Could you summarize in a few sentences what The Derelict Voice is?

The Derelict Voice is a literary magazine of poetry and prose. It was created as a venue for the writings of the homeless population in Chico, California. Our writing group meets every Wednesday morning at the local homeless resource center. The first volume was published in September 2010; the second volume in May 2011.

How did the project begin?

Four retired women met while working on the Obama campaign and wanted to continue his message by working in the community. When we started we assumed we’d be helping the homeless with writing skills. The people who came to the group, however, were not only diverse in their backgrounds and degrees of marginalization, but also in their writing skills. Some came with piles of writings they had amassed and carried with them for many years and others wanted to write their stories but had no idea how to begin.

Are there any guiding philosophies or ideas behind TDV?

We let it be guided by the group and its needs and interests. We want everyone to feel heard and acknowledged. It is open to anyone and now includes college professors as well as people living in shelters or on the street. The writing group provides a safe climate for expression, a reminder of personal talent, a connection to the human attributes we all share. As a result of the writing group, participants have become friends, mentors, tutors, and each others’ greatest fans. Their stories may be set in a dead end job, a camp alongside the road, or behind prison walls, but each resonates with laughter, tears, and pain—emotions shared by people in all walks of life. A sense of family has emerged. Like a family we lend a hand with health or housing needs, listen to tales of woe or heartbreak, and encourage the pursuit of higher goals—and, of course, suggest the placement of a comma or semi-colon whenever it’s needed.

4) Introduce yourselves. Where are you all from?

Eddi Deromedi was raised in the San Francisco Bay area and has lived in Chico her entire adult life. She is retired from a 30-year career as a teacher and school principal. Her early years living on a Israeli kibbutz influenced her philosophy of community responsibility. She is a board member of Chico’s Gateway Science Museum. She has finished a work of creative nonfiction about the public education system and is currently writing a young adult novel.

Emily Gallo was raised in New York City and has lived in Chico for 5 years. She is a screenwriter and a retired teacher who was a literacy coach in the University of California, Davis Writing Project and the Sacramento City Unified School District. She has lived all over the country working with low-income, multicultural populations. She has taught piano to elementary students and their teachers, founded after-school French and Spanish classes, and is currently working to establish a northern California art museum.

Erica McLane was raised in Berkeley and has lived in Chico most of her adult life. Although legally blind, she farms organically and raises chickens in Tehama County. She is a retired drug/alcohol counselor and bartender. She has been a newspaper columnist, has published short stories in literary journals and has just finished a memoir about Berkeley in the 60s.

Elizabeth Stewart was raised in Ohio and has lived in Chico for at least 30 years. She is a retired reference librarian who has organized workshops for local writers at the Paradise branch of the Butte County Library. She started a library in Venezuela as a Peace Corps volunteer. Currently, she is researching the history of her neighborhood and the now-demolished Chinese Temple in Chico. As a member of the Chico Heritage Association, she is helping to restore an 1852 farmhouse.

Is writing a political act?

Absolutely. Homelessness is a universal issue. It is an aspect of life up and down our state and across the country, becoming increasingly prevalent during this period of recession. The homeless come and go, taking their stories with them when they leave. But those who write with us, record their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams; they create permanence of a different kind.

Having a writing group at a homeless shelter is one thing. Publishing the writing from that group as a magazine is another. What led you to publish the writing you read at the Jesus Center [a homeless support center in Chico]?

Many who came with their own writing were clear at the beginning that they wanted to be published. Our magazine is a way of broadcasting the “word on the street;” to tell about the needs, ideas, and talents of people in our community who are often ignored.

Is TDV something you’d like to see replicated? Do you have any advice for other writer/editor/activists who’d like to start similar groups?

It’s a wonderful project and should be replicated. My advice would be to let the group itself guide the direction. We start every meeting with a writing prompt that could be a famous quote or just one word. We write for about ten minutes and then share them aloud. After that, people who have brought work read them and have them critiqued.

What’s one story or personality that has stuck with you thus far in your experience with the group?

Of course there are many but one of our regular participants is a man in his 60s who was born in Spain, spent his childhood bullfighting and in the jungles of Peru. His family became drug kingpins in America living in a mansion on the beach in southern California. He lived the high life, dressing in Italian suits, wearing expensive jewelry, etc. A few years ago his son told him he didn’t want to be with him if he was going to be a drug pusher. He denounced his family giving it all up and walked away. He now lives in section 8 senior housing, buying his clothes at thrift stores and Walmart. He has written poetry and songs for many years and is working on his autobiography.

Does literature have a role in the pursuit of justice?

Absolutely. To be a writer living in a world where no one cares if you write or what you write makes you feel like a derelict.

Much of the writing that I’ve read in volumes 1 and 2 of TDV casts an ironic, critical light on the cultural and economic norms that figured into the authors’ homelessness. What would you say is most prevalent regarding society in your writing group: blame, critique, or resignation?

It varies. We have an angry black woman railing against the white man’s influence and a man who rails against his religious Catholic upbringing. But most blame themselves for their predicament.

Economic differences can be difficult to navigate socially, particularly when someone who is well-off attempts to “help” someone that’s poor. Have any of the contributors or participants expressed contempt for you or your colleagues?

Never.

Do you view your work at the Jesus Center as charity or solidarity or something else?

Solidarity.

(I ask the following request of everyone I interview for fictiondaily.org.) Generate a relevant formula.

Be caring, open-minded, welcoming, and be willing to let the group guide the direction.

Marcelle Heath: What is The Lit Pub and how did it come about?

Molly Gaudry: The Lit Pub is a publicity company for indie books, but we also sell our featured titles in our Community Bookstore. This way, we can try to measure the relationship between our publicity campaigns and book sales.

I need to share, however, that this is not what we thought it would be when we first began talking about it. Initially, we (Christopher Newgent and I) wanted to form an alliance of independent publishers and find a way to get cheaper ISBNs. I think it all started with ISBNs and was inspired by my need to find a second job that isn’t teaching freshman composition as a lowly adjunct.

The more and more (and more and more) we learned along the way, the more we were able to fine tune our plan to become this thing that we could actually do. Which brings us to what we are—a publicity company and online bookstore—and what we want to be. . . .

Heath: What are The Lit Pub’s goals?

Gaudry: I think we have a few different goals.

Re: publicity, we want to attract the best indie authors to hire us to publicize their books, and we want to attract wider and wider reading audiences to our website, which is where our publicity takes place.

Re: bookstore, we are only selling our Featured Books for now, but we hope to very quickly expand to be able to also sell our Library Recommendations, and after that we hope to be able to accommodate the wider independent literature community by selling all of its collective titles. (We have the warehouse space; we just need to ease our way into the mechanics of utilizing it!)

Re: community, we truly believe that publishing is an art form that can integrate the rest of the arts—visual artists and designers for book covers, photographers and filmmakers (and actors) for book trailers and short films, musicians and composers for film scores. It is our hope that we not only become a hub for literary arts but also for artists of all creative disciplines, and we hope to connect our publishers with these other artists to create a greater awareness for what we all do.

Heath: How do you envision The Lit Pub’s role in publishing?

Gaudry: The Lit Pub is an all-around champion of the best in today’s independently published literature.

Heath: How will authors, readers, and publishers benefit from The Lit Pub?

Gaudry: The way we see it now, authors and publishers whose books are featured on our website will benefit from the close, focused attention our publicists, publicity assistants, administrative support staff, and fans will help to generate for the featured books.

As for readers (I love this question!), I’m hoping that we find them all over the country, all over the world, and bring them back to our website where we will be able to introduce them to each other and to our authors.

I hope that we can provide for them a forum to discuss the books we’re talking about.

I hope we find readers who have never heard of independent publishing.

I hope we find readers who miss their local Borders and need a new bookstore to hang out in.

I hope we find readers who will tell their friends and book clubs about us.

I hope we find readers who want to get excited about the books we’re excited about, books they may never have heard of if not for The Lit Pub.

I hope we find these readers, introduce them to a world they didn’t even know existed, find ways to make them comfortable and cozy inside this new world, and then given them reasons to keep them coming back every month for more.

Heath: As an author and publicist, what do you make of the evolving landscape of publishing in the digital era? What advice can you give writers today?

Gaudry: It has never been easier to publish that book you always said you’d write. The hard part is finding an audience for it. The good news is that a personal blog and a Facebook account might be all you really need to market your book to targeted audiences. If you’ve got the time and energy—and determination—to do it yourself, there’s really no reason not to. So get to it! And good luck!

[NOTE: In August 2011, Gaudry sent the following email, updating information about The Lit Pub:

Dear everyone,

Pardon the mass email, but I just wanted to write because you have either interviewed me about The Lit Pub or are going to.

OK, so, if you didn't already know, the site has been down since early July. We're about 2 weeks from relaunching. Basically, we cut out publicity altogether, and now we're an online bookstore for the indies. We still only vouch for and sell books we love, so it's not a total free-for-all, but over time we'll add more and more titles.

