The Legend of Armchair/Shotgun
Armchair/Shotgun is a reference to a Bob Dylan lyric from his unreleased (December 1963) "Depression Cola" album: "Babe you rest my mind / soft as an old armchair / shotgun so comfortable and so kind."
Legend has it the magazine was founded by Ludmilla and Vaselka Stranoglatz, red-headed Lithuanian twins from Brooklyn. Forced to emigrate due to a typographical error on their Dutch exit visas, the twins left their hometown of Petrašiūnai and settled in Sheepshead bay in the late 1950s.
Together with disgruntled activist and one-time Greenpeace chair Arthur "Double-Barrel" Remington, they published their first broadsheets in 1967 (or early 1968), working on a rusty Adana Platen Press in the basement of an abandoned warehouse at the corner of Knapp Street and Avenue Y. By the summer of 1973 the journal, published as The Armchair/Shotgun Monthly Picayune, had become so popular that the Stranoglatz twins expanded their operation, breaking into the basement of Borough Hall by night to use the municipal presses there.
Arthur Remington passed away in late 2007 due to chronic liver failure. Estranged great-nephew to E. Remington (of Remington Typewriters and Rifles fame), he left to the Stranoglatz's an abandoned pulp-mill in western Manitoba, which he had accidentally inherited in 1994.
Armchair/Shotgun switched to its current fiction/non-fiction/poetry emphasis in early 2008, upon acquisition of a neighboring Manitoban paper mill through less than legal means. The current board of directors consists of the Stranoglatz's, former middle-weight champion Tiger Patricks, and most recently Michael Malloy, who serves in a symbolic capacity.
Armchair/Shotgun continues today as a biannual journal which publishes exemplary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Day-to-day operations are carried out by the Editorial Board of Armchair/Shotgun:
John Cusick is a literary agent and author of the forthcoming young adult novel GIRL PARTS. He keeps a writing and publishing-industry blog at johnmcusick.wordpress.com He lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and an imaginary son they never discuss.
Kevin Timothy Dugan is a writer and a reporter. He answers to any one of those names.
Laura McMillan left her heart and several other organs at a truck stop in the Appalachians somewhere and has looked to literature to fill the hole ever since. An Issue 1 contributor-turned-editor, she lives in New Haven and spends a lot of time copy-editing on trains.
Adam Read-Brown comes from hearty New England stock. He lives in New York City, working by day as an editor of children's textbooks. His neighbors tell him that he should not go running outdoors in the city due to all the free radicals in the air, but he refuses to listen.
Aaron Reuben famously fought both for and against H.M.'s Royal Air Force in the Second World War, receiving several commendations and one notable condemnation for his unthinking bravery in combat. He went on to star in a series of forgettable British murder mysteries, including the occasionally lauded Who Stole My Kippers?, In the Park with Madam Pomfery, and Blood Everywhere but Whose is it? He currently teaches field courses in experimental paleogastronomy in a parking lot rather close to NYU.
W. Gavin Robb was not born but ejected from the surface of the Sun. His spontaneous entry into the Earth's atmosphere in 1973 sparked catastrophic wildfires and a short-lived peace agreement between NATO and the Eastern Bloc. He has written 364 novels, all of which have been published in various translations but never in the original English. In 1984 he moonlighted as David Byrne's oversized suit. He currently lives in an abandoned subway car at the end of the G line, and enjoys scratching around in the dirt at Riker's Island, looking for clues. He is currently working on a novel written by everybody in the world.
Evan Simko-Bednarski is a freelance writer, reporter and poet, living in Brooklyn at a safe distance from his ancestral home in Hudson County, New Jersey. He owns several good wrenches, several bad typewriters, and is philosophically opposed to the Oxford comma.