Before Knee-Jerk debuted last summer, and as we prepare to launch our first annual print issue in a few months, we found ourselves wrestling with a number of questions regarding the nature of literature, readership, and people’s attention spans. Frankly, we were a little worried. Do people still read? What do people read, or have time to read? Where, how, and why do people read? Are people still willing to pay for a little-known magazine filled with little-known writers when they have unlimited access to free literature online? If they are willing to pay, what compels them to do so? And why—why?!—start a new publication now, when it seems as though people generally have less time, less money, and less attention to devote to reading than ever before?
In other words: What is the future of literature?
In order to help us and our faithful readers sort through these and other bewildering questions, Knee-Jerk spoke with editors from three new(ish) publications: Matt Bell of The Collagist, a wide-ranging online lit journal hosted by Dzanc Books; Zach Dodson of FeatherProof Books, which recently launched its new TripleQuick iPhone app; and Rebekah Silverman and James Tadd Adcox of Artifice magazine, an exciting print journal that debuted this month.
You can check out all three forward-focused projects online, but in the meantime, continue reading to see what their editors have to say about surviving the digital age.
The Collagist began in August 2009 as an extension of Dzanc Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Working with Dzanc founders Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett, Collagist editor Matt Bell has developed one of the more exciting online literary journals around. Published monthly, and featuring everything from fiction and nonfiction to poetry and book reviews, The Collagist publishes both emerging and established writers alike, including work from Stephen Elliott, Elizabeth Crane, Chris Bachelder, Dawn Raffel, and even Captain Fiction himself, Gordon Lish.
Matt Bell is the author of the forthcoming story collection How They Were Found (Keyhole, Oct. 2010) and two chapbooks, The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His stories have appeared in many journals, including Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Willow Springs, and Unsaid, and will appear in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife.
In the interview below, Matt discusses what he looks for in story submissions, some of his work habits and favorite lit journals, and why Ann Arbor is the best place to live in Michigan.
Check out The Collagist at thecollagist.com, and Matt’s website at mdbell.com; and while you’re at it, see what Dzanc is all about at dzancbooks.org.
––Jonathan Fullmer
How did The Collagist begin? How did you become involved?
I think The Collagist had been in the works for a while before I was officially involved. Toward the end of spring last year, Steve Gillis at Dzanc approached me about editing The Collagist, both helping get it off the ground and then running the day-to-day business of it. I jumped at the chance, and we started putting things in motion for an August launch.
Related to the first question: The Collagist is, along with several other fantastic publications and presses, operated by Dzanc Books in Ann Arbor. How does The Collagist fit into that umbrella structure? Do Dan and Steve more or less let you do your thing, or do they like to be involved in any of the editorial process?
The Collagist is published and supported by Dzanc, and of course shares many of its resources. Editorially, it's independent, in that I'm the only one making decisions on fiction and non-fiction, and Matthew Olzmann makes his own decisions for poetry. Dan Wickett and Steve are there if I need their editorial opinions, but they've given me the freedom to publish what I want, by whomever I want. For the novel excerpts and the book reviews, Dan and I tend to work together. For instance, Dan tends to organize the bulk of the book reviews, but I do all the editing work with the reviewers themselves. So there's a bit of crossover, but the bulk of the work rests with Matthew and myself.
How does The Collagist differ from Dzanc or any of the other magazines and presses that make up that umbrella?
I'd say that is mostly reflected in how each editor’s individual aesthetics separate the imprints: Dzanc itself reflects the shared tastes of Steve and Dan, while Black Lawrence Press, OV Books, Keyhole Press, Monkeybicycle, and Absinthe all have their own editors and their own preferences. It's a pretty varied group of editors making the decisions at each of these places, so we cover a lot of ground, and Matthew and I push the borders out in our own directions.
To answer your question in a shorter way: At The Collagist, you're almost exclusively seeing the aesthetics and tastes of Matthew and me at work.
What do you look for in a story? What type of writing excites you? Or what do you consider to be a Collagist story?