Publishers can list their titles at any time; there are no annual fees or listing fees. Hopefully they can work with us on consignment, but if we have to go through distribution that will slow down the process slightly.

Here is a sneak peek at the very-much-in-process new site. The VIP Room has been significantly altered and the FAQ should now be more informative than it was before. Obviously, big changes to the home page.

http://dev.fuzzco.com/thelitpub.com/]

Molly Gaudry is the founder of The Lit Pub and the Director of Publicity, which means she can answer questions about how to get your book publicized at The Lit Pub.

Chris Newgent, founder of Vouched Books, is Sales Director, which means he can answer questions about how to get your book sold in The Lit Pub’s Community Bookstore.

Mike Bushnell is our Director of Business Development, which means he can answer questions about the future of The Lit Pub and what our goals are. Eventually, he’ll probably also handle advertising-related issues.

Elizabeth Taddonio is our Community Manager and she will be in charge of, among other things, our Facebook page. Liz is who to talk to if you’re a reader or a fan and have questions or concerns about The Lit Pub.

Erika Moya is our Social Media Editor, and she will be in charge of, among other things, our Twitter account. Basically, Erika keeps us up-to-date with the rest of the world.

And Mike Young is The Lit Pub’s inaugural guest publisher, and he’ll be publicizing Ofelia Hunt’s Today & Tomorrow on behalf of Magic Helicopter.

Nick Ripatrazone: Monkeybicycle 8 works so well as a cohesive issue. Could you discuss how this particular edition went from individual submissions to a collective, a completed “book”?

Steven Seighman: I was actually a bit worried about the book ending up as a more scattered collection since Shya and I haven’t done this together in several years. For the most part it’s just been me making the fiction selections (Jacob Smith handles the poetry) for the past several issues and I thought that bringing someone else in might throw off the energy a bit. But it was clear right off the bat that Shya and I could get back into the groove we had in the early days of Monkeybicycle. I think our tastes are very similar and still just different enough to offer up a good amount of variety in the stories without having them seem like they’re all over the place.

Shya Scanlon: I agree that it basically comes down to aesthetic agreement across the editorial team. Steven and I have worked together a lot over the years, and despite the number of issues he released since I’d last been officially on board, we’d remained close enough to know we’d still be able to work well together. I wish I could say that some incredibly detailed strategy informed the issue, but it’s largely an intuitive process. We select work that speaks to us, and also that seems to resonate with other work we’ve chosen. I see a couple interesting patterns/recurrences in issue 8, but I wouldn’t even want to spell that out, really, because the idea is not to enforce a particular reading, rather to encourage readers to discover something for themselves. Beyond the selection, of course, there’s also the order—in this case, Steven made those decisions, but I’d bet he’d agree that although his brain was at work, intuition had an equal hand in steering this process too. So, yeah, the answer is basically: magic.

Ripatrazone: You guys obviously enjoy all the pieces in this issue, but did you each have a particular submission that demanded your attention?

Seighman: I think just about everyone who has come up to me or emailed me about the book has cited Jonathan Redhorse’s “Delores Threnody” as their standout piece, and I completely agree. That story is just brilliant and I’m really happy Shya selected it (another example, I think, of how well the two of us work together and trust each other’s judgement). There are so many others in the book that I feel really close to as well, but the two that stand out to me are Blake Kimzey’s “Donald Mason’s City Inspection and the Stakeout Standoff” and Curtis Smith‘s “Lenin!”. These stories are bookends for the book and I set it up that way for a reason. I think both of them are somewhat light and also very engaging in pretty absurd ways. That’s the kind of thing I really like, and it seems to be a really great way to ease into and out of the book with a little umph. Kimzey is a new voice to me and when I read that story I knew he was a great talent. I hope we get the chance to publish more of his work in the future. And I’ve been a fan of Curtis Smith’s work for a long time. He has a gift. So I’m always eager when I see a submission from him.

Scanlon: I think I’d rather answer this slantwise by saying that some editors I’ve spoken with just love finding stories or poems that need absolutely nothing. While I agree that there’s a certain magic in finding work that requires nothing of me, I often end up being more fond of pieces that demand a little attention, pieces I work on with the author, that grow better, or more precise, or more themselves, through the strange and candid dance of author and editor. There were a few authors I worked with in this way for issue 8—they’ll know who they are if they read this—and though I don’t think I’ll reveal which stories are the result of that work, I’d just like to thank them for listening to me and trusting my input. All the work is great, of course, but I admit to a selfish amount of fondness for work that, however great it was coming in, for one reason or another “needed” me.

Ripatrazone: Monkeybicycle is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of a literary magazine with an equally strong web and print presence. So often magazines seem to treat online content as merely an addendum to a print issue, or worse, a place to house weaker pieces. I’m equally impressed with your web selections as with the material in your print copies. How do you approach the maintenance of these two representations of Monkeybicycle?

Seighman: Monkeybicycle began back in 2002, when the web was still fairly new. There were maybe a half-dozen literary sites that I was aware of back then, but it certainly seemed like a frontier that was going to offer more options for writers to showcase their work. The intention from the very beginning with Monkeybicycle was to have both print issues and a website. I was working at an internet company in Seattle when I started the journal, so it felt like an obvious decision to have a web presence. And I loved the idea of being able to produce content more frequently than twice per year. There are so many great writers out there, and we wanted to give them at least one more opportunity to find a home for their work.

It’s taken a long time to really streamline our print and web processes, but it feels like it’s exactly what we’d been striving for at this point. We have a fantastic web editor in Jessa Marsh, who consistently picks really great work. And J.A. Tyler was recently brought on board as our blog editor. Both of them have put forth really great efforts to make the site more of an almost daily destination. With new fiction going up every Monday and Friday and the blog posting reviews, interviews, and whatever other literary things that come to mind every few days, it feels like the site is bustling and really worth bookmarking.

And while those two maintain the website, Shya and I work together on the print issues. Most of the time I feel like what’s in there is kind of like long-form versions of what would go up on the site. The books are eclectic and fun and you never know what you’re going to get next, but you know it will be worth reading.

Together, I think the books and the website have really come a long way from those early days, and they work so well as a whole to showcase great writers. That’s exactly what I wanted Monkeybicycle to be.

Scanlon: I think it helps to have separate editors for web and print. That way no single editor will prioritize one over the other or, perhaps even subconsciously, skew the quality in a certain direction. Since I passed the web editing hat to Matthew Simmons many years ago, there has a series of excellent web editors, and the editorial divide has given the web editor a great degree of autonomy—essentially running his/her own journal (while maintaining the general tone of the brand). Jessa has a great eye, and she’d done a very fine job with the site. Similarly, Jacob’s poetry selections for the print side are essentially autonomous. His decisions are not questioned by Steven or I, and this, too, makes for a strength and clarity of vision. Everyone on the masthead contributes in a unique way, and everyone is treated as an equal. By trusting one another implicitly to know what’s best for the journal as a whole, we can focus energy where it’s needed without feeling like the attentions any one editor is spread too thin. I’d say it’s a pretty successful strategy. Glad you noticed.

Addendum: Seighman noted on Facebook: “I should add here that even though we didn’t get a chance to mention her in the interview, Laura Carney is our secret weapon. Her copy editing efforts on the print issues really make them something we can be proud of. Sometimes I see journals that could benefit from a copy editor, so we’re very lucky to have her, like we are all of our staff and interns.”

André Schiffrin founded non-profit publishing house The New Press in 1990 after an acrimonious split with Random House—the owner of Pantheon Books—where he had spent close to forty years as an editor and publisher. Established as a “major alternative to the large, commercial publishers,” the new press has been an important force in recent years, publishing around fifty titles every year—proof that a bookseller can operate “editorially in the public interest.”

Read the rest of Schiffrin’s interview at The White Review

draft enables instructors to offer contemporary examples of revision by viewing the original version of a story, the revision, the cuts, and an interview with the writer. It’s a unique resource, and the editors of draft—Rachel Yoder and Mark Polanzak—shared the genesis of the journal, their choices for the first issue, and more with Luna Park.

Nick Ripatrazone: Could you discuss the origins of draft: the journal of process? Why did you think such a journal should exist?

Mark Polanzak: Rachel and I came up with the concept for a literary journal that focused on the process of short story writing rather than the product when we were in our final semester at the University of Arizona’s MFA program, where we were both writing, editing, teaching, and workshopping fiction day in, day out. I was editing the University’s literary journal, Sonora Review, while Rachel was working for Alligator Juniper. We were learning a lot about running literary magazines. By my final semester at the program, I had learned a ton from workshops, from reading drafts of my peers’ stories, critiquing them, discussing them, getting the chance to talk with young writers about their processes; the MFA program allows you insight into so many talented writers’ methods, frustrations, successes, anecdotes. I might have been feeling sadness for leaving the conversation, leaving the classroom and access behind. draft, to my mind, is an extension of that program—you can see the early draft, see how it changed, see the final product, and hear in the interview a part of the conversation about process that Rachel and I got to have with the other students on a regular basis. That might be how the idea arose.

