The young Brooklyn lit mag Armchair/Shotgun recently released an unintentional all-female issue (mentioned at The Millions and The Atlantic):

Though the all-female-writers issue was a complete surprise to us, we’re pretty delighted about it and thought we should tell you a little bit about how it came about.

Armchair/Shotgun has an anonymous submissions process. When a piece of work arrives in our inbox, we strip the author’s name and biography off of it and assign it a number. This number identifies the story or poem throughout the editorial process–from assembling the packet, to assigning volunteer readers to help identify outstanding pieces, to the final editors’ meeting at which we choose the works that will make up the issue. We don’t know who wrote a piece until after the final vote, when we go back to our database and match up numbers and names.

For our first two issues, this process resulted in issues that were made up roughly 50/50 of men and women. When we de-anonymized the pieces we’d accepted for Issue 3, we saw that it had resulted in a set of stories and poems that were all by women. Fifteen pieces by eleven women.

Why is this noteworthy?… [Click to read the rest at the A/S website.]