While there's no easy answer to this question, there are things that get my attention: A writer who is sensitive to language and sound will always get me to wake up and pay attention. A story that has some sort of form or formal innovation on display will tend to make me want to see how it works, just because that's something I think about a lot with fiction. Of course, I want to be entertained as much as the next person, and in fact am entertained by the above things. My personal tastes probably run a little weird, and of course stories that are genuinely funny go a long way. The biggest thing I might say is that I'm drawn more to brave and risky stories that might not be 100% there than I am to safe stories that succeed completely, because while I can work with a writer on the first kind of story to get it closer to being perfect, there's nothing I can do for the second person.
Also, where I most closely mimic Dzanc's state philosophies, I want The Collagist to be a home for high caliber fiction that cannot, for whatever reason, get published elsewhere. That’s one of the advantages of being the only editor reading prose submissions. Because I never have to talk a committee into believing something is worth taking a chance on. All the writer has to do is convince me.
That said, I like to be surprised. I've already published stories that broke through some of my prejudices and biases by being so undeniably good that they overcame my resistance to some other aspect of their workings. That's one of the reasons we have such spare guidelines: I like to think that part of the joy of being an editor is being proven wrong about my assumptions, no matter how sure I am of my aesthetic.
As an editor, how do you strike a balance between your personal literary interests and the magazine’s needs? Is there any difference?
Most days, I write as soon as I wake up in the morning. Whenever possible, I work on my own fiction from the time I get up until lunch, which leaves me the rest of the day to edit and read and work on the other things I'm doing. As long as I've gotten my writing in for the day, the rest is bonus time, and easy to do. This semester, I'm teaching in the morning three days a week, so it's been a little more difficult. But I still try to write before I work on anything else.
That said, the longer I'm an editor, the more I realize that writing is just one facet of the literary life, and that a day where I do nothing but edit The Collagist is hardly a wasted day. This is important too, both to myself and to others, and I derive a lot of joy from the time I spend on it.
What are some of the magazines, online or print, that most inspired (and/or continue to inspire) The Collagist’s aesthetics?
I don't think there's any publication that reflects a one-to-one correlation for our aesthetic, but there are certainly magazines I admire a lot. The fact that I love reading these other magazines probably suggests some sort of aesthetic closeness. In print, I read a lot of journals, but some of my favorites include Conjunctions, Unsaid, Hobart, New York Tyrant, Willow Springs, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, The Lifted Brow, American Short Fiction, Annalemma, and many more, obviously. That’s as much a scan of what’s nearby right now as it is any real answer.
Editing the Best of the Web series this past year has really expanded my horizons as far as what’s available online, almost to the point of realizing that picking any magazine to single out seems ridiculous, as I’ve been reading really widely the last few months. Out of the many I admire and enjoy, I might point to Wigleaf and Everyday Genius for special attention, as both have become among the most interesting and surprising places to read innovative literature on the web. I could easily list dozens more that I like for just as many different reasons.
I could go on indefinitely, perhaps, and it probably wouldn’t get us any closer to an answer on aesthetics. There are elements of every one of those magazines I feel close to, but none of them are exactly The Collagist. That’s probably for the best—If I could find a magazine that was, I’d just tell people to read that one instead.
The Collagist posts a wide variety of literary forms in every issue, including poetry, short stories, novellas, essays, classic reprints, excerpts from upcoming books, and reviews. That seems like a lot of content for a web-based journal. Why the decision to include so much? And how do you keep (or plan to keep) people reading online? How do you get people to return to the site?
It probably is a lot of content, but mostly just because readers aren’t used to monthly literary magazines. I mean, you guys are a monthly too, and you know how fast the turnaround is on that. To be honest, we see the number of works we publish as constraints, to keep our standards high: If you can only publish four stories a month, then you publish the very best work you can. If we varied from month to month, sometimes publishing more, I might be tempted to take something I shouldn’t, and so on.