I don’t think a magazine like this needs to exist. MFA programs don’t need to exist. But the programs, for those interested, can be hugely helpful and fun. And the magazine can be helpful and fun as well. I can say that the MFA program was a success for me, because I left it a different, more confident writer. One of the important lessons I took from the program was that a polished, published piece of fiction in a magazine isn’t a magic trick; there is much unglamorous work that goes into a story that no one sees. We can, of course, imagine the work that goes into revising a story, but each writer works differently. Seeing the varied processes of my peers gave me confidence in my own process, in my own struggles. I saw that there is no one certain way to write and rewrite, which sounds obvious, but I thought I was doing it wrong for a long time. The program showed me that it was okay to do it my own way, and it’s okay to struggle, okay, also, to triumph. As much as you hear something like that, you don’t actually internalize it until you are faced with it over and over again. With hope, draft can show other writers this with each issue, reinforce the idea that this is work, and the work is never done the same way twice. Also, I’m always asking writers how they write, as a curious reader. It’s writer porn to see behind the curtain in this way. It’s just, well, cool.

Rachel Yoder: Mark is being very generous. He came up with the idea for draft, and I was his first and loudest cheerleader.  As I recall, he had just read me a poem about Raisin Bran, and I was worrying over how to make it out in the real world after writing school. We could not, after all, pay the rent with Raisin Bran poems (Mark’s specialty) or crappy Carver knock-offs (my specialty). This is when he placated me with his brilliant idea for draft, and I quickly started cheering and forgot all about my impending poverty. We talked about draft on and off for about 5 years (“Hey, remember draft?”) before anything happened.

I think draft actually does need to exist. There’s nothing else out there like it, and it’s especially great if you’ve never been in a workshop or writing group and been able to see other people’s work and process.  If I were a writer alone in the world and came upon draft, I would feel as if the libraries of heaven itself had opened and given me this rough draft writing to aid me on my literary journey.

He did also use the term “writer porn” during that first conversation and how could I not get excited about that?

Ripatrazone: How did your experiences with editing and reading for those established journals inform your approach to process?

Yoder: Editing for a journal didn’t really inform my approach to process at all. I guess if it did anything, it made me hold onto my stories longer before sending them out, made me realize that if I thought it was done, I should just wait three months and then see how I felt about the writing.

What really informed my process the most in graduate school was an exercise Buzz Poverman had us do in workshop. (Mark was in this workshop, too.) Each week we brought in a sort of writer’s journal entry to share with the class, our thoughts on writing, process, craft, mental health, etc.  Reading twelve of these entries every week was invigorating. I didn’t feel nearly so alone or so lost. I learned how other people approached revising, tricks they used, what they struggled with, what they thought about, how they used published stories as models for what they were doing, and on and on.  Through my own entries, I realized I really was considering a lot as I wrote and revised and that I truly did have “a process” (or many processes, each one unique to a story).  I kept many of the entries other students wrote with some vague notion that at some point in the future these should be turned into an anthology on writing. I think of draft as a some sort of incarnation of this book, writers sitting down with each other and talking about how it was done, or wasn’t done.

Polanzak: Editing a literary magazine informed a specific aspect of process for me. Having my own stories accepted at literary magazines also showed me this specific aspect of process from the other side: when a story is accepted, it is not necessarily finished.

At the magazine, we would often pass an accepted piece around from one editor to another, each marking up the accepted and “publishable” story, making changes, fixing typos, making suggestions before sending it back to the writer to accept or reject the edits. These were tweaks to sentences, hyper-detailed, nit-picky things we all wanted changed. But sometimes an editor would want something larger changed, like the removal of an entire scene. The idea that we could accept something, deem it fit for our pages then change the piece and send it back to the writer showed me that the process of revising, editing, rewriting a story could theoretically never end. The writer could send back the piece, and we could pass it around again, ad infinitum. The writer could make little changes, then decide to add an entire paragraph. There was one writer who changed the title of his story four times right up until the hard deadline for publication.

Having stories accepted, seeing the changes come back from editors, showed me that these pieces we send out have to be satisfactorily finished, but not absolutely finished. So, I guess I took an opposite lesson from Rachel—I’ll send out something that could possibly be reworked forever, but, at a certain point, you just have to say, Enough! And then accept or reject the edits. One magazine changed the tense of one of my stories. They changed all the verbs for me, rewrote it basically, so I didn’t have to labor over it. I agreed with their tense change. That seems like a huge edit. That seems like a problem that would keep it from being accepted, but it didn’t prohibit the story from being selected. Weird. The process can go on and on, even after being accepted for publication. I’m repeating myself now…

Ripatrazone: In your introduction to the Spring 2011, inaugural issue of draft, you present the magazine as a resource for writers—but also specifically geared toward academic environments (undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs, conferences, retreats, and workshops). I think it’s a great fit for those communities. What were your own experiences with literary magazines in the classroom? Did any of your instructors use literary magazines as texts, or discuss the submission process?

Polanzak: None of my writing professors, in college nor the MFA program, to my memory, talked about, used, or referenced literary magazines. This is, after your question, surprising; it’s the main medium for what we were doing at the programs. Everything I learned about the submission process came from experience and conversation with fellow student-writers.

Yoder: My thinking about draft, its audience and uses, was definitely informed by my experience as managing editor for Alligator Juniper. The journal is linked to a practicum class at Prescott College where advanced creative writing students read, discuss, accept/reject, and suggest edits for pieces. It’s incredibly useful for them because they get to be part of the editorial process, get to read all the submissions and see what qualities of work are submitted, have discussions about  how each piece is crafted, and begin to develop aesthetic philosophies.  I saw what an invaluable experience this was and wished I could have had it when I was an undergrad.

I also was a student in a grad course at the University of Iowa called Literary Journal Practicum where we read a bunch of journals, discussed them, and talked to the editors.  But I’ve never actually been a student in a class where work was being taught straight out of journals. I do it in my classes now. I think it’s important to give students a feel for the current literary moment, for what writers just five or ten years older than they are are writing and publishing.

Ripatrazone: The essential nature of revision feels like a consistent theme in draft. The first story in the Spring issue, “Sagittarius” by Greg Hrbek, was rejected “probably fifteen” times before being published in Black Warrior Review and then reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2009. I’m happy you included Hrbek’s work, since I think it helps show writers the subjectivity of editorial rejection and the benefit of sustained revision. Could you talk about why you included “Sagittarius,” as well as your own thoughts on approaches toward revision (and perhaps the hesitancy of some writers to revise)?

Polanzak: You are absolutely right—Hrbek’s story behind the story illustrates the benefits of revision and perseverance when you think a story you have written has something great about it. Hrbek points out that when the piece was originally being rejected all over the place, he knew it wasn’t a problem of content. He decided it must be a problem with the structure, something more technical was holding it back. In the time in between rewrites, his life also changed, and he recognized that another character, a brother, would help. Sometimes, you have to let pieces sit and go back to them. Hrbek spent a lot of time with this story—three months for the original draft and three months for the rewrite. This is admirable. I don’t know if I have this diligence yet, but I certainly see the benefits through hearing about the specific writer’s struggle and eventual success in being included in BASS.

What I find most fascinating in the original draft are the saved cut lines at the bottom of the document. He saves all his cut lines. There they are! You can see the precision of the sentence-level editing that went into this piece. Beyond the overhaul of structuring, you can see the attention to detail. Many of the lines that he cut are good. Very good. But they were not right for the story.

There is a tendency, at least for newer writers, to resist “killing their babies”—their little creations. Really good lines that they fall in love with but that are not working in the story. I know I have been through this. Someone edits my piece, draws a line through a sentence that I thought was excellent, and I think, Damn! But I love that line! Looking at Hrbek’s cut lines shows you a very experienced writer, willing to cut up his story, willing to kill those babies. That is an important lesson.

My approach to writing and revising is a lot different than Hrbek’s—I write very fast, too fast at times. I need to see the whole story as soon as possible and then I know what I’m working with. I have very few lines in a first draft that I feel are final. So, basically the whole first draft is killable, in my process.

Ripatrazone: I was happy to see Mary Miller’s work also included in this issue–I’ve taught an issue of Quick Fiction that contains a story of hers, which remains a perennial flash fiction favorite of my students. Why did you select this particular story for inclusion in draft?

Yoder: I’ve been a Mary Miller fan for a while now (if you haven’t read her collection Big World you must secure a copy immediately) and have become enamored of her dialogue, pacing, and tonal flatness. When I asked her to contribute to draft, she said she didn’t really keep drafts but had published a story as a flash piece and then developed it into a longer, more conventional length story. This seemed like an interesting process to me, taking an already “complete” story and developing it into something longer and “complete” in a new way.

