What are e-journals and e-zines? Well, a simple answer would be that they are electronic versions of their print counterparts.
When zines become electronic they are also similar to their print counterparts with the exception that their numbers explode. Since anyone with access to a computer can launch a web site, e-zines are mushrooming up on the Internet. Free servers such as Yahoo Geocities allow the e-zine editors free space to store and mount their webpages. Traditional definitions of journals, or serial publications, imply that the publication be numerated, that is that it have volume or issue numbers. 'Zines do not always work that way. And, e-'zines work that way even less.
This webliography is a guide to Latin American e-zines that publish literature, in forms of poetry, short stories and novels. I have compiled this list because e-zines are hard to find. They are not catalogued anywhere, so that means that you cannot easily know which ones exist, how long they have been around, nor where to find them. Even if they were catalogued, they are not indexed. This means that it is impossible to know who is publishing where. The only way to know who is in a certain "issue" of an e-zine is to stumble upon their submission.
Finding these zines is not where the potential problems end, but where they begin. Many are on slow servers, making some painfully slow to load. Like any other type of web site, e-zines can suffer from poor coding, making them difficult and annoying to read (ie causing one's browser to crash repeatedly).
And, some of these e-zines are on unstable servers, or they move from server-to-server. This is what happened with the Venezuelan zine "Letralia: tierra de Letras." Letralia had works of famous authors, literary criticism, information about literature festivals, and a space for lesser-known authors to publish. Unfortunately, I can no longer find Letralia.
Unfortunately, the current economic crisis in Argentina has caused many of the e-zines from there to disappear or at least cease being active. One of the Argentine publications, Poesía, states that due to economic problems they had to move to a smaller server and consequently no longer have archived issues available online.
I have also elected to include e-zines that are no longer being updated. I separate them from the others, but include them because inactive does not mean useless: One can still read creative works on these pages, sometimes finding different versions of the same work. If the only place where an author has published that particular version of that specific poem is a 1999 modification of an e-zine that is still on the geocities server, but with the last update in April of 2000, that poem is still accessible and useable. As long as the information is accessible, we need to consider it.
Greater exposure means that e-zines are a good way for young authors to ease into the publishing world. They are designed to help these young authors grow as writers, containing information about fiction and poetry festivals and contests. Most e-zines provide e-mail links to the authors so readers can respond directly to them about their work. And some have online workshops, asynchronous discussion boards, and real-time chat as services that work as writers' support networks. These online talleres are useful to us as scholars because we can communicate directly with the authors and we can eavesdrop on the conversations behind the creative processes.