As far as keeping people reading and returning, I think we’ve got to be honest with ourselves and see that it’s ridiculous to think most people are going to sit down and read The Collagist cover to cover every month, although some certainly do. What we try to do is use the blog and podcast series as a prod to keep pushing people back toward the website, which is a strategy that seems to be succeeding. It lets us keep mentioning the magazine and gathering readers, instead of just having a big spike when the new issues come out. We’re going to keep expanding our offerings in that area, and see if we can’t make the magazine a more frequent destination for people.
Ann Arbor seems to have a thriving literary community and a number of great up-and-coming writers. What is it about the area that fosters so much literary energy? Why is it the right place for Dzanc and The Collagist?
Ann Arbor is a cool town, for sure. There’s nowhere else in Michigan I’d rather live, and there are a lot of great people around, between Ann Arbor and the Detroit area. There are a number of universities across the two cities, and that certainly attracts some people to the area, and a lot of the people who come to Ann Arbor for school end up staying here for a while, too.
As far as Dzanc and The Collagist are concerned, it’s probably the right place primarily because it’s the area that Steve, Dan, Matthew, and I all live. Steven Seighman, our designer, is several states away. To make up for the distance, we all e-mail him a couple hundred times a day so he doesn’t get lonely.
What are your hopes and/or plans for the future of The Collagist?
I could probably go on about this for hours, but maybe it’s best to keep it at its most basic: I want The Collagist to keep growing and getting stronger, which to me means I need to keep finding the readers our contributors deserve, and to keep getting our name out there so we can find the writers we need and the ones who need us. I want to do right by the people who submit to us as often as I can, because they’ve already trusted us with their work, even if we don’t publish it. And I want to do right by our readers, who give us the gift of their time every month when they stop by and read. If I keep doing those things, everything else will fall into place over time.
What else would you like people to know about The Collagist, or Dzanc, or online publishing, or literature in general, or Matt Bell, or anything else, related or otherwise?
Well, that’s a pretty open-ended question! Let’s just say I think it’s an exciting time to be a part of all the things you’ve mentioned here. The Collagist and Dzanc are doing well; online publishing and literature in general are incredibly exciting right now; and I’m happy for the chance to be a part of all of them. I think it’s going to be a good year all around.
Chicago's own Rebekah Silverman and James Tadd Adcox have just released the first print issue of Artifice Magazine, an impressive collection of stories, poems, and plays.We here at Knee-Jerk are very excited about this publication which includes some of our most favorite things: absurd, occasionally surreal premises of the type that force the reader to consider (often reconsider) their own perspectives, inventive forms and structures that serve their story, beautiful and playful language, and plenty of laughs.
–– C. James Bye
Knee-Jerk: Can you give me some background on how Artifice got started?
Rebekah Silverman: Tadd and I worked together at Sycamore Review, when we were at grad school, and that didn't seem so bad. We figured we'd try working together again.
James Tadd Adcox: We have a lot of the same ideas about running a journal. We're not very democratic about art. We like what we like. We don't like voting about whether things should get accepted in a journal, for example. We do, however, like arguing about whether things should get accepted.
RS: We'd actually been talking about starting a journal for a couple of years before we finally decided to go ahead and do it. And we wanted to put together a journal with a definite aesthetic, one where we could say, with some degree of specificity, what we wanted and what we didn't.
What do you look for in a story? What excites you? What makes an Artifice piece?
JTA: At its best, an Artifice story or poem is a piece whose form drives it to places where a story or poem wouldn't otherwise go. A story or poem whose form works as a sort of engine to make a piece that does something wonderful and surprising.
RS: It's nice that we've got an issue out now, because we can finally say, look at the pieces we've published. Each of them is somehow using the artificiality of writing to do something wonderful.
Your mission statement seems somewhat intentionally vague. But your website also includes a submissions wishlist. Do the two function together? Is the wishlist a sort of tongue in cheek way of saying, when you combine the sort of voices it would take to tell all of these wishlist stories, that should give you an idea of what makes a good Artifice story?
