The Third Coast Review

The Third Coast Review

The new year, 2016, has brought Chicago a new digital literary magazine, or blog: the Third Coast Review.

Literary magazines that offer commentary and reviews of the popular arts are critical to the health of the arts and entertainment production community. The neighborhood theater movement that developed in Chicago in the early 1970’s was nurtured more by the Chicago Reader than the larger daily newspapers to site one example. The decline of traditional print media has had a deleterious effect upon the economic development of traditional popular art. It is difficult to find an example of where the new social media has promoted an artist, production, movements, whatever, in the same way that an advocate in traditional media has. Oprah and her ilk could move markets, twitter doesn’t.

As traditional ink media continues to atrophy, the hope is that digital media, like the Third Coast Review, could fill the breach, or at least be a small positive addition to Chicago’s literary community but that is probably unlikely.

Consider the name! Chicagoans simply don’t view their city as coastal, regardless of New York author, Thomas Dyja, using ‘third coast’ as the name for his book about Chicago. As Scott Turow put it in his review for the New York Times: “…calling Chicago ‘The Third Coast’ is patronizing, implying that only seaboard cities count; worse, it badly misses the point about a metropolis whose inland location is central to its identity …” Chicago is the heartland. Residents of the Gulf Coast use the term ‘third coast’ because that is what it is. But worse, there already exists a magazine published in Michigan by an almost identical name. Google it and discover several similar sites. With a name that does not bespeak its place or purpose, this zine is likely to be lost in the fog of the virtual world and will be of no consequence to Chicago.