There are so many people out there who write flash—me included—that I thought it would be helpful to hear how Miller identified this flash piece as one with potential to be longer, what it was that fascinated her about the tiny story, and how she went about expanding it. In her interview, she talked about how she thought the actions of the characters in the snapshot she had written were mysterious and kept wondering about what they were doing…and so, then had to write the longer story. Her flash piece functioned as a sort of drive-by glimpse into one fleeting and brightly-lit moment in a stranger’s kitchen. The longer story was the act of stopping, knocking on the door, and entering into the minutiae of the people’s lives inside.

Ripatrazone: Which writer(s)—past or present—would you especially like to view drafts/revisions from—sort-of the ‘ultimate’ unlocking of process?

Polanzak: Great question. I’m thinking back to times, when reading, I’ve said out loud: “How did he do that?” I think I’ve said this when I feel like I’ve experienced, in a story, a sort of magic trick. I want to know exactly how something came to be. Two writers I’d love to see drafts from and ask questions about process of are Phillip K. Dick and Woody Allen.

Often you hear readers ask writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” or “How did you come up with that?” I think the ultimate process-revelation for this type of question is PK Dick. Did his plots come fully formed? Are there drafts of stories with completely different plot turns or alternate endings? Why did he decide to go this way instead of that? Did he make notes on what the world of his story looked like before entering characters and plot lines into them?

With Woody Allen short stories and movies, I’d like to see, also, where the ideas come from, if it is a matter of starting somewhere and journeying toward the final product or outlining to know the full story before writing it. But with Woody Allen, I’d really like to see if the rhythms of jokes changed from draft to draft. If he wrote a line, then realized that it would be funnier written another way and why. I would really like to see drafts of scripts, especially Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry, which is a movie about writing stories and writing oneself into one’s own stories and revising them and analyzing them. That one would be very interesting, because it contains short stories made into short movie segments inside a larger story. I love that movie.

Yoder: Recently I’ve been obsessed with Mary Ruefle’s “The Most of It,” which is a little book published by Wave Books and called both poetry and prose on the back cover.  This is Ruefle’s first book of prose-ish writing, and the pieces, to me, seem to be the kind of things that either just come out right the first time or don’t come out at all. I would love to talk to her about her process of conjuring pieces that are, paradoxically, playful and serious, funny and philosophical.  And why prose now? And what’s different for her about writing prose versus poetry?

I think it would also be fascinating to talk to Lauren Slater about the stories/essays in her book Lying, what she calls “a metaphorical memoir” (basically, lots of the book is made-up). I wonder if she tried more direct approaches to the essays in this book before she landed on the metaphorical approach. I wonder what early drafts looked like, if she thought of them as short stories or essays, fictional, nonfictional, or what.  I wonder if the form was something that organically happened or if she thought about it a lot before she started writing.   And I wonder, in general, about her considerations as she was writing an admittedly made-up memoir and her thoughts on how she approaches truth in this book compared to others she has written.

I also wish we could bring Kafka back to life, sure, to ask him about his stories, but mainly so I could ask him to marry me.

Ripatrazone: What are your plans for future issues of draft?

Polanzak: We have a lot of plans for the future of draft. Right now, we are sticking to short fiction, but we want eventually to have drafts of poems, short play and film scripts, comics, and creative nonfiction. Outside of the print publication, on our website and blog, we’d like to begin featuring drafts of personal love letters—how many times have writers and non-writers alike slaved over draft after draft of a love letter? Also, we’d like to showcase student work from the classroom. The website and blog give us a lot more space to play around with draftable stuff—we want early iterations of songs along with their final version; short films; paintings in stages of revision. It’s really exciting, and I hope we can get to all of it.

Yoder: The future of draft? Like Mark said, we’d love to have a chorus of voices on the blog, and I’m really excited about expanding into graphic stories and essays. Eventually I hope we’ll be able to put together a compendium of revision exercises as well as a book of the work we’ve featured in draft to offer as texts for creative writing classrooms. I would have loved to learn from something like this when I was starting out, and to see that my favorite stories didn’t just arrive into the world fully and perfectly formed.  After we’ve published a number of issues, we’re also excited about the prospect of launching a reading series with a non-conventional format that showcases process rather than product. About once a week we email each other with another ideas we have, so there’s plenty to do and plenty to be excited about.

[Read our 2009 interview with Mary Miller. -ed.]

In February 2011, VIDA, an organization for women writers, released what has been called the VIDA Count, a totalling of male vs. female writer bylines for 14 of the top 2010 literary-type magazines. The numbers found the—perhaps expected—much greater representation of male writers in these publications. VIDA has also “counted” female writers in other publishing venues, and has more counts in the works.

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her poems have appeared inThe New England Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Fence,The Paris Review, The Cincinnati Review, Slate, Verse, Boston Review, and Ninth Letter. She is co-editor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande in August 2007. A recent Whiting Award recipient, she teaches poetry writing in Lesley University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is Co-Director with the poet Erin Belieu of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Marcelle Heath: VIDA’s 2010 Count has caused quite a stir in the literary community, generating debate about VIDA’s findings on the number of women contributors and reviews by women authors at the top magazines in the country. Many writers and editors were shocked by the glaring gender disparity in publishing. Others, like myself, were (unfortunately) validated by the pie charts: they represented both our personal experiences and deepest fears about institutionalized and pervasive sexism. While many expressed support and offered new ways to include more women, there were some who criticized and dismissed VIDA’s methodology.

What was your initial reaction when you saw the data? Were you surprised by how it’s been received by both the editors at the magazines in The Count and the public at large?

Cate Marvin: A SHORT ANSWER:

I was both surprised and not at all surprised by the numbers. I think I may have hoped to be surprised. That I hoped the numbers would not turn out as they did. Even though I fully suspected they would.

We at VIDA were gratified by the attention the “2010 Count” received, and especially pleased to find that so many editors were willing to re-assess their own “numbers”—because a great many venues have taken it upon themselves to conduct their own counts.

THE LONGER ANSWER:

I didn’t have what one could call an “initial reaction” to the numbers because the process of acquiring the data was so lengthy and time-consuming.

The idea for VIDA’s “2010 Count” was conceived almost immediately once the organization was formed, back in August of 2009, at which point I was in conversation with several female writers; it soon became apparent that the practice of “counting” was nearly uniform among us. I was then directed to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s essay “Numbers,” which looks at gender disparity in the representation of women in anthologies of avant garde poetry. (This is a terrific essay, by the way, one that I urge anyone interested in “counting” to make a point of reading.)

We at VIDA were still in the process of figuring out how to launch “The Count” when Publisher’s Weekly “Best Books of 2009” list came out. This required an immediate response on our behalf and provided the impetus for our first press release regarding the omission of women authors from prominent “best of” lists and awards. However, we’d always planned to address a number of different venues in our “Count.” VIDA’s “2010 Count” is only one of several we have underway.

We’re presently in the thick of counting The Best American Series, for example, the numbers for which we’ll be posting on the VIDA site mid-April.

The “2010 Count,” in particular, was dreadfully ambitious from the beginning. We pulled together a list of prominent literary venues and review venues; I then made it a personal project to acquire the table of contents for these publications. One assumes it’d be easy enough to access much of this information online; however, the content of a lot of magazine websites tends to be difficult to dissect due to the merged display of print content and online content. Some magazines require a subscription for accessing on-line content. And while one may also acquire access to media content via databases such as JSTOR and Lexus-Nexus, it’s nearly impossible to turn up a decipherable table of contents pages. For these aforementioned reasons, I ultimately resorted to photocopying print versions of numerous TOCs at my local library.

Throughout July and August of 2010, I spent much of my free time counting. I had opted to not put my then 18-month-old daughter in daycare in order to save money. So, during the days I cared for her, I all too often lugged said daughter along with me to the library. During the evenings, while she slept, I counted.

Thus, by the time VIDA’s “2010 Count” appeared, in early February  of 2011, I’d already spent a lot of time with the numbers. And it’s a very troubling affair. Like you, many of my suspicions were confirmed. But I was also pretty surprised at just how consistent the findings were. I honestly didn’t think The New Yorker would count the way it did: the evening I counted the NYer (I think I finally went to bed at 4 a.m.), I remember feeling distinctly demoralized. I’ll admit: I’d entertained hopes of publishing a poem within its esteemed pages someday. Yet, after counting, this aspiration seemed ridiculous. I felt like a bit of a fool for having believed it possible. So, in answer to your initial question, seeing the numbers depressed the hell out of me.

In fact, I often (jokingly) say that VIDA will end up giving me cancer, as my smoking habit escalated with all of the counting I was doing during last summer, so often late into the night, by which I really mean into the early morning.

