An idea – publish a literary journal highlighting writers east of I-95 in North Carolina – turned into a grant proposal, which proved successful, which spawned the single issue of the traditional print literary journal which soon became the online literary journal you now hold in your monitor. The North Carolina Arts Council partially funded the first Mule. We are eternally grateful to them for their help and support. That seems so long ago. Hell — it was a long time ago… 

We could go on and on about how we were one of the first literary journals online. We could talk for hours about how place influences creativity and content. It makes us feel damn good to think the Mule may have spawned more southern literary journals online (but it confuses us because mules are sterile, right?) We are damn proud to have our premise repeated and to witness the demise of fancy tricks, flashing geegaws, and pop-ups on lit journal sites.

We were the first to offer the straight forward photo-text format, back in 1996, and readers must forgive us if we boast. With all the server/hosting company problems we had in 2003, we’ve got to brag about something. Shoot. And we want y’all to continue enjoying our Mule – the writing and the photography.

The Mule, always evaluating web standards and applying them to our backend (and not the ass end, we mean in the sense of web-based terminology). Being accessible by all readers – whether they utilize IE6, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Safari, FIREFOX or they access us through a PDA – means as much to us as the content of this fine journal. Check us out on your cellphone, it’s mega-cooleeeeoooh.

The biggest kick in our ass came when Robert MacEwan made us 508 compliant. Readers with text-based browsers can access and enjoy the Mule. You can read about it in the about section of the Mule. Publishers of online material have an obligation to become compliant. Not just because it is federally mandated … because it is the right thing to do. Y’all keep reading and we’ll keep publishing. The Mules Going Linux… Going strong… OpenSource is the only source.