JTA: We certainly didn't mean for our mission statement to come across as vague. We think that it captures what we're looking for pretty well. "Prose and poetry that's aware of its own artifice"--not mimetic realism, not conventional confessional poetry, not anything that assumes the purpose of literature is to be some kind of direct window on "what's really there."
RS: We like tricks. Not cheap tricks. Heartfelt, impassioned, gut wrenching tricks.
Is there a difference between what you might get excited about or love in your everyday personal reading compared to what you feel should be included in Artifice? Anything that you just love to read that just wouldn't fit in Artifice? How do you balance those personal likes and the magazine's needs when selecting work?
RS: There are definitely things that we like that don't fit the magazine. We get our share of realist work, for example, that we love but that isn't really doing anything formally or whatnot.
JTA: It's not really that hard to balance personal likes and our magazine's needs. I think we've been pretty up-front about the fact that the stuff we're looking for is work that in some way descends from that 60s/70s postmodernist moment--not work that is doing the same thing as Barthelme or Pynchon or Acker, but work that is somehow continuing what they began. Mary Gaitskill, who's one of my favorite writers, doesn't really do that, for example. So, if in some alternate universe, we received the best story Gaitskill had ever written, we'd still probably have to pass on it.
Everything is going digital. The literary world has had a huge push in that direction recently. Why a print issue now? Also, can you tell me about any plans you have for maintaining financially as a print mag?
RS: I think our primary plan for maintaining ourselves financially as a print mag is to be awesome, and have people love us.
JTA: I do remember that coming up in the budget meeting.
RS: Also, to sell subscriptions.
JTA: To get at your other question, though, why a print magazine rather than online: we're interested in the materiality of writing, with how well it works as an aesthetic object. If we were doing an online journal, I think we'd be interested in presenting work that only works online, that wouldn't work on a page. I'm thinking of sites like [out of nothing] (http://www.outofnothing.org/), places that do the online equivalent of what we're interested in.
RS: Which is another way of saying that neither of us is quite good enough with web design to do that kind of thing online. That being said, we have mad respect for the non-Artifice-y websites putting up good work. See the answer to #4, above.
Your modesty about web design not withstanding, I know you're also pretty tech-savvy people. How do you see artificemag.com playing into your goals? What sort of exciting and different things does that component of the magazine offer (for example, if you could talk about the author dossiers--which I really like, by the way)? Do you see the website and its features evolving over time? Anything specific we should keep an eye out for?
JTA: We have a pretty firm division between the website & our print publication. We don't do poetry or fiction on the website, except as excerpts from the issue. We like that we are primarily this object, the magazine.
RS: On the other hand, it's not like the nonfiction on the website is exactly non-ficticious. Exhibit A, Andy Farkas's photo-essay about the time he didn't travel to Spudnik Press: http://www.artificemag.com/blog/an-orbit-of-spudnik-a-photo-essay.html
Exhibit B, Jessica Bozek's claim to have been married at the Cinncinatti Zoo at the same moment the last passenger pigeon died, in 1914: http://www.artificemag.com/blog/author-dossier-7-jessica-bozek.html
Exhibit C, this whole thing: http://www.artificemag.com/blog/rebekah-explainsmicroscopes.html
In your opinion, what's the very best part/the most exciting thing about the debut issue of Artifice?
JTA: It's black and sleek and contains many things that we are in love with.
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Keep up on Artifice Magazine and order their first issue at http://www.artificemag.com.
In July, Chicago's Featherproof Books released TripleQuick fiction, their very own iPhone application. Since then, they have published a bevy of 333-word stories, including stories from Knee-Jerk contributors Lindsay Hunter and Amelia Gray. Knee-Jerk recently spoke with Featherproof co-founder Zach Dodson about the inspiration behind TripleQuick, the benefits of fiction via iPhone app, and, well, friendship bracelets.
For all things Featherproof, check out featherproof.com.
How did the TripleQuick series come about? What was your inspiration?