And it was a bitch to track down all of the magazines. My local library simply wasn’t cutting it. So I finally relented and put my daughter into daycare, headed up to Columbia University’s library, where I was able to find much of what I needed. That’s one heavenly library. Later, I’d have the wisdom to hit the New York Public Library. They have everything. It was fascinating to see the history of certain venues, such as the Best American Short Stories, which was launched as a “yearbook” in 1915. Looking at the authors who were published in the volumes from the inception of the series really struck home the fact that it’s a career making publication.

As I moved on to counting other venues, I began to feel the shadow of cynicism cross over me. I began to develop the suspicion that I was the butt of a huge joke. I’d be in the city, riding on the subway, or sitting in a restaurant, and notice women of all types and ages reading The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Review of Books; photos of male authors seemed to peer out at me from the pages, gloating. I wanted to ask these female readers if they were, in fact, enjoying what they were reading, ask if they noticed that nearly every article they perused was written by a man, that nearly every review addressed a book by a male author. And, if they did realize this, how did they feel about it?

September rolled around and I was back to teaching. I began to procrastinate when it came to counting.  Frankly, the project had become distasteful. I had piles of TOCs scattered all over my house, stacked in my closet, piling up in my office at school.  It was too much! I began to despair as the whether the project would ever be completed.

I then wisely enlisted the help of several women from VIDA. We divvyed up the TOCs and began counting in earnest. We were very careful: at least two or three individuals counted each venue, then cross checked their results with one another.

Some have derided the VIDA Count as “unscientific.” It’s true that we just presented the numbers. But we made every effort to ensure the numbers were accurate. The night before we launched, I stayed up till dawn on the phone with a close friend (and VIDA intern) who has bookkeeping expertise. She re-tabulated all of our data to ensure its accuracy.

By the time we completed VIDA’s 2010 Count, I no longer took offense at the numbers. I know this may sound strange, but I actually found the whole affair funny—no, hysterical.  What were these editors thinking? Or, perhaps they were not thinking. About their readership. I came to the conclusion that the female readership is largely ignored, which is also funny, given that we make up such a large percentage of the their readers (and, as such, we are the primary consumers of their product). If these editors were financially savvy, wouldn’t they include more female contributors? Wouldn’t they review more books by women?

I began to wonder why I ever considered myself an appropriate reader for these magazines in the first place. It suddenly seemed so clear that their content was never intended for me. But this also struck me as absurd, given the fact I’m an English professor and writer; wouldn’t I be among their targeted readership?

The fact is, I often felt bored when reading these publications. (And I felt guilty for being bored!)  Now I know why (whereas before, I felt I ought to be interested). I don’t subscribe to any of these magazines. Anymore.

Just as the 2010 Count was making its debut in February of 2011, several persons from the press contacted me. Before founding VIDA, I’d had very little contact with the media. One individual congratulated me on a “great story.” As a writer, this struck me as odd, because as far as “stories” are concerned, the VIDA Count required absolutely no imagination.

Heath: There are many vital conversations taking place regarding The Count, including the perception that women’s writing is less than: less interesting, less intellectual, less serious, less relevant, etc., etc. In addition, many people have essentialist notions of identity in relation to women professionalizing themselves as writers: i.e., we don’t send out stuff because we’re insecure, we’re not as aggressive as our male counterparts, etc., etc. What surprises me is how little attention is given to the fact that we live in a society that devalues women in all aspects of our lives, that these “essential” ideas about women and men are rooted in the fiction we continue to create—in language, in politics, in literature, and that these myths perpetuate inequality.

What do you make of the disconnect between perception and reality in terms of how women are perceived as writers and the fictional narratives both women and men create to perpetuate these myths?

Marvin: This is a question I’d like to pose to anyone who believes that literature plays a significant role in our culture. It is, in fact, the question that we at VIDA hoped the Count would prompt. But, here, you are asking me to speak to how I understand it. And, to be honest, I don’t. I don’t understand how people aren’t generally taken aback by evidence that is presented daily in media that women are tremendously undervalued, and often dismissed. This is, of course, the root of the problem.

And isn’t it awfully funny that we’re having this conversation in 2011? But it’s not funny, at all. It’s pretty scary, especially if you’re a woman. Even if you’re a woman who’s never intended to write and doesn’t much care for reading.

I personally think that women, as an entity, are quite adaptable, and that we’ve managed to accommodate the falsehood of “equality,” and much of this has to do with being “polite.” We are quite literally trained by society to understand ourselves as less significant than men—and even when we know that we are capable of greatness, we have also learned our place—and we know we will be criticized for being too outspoken or ambitious. From my experience with those who work on VIDA, women enjoy productive discussions, and would prefer to leave the arena when things get unnecessarily combative or ugly. I think it’s time we express our experiences and perceptions candidly, that we raise our objections when we feel them rise within ourselves. Too many women feel uncomfortable expressing themselves. I think the root of this lies in that we fear we’ll be disliked, or that we’ll be shunned. I think we should model the behaviors we wish to see enacted by others. I hope we can more firmly and cogently express our viewpoints, without apology, and that we will work to support one another. We really need to support one another. We need to learn as much as we can about one another’s work, about the different genres we’re working within, because we all share the same obstacles. And I don’t think men are outside this conversation. A great many male editors and writers are themselves deeply interested in bringing women’s voices to the forefront. I think the sooner the conversation becomes “about” gender, and less “between” genders, we’ll recognize that we’re all interested (one hopes) in a shared goal: parity.

Heath: What are VIDA’s expectations and goals for The Count? What are your goals for the organization as a whole?

Marvin: We at VIDA want to create a conversation. Many conversations. We wish, quite simply, to create a forum in which people who are concerned about gender disparity in literature can speak to one another. As such, we are about to launch a “forum” on our website in which members may carry on such conversations.

We’re also about to launch a blog, which we’re calling, after the Sexton poem, “Her Kind.” We plan to invite two writers at a time to conduct an extended exchange of ideas that response to specific questions provided by our blog editors, Rose Ben-Oni and Arisa White, who will serve as curators of these conversations.

We’ve also spoken a lot about establishing fellowships for female writers who are interested in engaging in critical discourse. We’d very much like to provide a substantial stipend, in addition to offering a retreat for such writers at which they would be mentored by writers with experience in this field. We want to help women writers become major players in the field of criticism, reviews, op-ed pieces, etc. It’s become obvious that we need more women presenting their critical prose to the literary world at large.

Finally, one of our ultimate goals is to host a national conference that focuses solely on women’s writing and its cultural reception, and we intend to include the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, as well as playwriting and children’s literature. We’d like to for this conference to be less commercial than, say, AWP or MLA. By which I mean, we hope to offer a flat rate for all participants (rather than providing institutional memberships, which ultimately favor academics). It would great if we could provide housing at a low cost; this might be made possible were we to conduct our conference at a university campus. Most obviously, we would want to provide daycare. We wish to host a more intimate conference, one that isn’t so much focused on networking, as it is on building community.

Heath: I am often challenged to confront and question my own privilege in my work as well as erroneous ideas about women in general.  Often, I fail. What informs your work as a poet and professor? How do you articulate your identity, and what vision(s) do you have for your writing?

Marvin: I prefer that my poems don’t answer to identity; rather, I desire that they create their own identities. The most seductive and wondrously empowering aspect of writing is that one can own the page. I personally work with the assumption that I’m not required to be faithful to the actual.  And, for me, that’s what’s writing’s about. Escaping the body. Becoming autonomous through being anonymous, and thereby finding a space within which the mind and heart may engage the page.

When writing, I don’t think about numbers.

Sources:

A Literary Glass Ceiling?, Ruth Franklin, The New Republic

Submitting Work: A Woman’s Problem?, Becky Tuch, Beyond The Margins

On Gender, Numbers & Submission, Rob Spillman, Tin House Blog

VIDA and The Count Round-Up, Alyss Dixon, She Said What?!!!

VIDA: The Count Roundup, Stephen Elliott, The Rumpus

At a time when public-school education is much debated at the state and national levels, our classroom feels idyllic: the students are very talented, focused, and open-minded, and are quite aware of the contemporary literary magazine scene (in addition to having a strong background in earlier fiction). They read, read, read before they send off work, and our classroom workshops have the feel of an intermediate or advanced collegiate workshop rather than a high school course.

Their yearly mid-term assignment is to complete a short story with a particular—and worthwhile—mode of experimentation. We sampled “A Good Story” by Rick Moody, “Why I Love Country Music” by Elizabeth Tallent, and “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed” by Matt Bell. Bell’s story sunk-in. The piece is not a mere alphabetical litany; rather, Bell uses the list format of the story to accumulate breadth and depth to the narrative. Students appropriated Bell’s willingness to experiment without merely stealing his format, and the resulting extreme focus on structure and arrangement forced students to earn every single sentence of their stories. Bell’s story was published in the web-version of Conjunctions, and therefore readily accessible. Additionally, students were able to discover more of Bell’s work and observe his modulations in form and structure—deepening their understanding of an important contemporary writer, while also discovering a writer open to range and a variety of genres.

