In our recent interview with Laura van den Berg, author of the acclaimed collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us from Dzanc books in October 2009, van den Berg discusses the amount of research (or lack of?) she puts into her stories in foreign lands, and so reminding us in an age of spectatorship and narratives of experience, fiction is a literature of make believe. From the interview:
Laura van den Berg: I’m a visiting professor at Gettysburg College this year and, in a recent discussion with students on research in fiction, I found myself extolling the virtues of Wikipedia, forgetting they’ve likely been hearing all their academic lives that Wikipedia is the devil’s work—until, that is, I registered that the entire class was gazing back at me with expressions of abject horror.
So, as you can probably gather from that anecdote, I’m not a terribly rigorous researcher. I always do some research—hopefully enough to not make any major blunders, though I’m sure I have made some—and I like to look at photographs and listen to recordings and read up on the things that intrigue me. But I’m not exactly looking for facts; rather, I’m seeking the details that allow me to begin entering the world of the story—in the title story, for example, it was discovering the detail of the red dirt in Madagascar that made the story begin to take shape for me. I’m really interested in place, but more in the metaphorical possibilities of a setting and landscape as an instrument of pressure than adhering to some larger, factual reality.
I also don’t perceive the setting in my stories as being faithful renderings of the literal places; the Madagascar in the title story is not the real Madagascar, but my own fictional approximation. I haven’t been to a lot of the locales in the collection, though I used to live in Boston and have been to Paris a few times. This seems to disappoint people sometimes, probably because “autobiography” and “authenticity” are so often conflated—“But then how do you know X detail was real?” I’ve been asked. Fair enough, I suppose, but what does it mean for something to be “real” in a story? My feeling is that the only reality that matters is that story’s reality, so as long as the details, whether factual or invented, are things the reader can believe in, I have no qualms about making things up.
Roxane Gay—noted writer in many online and print venues and assistant editor at PANK, an up-and-coming young literary magazine from Michigan—writes at Luna Park about what she sees as a lack of writers of color in the literary publishing world. Gay’s essay on Luna Park is a follow-up of sorts to a blog post she wrote earlier this summer for the PANK blog—her main point perhaps summed up in her second paragraph: “I am consistently frustrated, frightened, and freaked out by the lack of people of color in the publishing world in 2009(!), and particularly in independent publishing.”
The post drew lots of attention, commentary, and, at times, some criticism of Gay’s position. For example, from fgrayson:
i’m not frustrated with this talk as these are good things being discussed but i’m frustrated at the fact that people are acting like what’s going on in indie publishing is way different than regular publishing and that there’s some sort of insidery bs going on in indie publishing when it’s open to anyone who has the time to throw together some paper or a blog
In this follow-up (or response) for Luna Park, Gay tries to be clear in stating she has no solution for what the problem she perceived in publishing, but offers her essay up something of a sign on the side of the road, a notice to writers, editors, and readers that a problem might exist, and that they might want to look around.
New issue of Lumberyard, issue 4, arrived in the LP mailbox today. WOW. Wowwowwow.
Here’s a link to our interview with the editors after their smashing first issue: LINK
Jonathon Keats's cover for Opium 8: The Infiniti Issue
Aside from being editor of Luna Park, I am also a soliciting editor for Opium Magazine, and so can’t quite get myself to write about Opium on the main site (though if someone else would, that would be great). But the latest issue concept seems so interesting/original/unique/etc. that I can’t help but say something about it.
Issue 8 is the Infiniti Issue for Opium, and, in the spirit of the theme, Todd Zuniga worked with artist and writer Jonathon Keats to create possibly the most audacious cover in literary magazine history, commonly referred to by Zuniga as “The Longest Story Ever Told.” Long story short (pun intended) the cover has a tale written in 9 words, each word of the story revealing itself in 100 year increments. According to Zuniga in the issue:
The cover is printed in a double layer of black ink. The overlayer is incrementally screened back where the nine words are, making the letters fractionally more vulnerable to ultraviolet light, allowing the underlayer to fade away decade by decade, gradually letting the words turn gray. The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so the words will appear one at a time…
This longest-story-every-told conceptual art idea might easily be made fun of as sensationalist, trite, and so on–but, in the end, it seems there is a difference between doing things to get noticed in a wholly superficial way (marketing) and creating things for the love of it and wanting others to see that creation for that same reason, and that this issue falls much more towards the latter of these two extremes.
What Zuniga and Keats (and others on the magazine staff) seem to have hit on with this cover is something that not only gains exposure for the magazine and for those creating it, buts something that might possibly get readers to consider what constitutes story, reading, and publishing, how conservative many of our concepts of these things might be, and then what the world of possibilities are.
This coming fall, Luna Park will be heading to the northeast and joining the good people on the campus of York College of Pennsylvania. What does this mean? Bigger facilities, newer hardware, greater access. Also, a new address:
Luna Park
York College of Pennsylvania
441 Country Club Road
York, PA 17403-3651
Willow Springs has significantly updated their website (at least since last I visited it) to include a tremendous amount of their author interview and author profiles–which are essentially a better, self-generated wikipedia entry of selected authors, with notes from the authors on reading and work they published in the pages of Willow Springs. New profiles are up of Kim Addonizio, Paisley Rekdal, and Joseph Salvatore.
Monkeybicycle has refitted their website, adding, among other things, a new media section featuring audio & video. Only two pieces of content available so far, but Laura van den Berg reading her new story “Photography” is worth a visit.
In case you have been living in an Internet & literature depressed world and have somehow missed Triple Canopy, here’s an introduction from their first issue. As we’ve said before, this magazine seems to be the greatest realization of the literary possiblities of online publishing. And, like Antioch Review (mentioned below), Triple Canopy is up this year for an Ellie.
Yes, us too: http://twitter.com/lunaparkreview
The Antioch Review is a finalist in the “essays” category for the 44th annual National Magazine Award. (See our previous post on the NM Awards.) It is the magazine industry’s highest award and has been compared to the movie industry’s “Oscar” competition. The twenty-six winners will receive an “Ellie” designed by Alexander Calder at an event on April 30th at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall. The Antioch Review’s entry was an essay/memoir piece “Vickie’s Pour House: A Soldier’s Peace” by Maureen McCoy, Professor of English at Cornell University. The essay appeared in the winter 2008 issue of the Review. Robert S. Fogarty, editor of The Antioch Review, said “it was a distinct honor to be chosen in a category where there is stiff national competition.”
