Normal School

The Normal School is a bi-annual journal featuring nonfiction, fiction, poetry, criticism and culinary adventure journalism. We are nestled happily into the California State University at Fresno like a comfy spore in a benign and mighty lung. We dig quirky, boundary-challenging, energetic prose and poetry with innovations in content, form, and focus, which isn't actually as high-falutin' as it sounds. We're just sort of the lit mag equivalent of the kid who always has bottle caps, cat's eye marbles, dead animal skulls, little blue men and other treasures in his pockets.

To us, defining ourselves as The Normal School does not mean that we define ourselves as:

Normal: 3a: unaffected by or not exposed to any particular infection or experimental treatment (control animal). B: occurring naturally and not because of disease, inoculation, or experimental treatment.

Or . . .

Normal: 4b: free from mental disorder : having neither neurosis, personality disorder, nor psychosis

In fact, if we had to depend on dictionary definitions, we would probably just quit, go home, and paint saw blades with pastoral scenes of waterfalls and ducks floating on idyllic ponds.

But we like this partial and incomplete index from this really huge edition of Webster's Dictionary that could break a toe if you dropped it on your foot:

Normal: barrage, curve, dispersion, distribution, dropper, equation, fault, form, honey, horizontal separation, minor scale, moisture capacity, overlap, pitch, place, pressure, saline solution, school, state, tax, valence, volume.

We especially like "Normal Honey." Who doesn't want some of this?