My success with Bell’s story wasn’t a one-time experience; we’ve read “An Index” in class each year since it was published, and it always creates strong responses. Matt Bell was kind enough to answer some questions about this great story.

Nick Ripatrazone: I’ve wondered about the following question since “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed” first appeared in Conjunctions. What came first: the form (alphabetical list story), the content, or were they concurrent?

Matt Bell: The index form came first, and then generated the content. I’d actually been trying to write in the form for some time, and had made maybe two other serious attempts in the preceding year. In the earlier attempts, I tried to apply the index to an existing subject, and both times didn’t end up with anything particularly satisfying.

I first came to the form through Ander Monson’s Neck Deep, which has an essay in index form. I think that in some ways what failed in my attempts to try the form myself was that attempt to do what he had did, which was to index something already there (in his case, his collection Other Electricities, or part of it). Once I gave that up and started with the form, just writing sentences and alphabetizing them, that allowed the subject and the story to emerge more organically, and in an at least slightly less imitative form.

Ripatrazone: What was your revision process with “Index”? How did the published version differ from your earlier drafts?

Bell: The first draft of “Index” didn’t really have a story: It was more an index of possible murders, possible detective work, than any attempt at character-driven fiction. As I continued to add to it—the second draft was at least twice as long as the first, if not three times—I started to see the stories of X and his family emerging from the form, and I couldn’t have been more surprised, or grateful. I didn’t expect that, but once that happened, it created a way in which to cull through the material, keeping what could accrue into his story, and letting go what wouldn’t, and also to create from all that violence and tragedy something hopefully more meaningful.

Along the way, there was also obviously a lot of work tightening and tightening the prose: When you have single-sentence paragraphs, sentences lose the support of their surrounding material, and have to be stronger on their own. It really pushed me to try to make every entry a unit of both sound and sense, so that those units would be strong enough to stand even if later versions of the story added new material around them, or took away some of their scaffolding.

Ripatrazone: Have you read any other such list-style stories (or stories that near this experimentation)? Were you reading any particular writers/stories around the time “Index” was composed?

Bell: Other than the Monson above, I’d say I was also influenced by books like The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, with its lists of terms and somewhat academic tone. . There’s also a memoir called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, that I read a couple years earlier, and that is, as its title suggests, in the form of an encyclopedia; I don’t remember that being an explicit influence, but whenever I’m asked this question now, it always comes to mind. So perhaps it was.

Ripatrazone: Is “Index” comparable with any of your other stories in terms of form and structure?

Bell: I think most of the stories in How They Were Found have structures that are fairly different from anything else in the book, although certainly there’s some overlap. I’ve always been interested in the different ways stories can be told, and with trying to find new ways to push myself forward along those lines. Often structure can be constraining in a very generative way, in the same way that choosing one diction or syntax might shut off some other possibilities, forcing you to innovate with what you have left. I really enjoy working in that way, and I think I’m continuing to do so, even if my recent work has had as obvious a structure as “Index.”

Ripatrazone: I’ve taught “Index” since it was released, and always to a great reaction. It’s a piece that influences and guides students with their own experimentation in form. What was your experience with literary magazines in the classroom (high school, undergraduate, or graduate)? Have you used magazines or excerpts in your own teaching?

Bell: When I taught a college-level craft of fiction class, I used a variety of things from lit mags to supplement our anthology and our craft text: I taught Blake Butler’s “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach” out of Ninth Letter, the version of Norman Lock’s Grim Tales that was online at elimae, and three essays from The Believer—Chris Bachelder’s “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” Ben Marcus’s “The Genre Artist,” and Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” all three of which I consider essential reading for every contemporary writer. I also assigned essays in which students would analyze various craft elements in stories published in literary magazines, and brought in other stories and essays as I found them.

Ripatrazone: What literary magazines would you recommend to teachers and professors (let me plug The Collagist, Dzanc’s online magazine that you edit–I’ve used flash fiction with my college students)?

Bell: Conjunctions—especially in its print form—might be a great choice for a wide variety of classes, especially if professors are willing to work with the staff there to arrange for getting a stack of particular issues. Bradford Morrow always has a specific theme for each print issue—the two issues I was in were Hybrid Histories and Urban Arias—which might make them easy to slot into a themed seminar or unit. (It’s also one of the very best magazines, which helps.) I haven’t read Witness in a few years, but when Peter Stine edited it, I would have said the same about its theme issues as well.

Gulf Coast is a favorite, both for the creative work and also for its excellent essays and interviews with writers. The Believer has some of the best long-form essays and writer-on-writer interviews in the game, and their book anthologizing some of those is among the best money a young writer can spend, if you want to hear smart people talking craft. Willow Springs and Unsaid are probably two of the finest and most progressive literary magazines around, as well as among the best edited. Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, American Short Fiction, and so many others are among my must-reads, every issue. Literary magazines have long served as my own textbooks, pushing me along, and I think they certainly can do that for students.

One place that certain literary magazines might also be used is in design classes: I think magazines like McSweeney’s, Ninth Letter, and Annalemma are constantly pushing the envelope of what the literary magazine can be as an object, each in their own way, and students interested in printing and looking to have careers in print post-eBook might do well to study them.

Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and has been editor of the Southwest Review since 1984. His latest book, Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, was published by Picador in 2010. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

Ben Leubner: How long have you been editing The Southwest Review, and what things of note, in that time, have remained the same about it?  What things have changed?

Willard Spiegelman: I became editor in 1984, when the university provost phoned, out of the blue, and said he wanted a faculty member to take over the review after the previous, long-time editor had retired. I guess he thought that since I wrote about contemporary literature and actually knew various writers I’d be interested in, and good for, the job.

What has remained the same is my taste, and my decisions. I have had two managing editors, the first for twenty years, the second for the last six. We work together to determine the contents of the issue. We don’t deal with an editorial board or any decisions by committee. We have an advisory board, whose members help to bring work and people to our attention.

What has changed, of course, is the rise of the Internet and the decline of print journalism.

Leubner: The Review itself is billed as one of the oldest continuously published literary journals in the country, something in which you no doubt take some measure of pride.  Can you comment on the remarkableness of this achievement, on what it is that makes continuous publication of a literary journal, for a century, both so difficult and so impressive?

Spiegelman: It’s a total mystery to me. Neither SMU nor Dallas itself is a repository of literary types, and it’s purely by chance that the Review has survived as long as it has. During the 1930s, Henry Nash Smith and John McGinnis used to meet Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the editors of The Southern Review, midway between Baton Rouge and Dallas in order to arrange joint issues of the two reviews. When I took over at SWR, the previous editors had also run the SMU Press. The two organizations were split. The press has subsequently (as of last year) been more or less dismantled by a new, cost-cutting provost. There is some hope for its revival, but everything is shrouded in mystery. SWR has so far been spared the axe.

Leubner: What are your thoughts on the state of the literary journal (or lit-mag) in general, today, in the early 21^st-Century.  Particularly, what do you make of the large shift from print to electronic publications?  Do you think that the current explosion of electronic lit-mags can be at all likened to the profusion of print magazines and journals that abounded during the early 20^th-Century?

Spiegelman: This subject has been talked almost to death. I have no opinions different from those of the majority of witnesses. Writing will survive, in one form or another, and print publication, even if diminished, will continue to survive, if not thrive.

Leubner: Do you find my using “journal” and “magazine” or “mag” as if they were interchangeable befuddling?

Spiegelman: Not at all. I suppose “magazine” is used more specifically to refer to something with more than quarterly publication and something that appears in a non-book-like form.

Leubner: A journal like Poetry seems to have gone through several changes over the course of its career, changes that often seem to occur whenever a new editor arrives (I think of Karl Shapiro changing the journal’s name from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse to just Poetry because he thought the two words, poetry and verse, were far from interchangeable).  When you took the helm at The Southwest Review, was there anything about the journal that you felt needed to be changed right away?

Spiegelman: Yes. In trying to cover the region of the southwest, and to represent the arts here, the magazine had made “regional” into something of a synonym for “provincial.” During its earlier days—the 20s and 30s—it strove for more national and indeed international connections, and the opening issue, in fact, had a piece by Edmund Gosse, of all people. One thing I have tried to do is to represent the arts, concerns, and themes of this region without being bound to them. We try to cast a wide net, and we also have a more than modest interest in writers and issues that pertain to the region, which is itself a large and diverse, almost indefinable place, with an increasingly international (and polyglot) spirit.

Leubner: Travis Kurowski (editor of Luna Park) is under the impression that you run the Review in a rather unique way.  I’m not sure what means by this.  Are you?

