Rochford Street Review took a short break over the December holiday session. Like most projects that run on a shoe string we are very sensitive to external pressures – with so many balls in the air sometimes one or two can get dropped. But we are back again for 2015 and we have some plans to freshen things up a bit and to build in a little more resilience to the way we operate – but more of that later.

Looking back Rochford Street Review is now over three years old and has published just over 200 reviews, articles and speeches. We have had almost 65,000 visitors during that time and have directed a large amount of internet traffic to small press publishers and individual writers’ and artists’ websites. We think it is worthwhile continuing into 2015 and we hope you agree.

As for our future plans – we want to try and involve more people in the day to day running of the site. While we are not too sure how this might work we are happy to receive any suggestions or offers of assistance. We would also like to expand the scope and reach of the journal to include more articles and reviews on the visual arts, film, drama and other art forms and we would also like to expand beyond a purely Australian focus to include more international analysis.

One short term change is that we will be including a feature artist and writer each issue who will provide a number of pieces of work that will run throughout the issue. For the current issue (Issue 13 – Double Issue) the featured artist is US based poet and artist Sheila Murphy whose work, Quotidian Rapture, appears on the cover of Issue 13. The first featured writer will appear in Issue 14 which will begin loading in April

Rochford Street Review relies on the generosity of donor to keep us afloat and recently we have been fortunate to have received a number of very generous donations. This has enabled us to commit, at least for the next few months, to pay contributors a nominal payment of $5 a review or article. This will be regularly reviewed in light on incoming donations to ensure that it can be maintained and/or increased. Please feel free to consider either a one off or regular donation by clicking on the button at the bottom of this post.

So please keep an eye on us to keep up to date with the changes and all the best for 2015.

– Mark Roberts

 —————————————————————————————

Rochford Street Review relies on the support of its readers to continue. If you like what we are doing please consider making a donation.