We’d just finished eating and were still nursing this bottle of red wine, when Andrew asked, “Why aren’t we doing something like that?” We’d been talking about literary magazines. I remember looking at Adam and then back at Andrew and saying, “Shit, I dunno.” Adam was still in school and Andrew and I were working at a used bookstore; I was also teaching and Andrew was in the process of applying to MFA programs. So, while all three of us had our own things going on, none of us was too busy for a little literary project. “I dunno,” I said again. When the waiter came over to clear away the remains of our Chinese food, he asked us if we’d like another bottle of wine. We looked at each other and smiled.
Listen, we’re not unlike any other readers and writers. The three of us have our own styles, our own ways of reading and our own ways of writing. All we have in common is this fixation on words and an intersecting love for Woolf and Joyce and Beckett. I remember the first time I met Andrew (it was his first day of work, and I’d been there for about a year). I don’t know why, maybe it was because we’d both chosen to work at a bookstore. In any case, the first thing I asked him was whom he reads and if he writes. He said he’d been obsessed with Woolf for the past few months, and yes, by the way, he does. Ah, I thought. This is going to work.
Over the course of our friendship, we discovered that, despite this common love for Woolf and her contemporaries, it turned out that Andrew and I disagreed on most other writers, and that when we did agree, we usually agreed differently. But we wouldn’t have it any other way. We spent a lot of our time talking about authors and offering recommendations. He introduced me to Nicholson Baker and Stephen Dixon, two authors I’d never heard of. They are two authors I’ve since fallen in love with. I introduced him to Raymond Carver and Alice Munro, two writers whom he’s been reading ever since. Adam and I’d been reading a lot of stuff from young writers at the time: Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss were two of our favorites. Andrew loved stylists like Baker and Donald Barthelme. We were a triangle of reading that was constantly being reconfigured.
So, that night at the Chinese restaurant. Well, everything suddenly seemed to make sense.
In the days and months that followed, we chose a name (which was no easy task), mapped out our goals, and figured out ways to make this thing work. Our blog details a lot of this process, so I won’t go into detail here. Here, I’ll just go ahead and write about what we wanted out of this project and how we were going to go about doing it.
It began as an exciting and energizing conversation. Let’s do this! Let’s do that! We should do this! We should do that! We felt like kids who suddenly decide to start a club. Then, that silent and simultaneous realization: no one really reads literary magazines.
Shit.
Now, this was not an easy thing to admit. All three of us were (are) avid readers and writers, yet even we didn’t really read literary magazines. As we sifted through our guilt, we tried to refocus and think logically about this problem. Mainly, we threw around ideas about why this was the case.
The one thing we kept coming back to was the fact that literary magazines aren’t very nice-looking. And I don’t care what anyone says on the subject: we do judge a book by its cover. And we should. The way something looks has a direct effect on that which it says and does. In fact, the cover of a book is a performance; it says and does simultaneously. It promises.
So, fine, we knew we wanted something that resembled a book, not a magazine. And a beautiful book at that. Something with depth, inside and out. Something that felt good in your hands; something you’d want to open; something that stayed in your hands a little longer than necessary.
The cover was one thing, but the inside was another thing altogether. We wanted the kind of paper that you’d want to touch, something with texture. We wanted the kind of layout that was easy on the eyes, something that used negative space. One of the things we talked about was the fact that, if you happened to pick up a literary magazine, and then if you happened to open it up, what you’d find was words on a page, words on a page, words on a page. We wanted something more fluid, some design that could separate the stories from one another yet something that still argued for their collectivity.
This aesthetic issue was very important to us because from the beginning we wanted a project that reached readers, rather than just writers. Listen, we’re not saying that literary magazines only care about writers, and we’re not saying that they shouldn’t showcase writers. They do care about their readers and, hell yes, they should showcase their writers. All we’re saying is that literary magazines exist to further the writing public, rather than the reading public. We wanted to find a way of doing both.
This is easier said than done. Here’s what we wanted: we wanted to publish hardcover books; we wanted linen paper; we wanted to circulate at least 1,000 copies. I’ll make a long story short, cutting out months of research and meetings, and I’ll just say: we can’t do any of these things. Not even one.
Yes, money.
In any case, there are a lot of things we can do. We can create a beautiful cover with beautiful art; we can use a paper with a kind of texture; we can create a layout that facilitates the reading process. We have artists; we have a great printer; we have an excellent graphic designer. And we have hope.
Now, all of this would mean nothing if we couldn’t publish good fiction. But we will. We promise to put out at least two issues a year, and as long as the fiction continues to be strong, we’ll promise to publish more. There are great stories out there. It takes time to tell them and it takes even more time to find them. But we’ll do our best. We’re doing our best. We promise.
Feel free to visit our blog to follow our current joys, anxieties, and frustrations as we attempt to maintain Avery.