Spiegelman: No, I don’t know, either. We are a small operation. We print what we like. Jennifer Cranfill, my co-editor, reads and selects fiction; I do the poetry and non-fiction. As the late Howard Moss of The New Yorker said, when asked for his definition of a good poem: “A good poem is one that I like.” The best magazines/journals/reviews have always been ones that reflect the tastes of a single person, or a small group of people. The late Richard Poirier’s Raritan comes immediately to mind, as does the ongoing Salmagundi, which is a two-person operation—Bob and Peggy Boyers—along with some external supporting advisors.

Leubner: Do you see the future of the Review as relatively set and staid?  That is, can it continue largely as it functions now based on the strengths of the tradition which undergirds it, allowing of course for necessary adaptations to changes in technology, or are there forces at work which threaten it and which exceed such changes, making adaptation, and thus survival, difficult?

Spiegelman: I have done this for 26 years. I can’t imagine staying more than 30. What happens to the Review will be determined by whoever takes it over. I hope a younger person (well, anyone will be younger than I) will be more Internet-savvy, and Internet-committed than I am. What we need now is both the time, the personnel, and the money, to get ourselves digitized, and to have some Web presence other than our own modest Web site, which is mostly a provider of information.

Jennifer Cranfill, Southwest Review co-editor, added the following comments:

Jennifer Cranfill: I’m as confused about what’s happening as much as anyone. As far as the future of magazines in general or SWR in specific, I don’t know what that future might be. In our case, so much depends on the university. Five or six years ago I thought there would still be a place for SWR for decades to come but going forward in this economic, cultural, and academic publishing climate I’m not as sure. The trend is toward online magazines because they are less costly, they are considered to have more of a presence, many think they have an immediacy that traditional print magazines don’t have. The down side is to a certain extent they remain ephemeral. The 96-year publishing history of SWR shows the exact opposite: row after row of bookshelves lined with magazines. I’ve always thought the best of both worlds would be ideal: a print magazine and a website offering what the magazine does not (information about the magazine, perhaps interviews with authors, etc.). But I hate to think they are interchangeable. Both have much to offer but something would be lost if either were to become disposable.

I’m also struck by the fact that there are likely more people in America at this moment who want to be or who consider themselves to be writers than perhaps any other moment in our history. MFA programs continue to grow and more and more undergraduates and graduate students study writing with the idea they will make it their life’s work. SWR in particular has seen an upward trend in submissions in the last five years. We receive thousands of submissions. And yet our subscriptions have steadily declined. So as more and more people want to be published in SWR less and less of them are willing to subscribe. Newspapers and mainstream magazines have experienced a true crisis in subscriptions, but that is primarily because of a general apathy for reading the news. In our case it is not apathy as much as a general lack of support of magazine subscriptions, possibly in favor of the free content offered by many magazines or e-zines, but I wonder if it says something about the lack of importance some writers are placing on reading the magazines in which they want to be published. Either way it isn’t a sustainable idea. If you want to be published in print magazines it would be a good idea to support print magazines. Otherwise we cannot continue to provide the opportunities to publish.

Shaking Like a Mountain is an online literary journal featuring writing about music. The journal is edited by Wayne Cresser, Vito Grippi, Jed Griswold, and John Hames, with contributing editors such as Amity Bitzel, Janice Eidus, Marion Winik, and others. Francesca Macchiavelli spoke with co-editor Vito Grippi.

Francesca Macchiavelli: How long have you been working with Shaking Like a Mountain?

Vito Grippi: We published the first issue in the summer of 2007. But the conception and planning began winter of 06/07. Things came together pretty quickly.

Macchiavelli: What are you trying to accomplish?

Grippi: Initially, our purpose is to provide a space for writers to display their work. Taking that further, we specialize in lit about music because we think such a large connection exists between the two artistic mediums—really just to add to the overall literary conversation, but specifically to highlight work that is somehow inspired by, or written as a reaction to music.

Macchiavelli: What drove you to create a new online literary journal?

Grippi: Mostly money, or the lack of it. Total cost to get started was something like $150. Now that the online part seems to be established, we are considering the possibility of releasing some print editions—maybe something like a year “best of” collection.

Macchiavelli: How do you decide what Shaking publishes?

Grippi: The publishing process at Shaking Like a Mountain, I think, is not too different from that of other journals. We have a group of readers that includes myself and my co-editor who read through submissions as they come in. We then add the submissions to a spread sheet and initial a corresponding “yes,” “no,” or “yes, but…” column. (I suppose this would be considered the slush pile.) At this point we’re really looking for a few things—primarily, whether or not they fit the journal. In other words, seeing if the author actually read the submissions guidelines and/or read the work on the journal itself. We get a lot of really beautiful work that does not connect with music in any way. Here we’re also looking to see if a piece moves us immediately. We want the piece to make us react.

After a piece makes it through the first round, it is then sent off to our group of contributing editors by genre. We have a group of poetry editors and a group of fiction editors that includes writers like Janice Eidus, Marion Winik, Crista Mastrangelo, Fred Shaw, among others. This group usually makes the final decision. There are instances where we like a piece that isn’t quite right, has a lot of potential. In those cases, we often ask the submitting authors if they are willing to revise and resubmit (they usually do). So, in some rare instances, a piece may go through multiple revisions and submits before we accept it. Overall we try to keep the process as democratic as possible, because art, as it should, affects people differently.

Macchiavelli: What do you look for in prospective pieces?

Grippi: I’ll start with the blog or nonfiction work that appears on the journal. These are often assigned to someone in our trusted group of writers, or in some cases pitched to us. Initially we’re looking for work that somehow balances relevancy (the music angle) and literature. We look for pieces that are well written, fun, and add to the conversation of music, literature, and art.

For fiction and poetry, what we look for is not that much different. We want pieces that are, first and foremost, good. We want them to stand on their own as a piece of writing. Then they have to have a connection to music. Our guidelines on that end are pretty loose. Mostly we look for something that takes chances and isn’t too obvious. Too many poems try to be about something that is automatically supposed to be cool, like jazz. We don’t need any more poems about Miles Davis.

Macchiavelli: So, what don’t you look for in prospective pieces?

Grippi: We try to stay away from fluff pieces and pieces where the writer appears too self indulgent. This tends to be difficult at times, especially for writers working in memoir and that sort of thing. We try to stay away from things that try so hard to be cool or cutting edge that they forget to be good. For instance, if you give us a poem where the lines create the shape of a musical instrument, it better be a really good poem.

Macchiavelli: What type/genre of pieces do you tend to publish most?

Grippi: We probably publish more poetry than anything else. This is probably because we receive more poetry submissions than any other genre. That said, we have been receiving much more fiction lately, and that makes us happy.

Macchiavelli: Which of your authors do you think reflects Shaking the most?

Chano Pozo

Grippi: Pablo Medina’s “Cubop City” really blew us away. It’s one of those that we’re really happy to have published. It’s a fictionalized account of the murder of Latin jazz percussionist, Chano Pozo. It’s just filled with magic and beautiful language and images.

There’s also another great story, “Killer Heart,” by William Orem that really works. It’s the story of an aging bassist who’s carrying on a relationship with the 17-year-old rising start that fronts his band.

As for poetry, it’s the ones that don’t try too hard to be about music or musicians that I think really succeed. We get a lot of poetry that name drops jazz greats and such, but that’s not really what we’re about. The musical inspiration can be a very minimal part of it. The hope is that music sparks something that then causes a writer to create more music. That’s what poetry really is in the end: music. That said, Lisa Mednick-Powell’s “Ooh La La” is pretty great, Fred Shaw’s “Turntable Generation,” Dave Wanzynck’s “Fortunate Sons.” They’re all great.

Macchiavelli: Do you target a certain audience?

Grippi: Our audience is all over the map. Really, we’re looking to reach people who are interested in literature, people interested in music, and those interested in the combination of those two things. I suppose that could really be anyone. More specifically though, we’d like to reach people interested in interacting with the work. Part of the beauty in publishing online is that a reader can offer an immediate reaction to what they’ve just read. That reaction is read by other readers and the writer, and, hopefully, some sort of meaningful discussion can occur. There is something really cool happening there.

Macchiavelli: What do you want readers to get overall from Shaking?

Grippi: I want readers to know that there is a space where both music and literature come together in an interesting way. We hope it prompts readers to want to write (or listen to) certain pieces of music or certain musicians—or both.

Macchiavelli: What do you get from the journal?

Grippi: The gratification of knowing that we’re responsible for putting another piece of art into the world. I also love to come across names of people we’ve published in other journals. You always feel like you played a part in that person’s career in some small way.

Mostly, though, it’s a love of literature and music and being able to witness the convergence of the two, and then release that product or offspring into the wild.

Macchiavelli: Do you have any advice for authors?

