Once upon a time, a certain small town in a certain state — okay, it was Rhode Island — banned all stories, because, the town fathers said, false tales "worketh abomination and maketh a lie."

Probably, this decision wasn't well received at the local public library.

Neither would it be popular at On Wisconsin, but for a hundred and some odd years, we've never allowed a fictional story — okay, an intentionally fictional story — to appear in our pages. Until now.

So why did we, the editors of On Wisconsin, decide to challenge this longstanding policy against workething abomination and makething lies?

Well, the story goes something like this:

In the fall of 2002, UW-Madison launched a master's of fine arts program in creative writing, bringing a class of fiction writers to campus. Ultimately, each of these authors has to create a novel as his or her master's project, but as they all work on their craft, they write short stories. We, the editors of On Wisconsin, thought, "Wow — wouldn't this be a great program to feature in our magazine? And wouldn't one of those short stories be just the best way to showcase the students' talents? And wouldn't it also be the best way to challenge longstanding policies?"

And so we invited the MFA students to send us some of their work, and we discussed the stories nearly to death until we decided on which one we wanted to publish. (It has a baby in it — some of us thought that was cute.)

And so that's how we came to fill this issue with abominations and lies. At least that's our story — and we're sticking with it.