A lot of other lit folks had a similar idea around the same time, so I think it was floating around in the collective conscienceless there, for awhile. That and everyone talking about apps. Anyway, we'd enjoyed the success of our online mini-books so much, we wanted to expand to another format that had free and easy distribution. Also, we seem to be publishing more short fiction than ever before.
How does TripleQuick fit into Featherproof’s general aesthetics and goals?
It has eggs all over it and our logo is a bird? I'm not sure we have any other goals than being cute, really. Actually, I take that back. Our goal has always been to spread our aesthetic: to trumpet the writers we really like, that we feel are doing something new and different. This was just another tiny way to do that.
What kinds of stories do you look for? Which excite you? What makes a successful 333-word story?
The form really does dictate the type of stories that come out. Some are scraps of narratives, some are pure poetics. Some split the difference. Really, anything that strikes us as idiosyncratic, is what we like to publish.
Where do you see people reading these stories? Where do you see people writing these stories?
In a box, with a fox, is ideal. We have also imagined people using TripleQuick in a house, with a mouse. Or anywhere their phone goes really. I am proud of the feature that allows you to compose your own 333 word story, write a bio, and take an author photo, and submit it to us, all via the app. As far as I know, there's not another app that allows you to do that. We've gotten some really great submissions.
Does being a small press allow you to play more with form and delivery? If so, how? Are you free to take some risks in the stories you select or the form in which those stories are delivered to the world?
Totally, I think we feel really free about the whole thing. We've done CDs, postcard books, a re-writable t-shirt. We've even talked about video games. Most of the time, we're interested in books, but there's no one to answer to, so we do let the project follow our interests. I don't think we've ever thought about risk when putting anything out there. Featherproof friendship bracelets, anyone?
Do you ever feel that you don't have the resources to carry out an idea?
This, on the other hand, is a constant thought. Our resources (read: money) are rather limited, so we can't execute all of our ideas. It leads to a lot of painful moments - sometimes being unable to do a project, or sometimes scaling things back from the original idea. There's a downside to scraping by, for sure, but it also has led to some innovation. Often I think we're the most creative within constraints. The series of boring posters I did were just overrun press sheets from the printing of the actual book. That cost us very little, because our printer just left the press running, and didn't have to cut or bind those sheets. I had designed them to work as both, so we didn't have to print separate posters. I don't think I would've thought of that if the coffers weren't so empty to begin with.
With regards to design, what do you lose or gain with the TripleQuick series?
Web design, and by extension, mobile design is not my most favorite. I do prefer designing for print. But I have to admit that designing TripleQuick was a lot of fun. I got to make a lot of cute little icons, and think about things like user interface, that I normally don't get to think about. I was surprised that the development platform allowed for the flexibility in design that it did, and we were able to control almost every aspect of the look of the app. I still think it's one of the best looking lit apps out there.
What do you suppose are the advantages and disadvantages of a rating system?
I'm not sure I believe in a rating system for literature. Which is a funny thing to say, given that the app has one. But we wanted to add another layer of interactivity to the app, which is not something you usually get with online literature. So I view it as a fun thing more than an actual competition. The results have been fun to watch. The top story of the moment is awarded the 'Golden Egg', and it's been interesting to see which stories the crowd picks out. The latest winner was 'Someplace Bright and Sweaty' by Kate Axelrod, a story about a relationship dissolving around a sugar candy bra. I think its victory proved two things: Kate is a great writer, and sugar candy bras lead to interesting stories.
Is submitting stories via an iPhone app the wave of the future? Is this something you see catching on? What does the finger-snap nature of the iPhone application mean for the future of short fiction?
I don't know if I should be in the prognosticating business. I have no idea what will catch on or not. I do know that we'd like to make our stories available wherever people's eyes are, and at the moment, there's a lot of eyes on mobile devices. The reason for the super short format was not only a love of the form and constraint, but a recognition of the mobile attention span. I view the whole thing as an experiment. It's fun and interesting, but I don't ever think we'll stop putting out novels made of paper.