Grippi: Read everything you can get your hands on, write constantly, get to know the work in the journals you want to publish in—and read the submissions guidelines. There is nothing worse than turning down a great piece because a writer has just sent it to the wrong place.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English and Chinese. Her books include Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010) and Silhouette/Shadow (co-authored with Gao Xingjian, Contours, 2007). Co-director of Vif éditions, an independent Parisian publishing house, and one of the editors at Cerise Press, she is also a zheng (ancient Chinese zither) concertist. Her CD, In One Take/Une seule prise (with Guo Gan, erhu) will be released in Europe this summer. She has also recently completed prose translations and an introduction of Wheat Has Ripened, a book of translations of Hai Zi by Ye Chun (forthcoming), and is currently completing a French critical monograph on Gao Xingjian’s dramatic literature. She lives in Paris, France and New York. Visit www.fionasze.com

Maryanne Hannan and Fiona Sze-Lorrain met in an online poetry class in Summer, 2007. Since then, their friendship has flourished through telephone conversations and email correspondence. This is their second interview together.

Maryanne Hannan: Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), the international journal of literature, arts and culture that you co-edit with Karen Rigby and Sally Molini, has just passed its one-year anniversary. What was your initial vision?

Fiona Sze-Lorrain: There is only one vision that Rigby, Molini, and I share—and it isn’t initial: creating a real independent space that harnesses positive energies from all artistic expressions, predominantly literature (poetry) and translation, as a response to contemporary urgencies that are free from institutions, structural rigidity, publishing trends and politics, media interference, or cultural dominance. Beyond its creation, the work is all about nourishing the review with consistency and diversity, as well as constantly renewing, and without fail.

Hannan: When you see all that has been accomplished in the course of a year, do you feel a sense of pride?

Sze-Lorrain: I don’t think in those terms. This is a dangerous zone for an editor. To say this is so-and-so’s magazine is unhealthy. The work belongs to the authors, not the editors. As an editor, I don’t seek ownership of the platform. There may be an unconscious trend among editors to speak about themselves, to be auto-positive. There is a lie in that.

The flip side, of course, is that edited work does speak something about an editor, but not everything. The invisibility of the editor. As a reader, you know something is there; you feel it, but cannot see it.

I have the privilege and honor of working daily with two highly focused, disciplined, efficient, and independent creative women, Rigby and Molini. Co-editing with them is a very pleasant experience, even when situations of differing opinions arise. Such moments always transform into something constructive. You must know that each of us is very precise in our own way. They always keep me back in perspective as far as Cerise Press is concerned.

Hannan: Can you speak more about what you see as the role of an editor?

Sze-Lorrain: It is more about what kind of readership you want to reach. You create something first, and beyond which, you’ll have to let it go. Editing, or at least it seems to me, is a process, and not the end product. A reader cannot and shouldn’t see an editor behind an author. It is very much a shadow, perhaps like a translator too, to some degree.

To edit a magazine effectively, you have to be clear about what you would like to offer to a reader. Very concrete visions, but not rigid—for they can change and respond to varying needs at different times. Concrete visions do not mean rejecting surprises.

Cover image "Carriba" by Mikhail Gubin, from the Summer 2010 issue of Cerise Press

Hannan: Is it difficult to have that kind of clarity with two other co-editors?

Sze-Lorrain: Initially, I thought it’d be complicated. It’s like real society, living next door to your neighbor. Sometimes we resolve our differences by negotiation. Other times resolution doesn’t matter, and we resolve our differences by living with them.

As time passes by, however, it isn’t difficult to have that kind of clarity. Especially in my case, when my coeditors, Rigby and Molini, as I previously mentioned, exercise a very strong level of exactitude in their work. They edit the magazine just like they commit themselves to simple yet essential activities in life, with no distraction. Besides, we trust one another—yes, even in times of differences—and our friendships are built on profound mutual respect. I do believe that there is something transcendental and spiritual in how we treat our lives, friends, correspondence, a piece of writing, etc. I do think this is reflected in how we create Cerise Press.

Hannan: What kind of clarity do you personally begin with?

Sze-Lorrain: I believe in seeking work by positive people, however complicated their lives are. I’m not interested in “intelligent” writers, opportunist artists, or ambiguous personalities. At the stage where I am personally, it is easy to find intelligent people, but it’s hard to meet people who are free and luminous. Once you open up a creative platform for the work of such people, not only their work will speak for itself, the platform itself will expand at its own terms.

Editing has taught me to continue belief in the fundamentally good will in human exchanges (if begun in fundamental good will). Beyond that is a question of aesthetics, “when” and “how” to fit, never “what.” The “what” is never resolved.

Hannan: It sounds like relationships with the authors are of great importance to you.

Sze-Lorrain: A journal is first about the work, and in rare situations, both the work and the author. But on a personal level, I do feel that as editors, we have to know what we can offer authors, not just what they offer us. Molini and Rigby feel strongly about this too: friendships count. Cerise Press does not publish literature as if English is the center of the world as a language and culture. Not all our writers are Anglophone voices. Sometimes authors communicate differently because of cultural issues; some communicate through translators. Maintaining personalized relationships with authors is thus all the more vital.

Hannan: You said earlier that you wanted Cerise Press to be concrete. Why is that?

Sze-Lorrain: As an online journal, it is a limitless platform, in terms of times, people, philosophy. It exists in the virtual world, so its material must be concrete, talk about something in the real world. Print journals have subscriptions, so you know to some extent who is holding/reading them, but not so in the virtual world.

Hannan: I understand Cerise Press is publishing an anthology. So you remain committed to print also?

Sze-Lorrain: Yes. It is important to find a way to connect online to where the paper is. Just because our journal is online does not mean we are paperless. None of us three (editors) advocate paperless, in fact. We always refer readers and viewers back to the book, or the visual source, to have them engage in what is beyond the journal. The journal functions as a door to somewhere, a window to someplace, and readers have to do the rest. If a person has trouble walking or looking through, it has nothing to do with the door or the window, if the door/window is well-constructed in the first place.

Hannan: Speaking of which, I’m currently reading a book I saw reviewed on your site, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry by Stephen Burt. I’ve also contributed reviews to your site, so I’m interested in that aspect of editing. Is it different from other editing?

Sze-Lorrain: It is one of the hardest part of editing. That is where opinions from different people—strangers, or perhaps maybe not?—come in.

It is necessary to allow maximum liberty and individualism, but as an editor, to some extent it is ethical to claim responsibility for the person, even if the review does not reflect the opinion of the editors – otherwise, why publish it in Cerise Press (and not elsewhere)? Negotiation is allowed, but how much? It is quite a “human” process; there is no hard and fast rule. Reviewing is such a broad topic in itself, and I’m sure different editors and journals have different agendas. In general, Rigby, Molini and I seek consistent, creative, and grounded reviews—sensible reviews that do open up dialogues, and not opinionated reviews for the sake of being “opinionated.” We shun negative reviews that damage rather than propose something beyond. It is part of our ethics.

Hannan: You’ve just published a full-length poetry collection, Water the Moon, and you are a guzheng/zither solo concertist. Do you consider editing a component of your creativity?

Fes (Maroc, 1970) © Olivier Schwartz, from the Summer 2010 issue of Cerise Press

Sze-Lorrain: I do not see editing as part of writing. Editing a journal is not writing a poem, or translating a text. The experience of editing a journal cannot replace the act of writing itself. Editing is part of a creative life in the broadest sense, yes. I do resist overarching of any sort as far as writing and editing are concerned. Some things may converge but the dialogue does not make it compulsory for other things to happen. Writing taps into another energy of me.

Hannan: How do you negotiate energy between your different projects?

Sze-Lorrain: How do you negotiate with time?

Hannan: The clean over-all design and maneuverability of your site really draw readers in. Can you comment on the photography and graphics?

Sze-Lorrain: Karen Rigby is our web-master, and web design director. Sally Molini also has a sharp eye in balancing competing visual elements all on one page, for example. All three of us agree that we want Cerise Press to be accessible, Zen and yet rich. One advantage with visual aspects is that you can’t go “wrong.” Either you like it, or you do not. We intend to expand this aspect of photography, art, and visuals. As the journal gets more visual, it starts to challenge the word.

With online journals (or publications of any sort), the word risks presenting itself as an image, rather than a word, as Nadine Gordimer mentioned at the Guardian Hay Festival this year. You see the text on the screen. It presses back as an image. It is almost like a means of consummation. The reader ends up just continuously wanting to consume—more and more images, and not engage in serious reflections, interrogation, or imagination. Image and word juxtaposed together, on the other hand, create a much more organic experience.

Hannan: Have you considered audio files on your site?

Sze-Lorrain: Yes, but they must be a third phase. You cannot perform more than what a reader can absorb. We hope we are resisting “mainstream forces” of a white noise society. I would like to emphasize that Internet has its limits as a means. It is not without limits. Internet is just one of the tools in which we may communicate and transmit information, but it is not something real, both in physical space and in temporality.

Hannan: What would you like to see Cerise Press accomplish?

Sze-Lorrain: For it to grow to be as generous as it can be as a window for the maximum number of people to pass through; for it to lead people to meet in real life on their own terms. For it to be useful to others.

Thank you for being a patient and understanding listener.