We see the same magazines at the grocery store checkout every day—and often, it seems as though they are literally the same ones: glossy celebrities surrounded by bright lettering, promises of learning how to become the best you, one more set of “Ten Steps to….”
Yet there’s another side to the publishing industry: independent magazines that are printed in small batches or even handmade, ranging from intricately designed works of art to stapled-together printer paper. When I first discovered them, I felt a sense of human connection that seemed absent from the checkout line. You can tell someone chose the stories, designed the layout and coordinated publication, all likely from your hometown.
Seeing these, it’s hard not to get sent on a wave of nineties nostalgia. Or, since I was born in 1993, a pining to have been a teenager during the golden age of indie magazines, when zines played a huge role in feminism, punk rock and DIY culture. You name it, there was a zine for it.
However, there’s hope in the Raleigh-Durham area. It’s home to more than a dozen small-press fiction magazines, both online and in print, covering a wide range of subjects: sci-fi, Southern culture, dream journals, sentence-long stories and others. To find out more about the region’s lively small press culture, I spoke with the editors of three very different publications: “Bull Spec,” “At Length” and “Inch.”
“Bull Spec”
“Bull Spec” is a Durham-based magazine of speculative fiction. That umbrella term includes science fiction, fantasy and alternate history, as well as anything and everything that dwells at the margins of classic literature, like R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series and Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Though there’s debate over the origins of speculative fiction, the genre fundamentally taps into two main motives for storytelling: enthralling one’s readers with crazy stories while shedding light on contemporary society.
Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, the publisher of “Bull Spec,” created the magazine in 2009 for another set of reasons: first, his children were old enough to have a regular bedtime, giving him time to write, and second, he’d noticed that, despite the huge amount of talent he saw in his writing groups, local writers didn’t have a place to showcase their work. He started online, posting queries for submissions on writer’s websites like Duotrope and hoping for a few responses. But within a few weeks, he says, in phrasing that sounds like the start of a killer post-apocalyptic novel, “The flood came.”
In the first few months, he saw “Hundreds and hundreds of submissions, with so many good stories—and some bad ones, but that doesn’t matter.” Though Montgomery-Blinn originally thought that he’d create a website, he soon realized that he had enough high-quality submissions for a full-length magazine. And after speaking with Durham’s Regulator and Duke’s Gothic Bookshop, he was able to get the first print issue on bookstore shelves.
As “Bull Spec” and the speculative fiction genre grow, Montgomery-Blinn hopes for more collaboration between speculative fiction writers and video gamers, whose interests both lie in creating complex fantasy worlds. He’s also excited about two new emerging speculative fiction genres: contemporary fantasy, which blends magical elements into real-world settings, and near-future stories, ones that take place in parallels of contemporary society that engage current social and technological issues.
“At Length”
There’s been a lot of buzz lately over whether “listicles,” the type of list-based, short-form writing that's made sites like Buzzfeed so popular, have nudged online writing into a low-commitment form of reading, where snippets of data dominate.
But there’s a growing space for long-form fiction on the web, too, as literary magazines increasingly shift their content online.
Durham’s own “At Length,” an online magazine of fiction, poetry and essays on music and art, was one of the first literary magazines to make the switch. What began as a quarterly print magazine over a decade ago went fully digital in 2009. In an email, Farmer wrote about the excitement of beginning a new publication, “My initial rule for myself: I didn't want to put out something that wasn't at least as exciting to me as whatever was on my bedside stand. That is: I wanted to publish things (to only publish things) I would be desperate to read even if I had no connection to them.”
This print format wasn’t always conducive to this, says Farmer. “Being a print magazine required certain shapes of us, mostly because it required us to charge for the magazine, but also because it defined and limited our audience to the people for whom we created a copy in our single print run.”
After a short hiatus, Farmer restarted “At Length” as an online-only publication. Though he was initially worried about the new format—“I associated reading on a screen with hurry: a bad fit for long work,” he remembers—“At Length” ultimately succeeded, able to publish work that didn’t have to conform to the interests of a small paying audience, “something that's really intriguing but may not be for everyone.”
And while it’s true that many committed readers love the tangibility of paper and ink, online literature has the potential to outlast the lifespan of even a print issue. “Because a piece can stay on the site indefinitely, it can (and some do) discover a large new audience years after we first publish it,” says Farmer.
“Inch”
It’s a story that’s invariably mentioned when discussing flash fiction. Ernest Hemingway’s devastating response to a friend’s challenge to write a short story under ten words? “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”
Whether it’s true or not, flash fiction has the power to disarm its readers; it sticks in your mind like a punch line or a fortune.
Though flash fiction’s borders are blurry (the upper limit may be as high as 1,500 words), the recent trend has been toward shorter pieces. Take for example, the six-word memoir or, perhaps the most popular, the 140-character tweet. In flash fiction, there’s a lot left intriguingly unsaid. The small number of words function almost like song lyrics, forcing their audience, through the power of association and interpretation, to imagine worlds and narratives beyond what the writer offers.
When Ross White and his coworkers discovered “Blink,” a poetry magazine printed on a single piece of paper, they were fascinated. They tried to contact its editors but then realized the magazine no longer published new issues. “The world was poorer for not having ‘Blink’ in it,” White says, and so, despite having little experience in publishing, they launched Inch in 2006 in homage to “Blink.” “We never planned on being a business, or even a publishing house,” says White, who now edits “Inch” and runs Bull City Press, a micropress that has published six books.
White makes each magazine by hand, and he credits the new season of “House of Cards” for helping him print and staple the latest issue. “Inch” comprises just one sheet of paper folded into an approximately five-by-four inch booklet, and it usually contains five pieces of flash fiction, though the number varies according to each work’s length.
There’s some debate over whether a four-line story should be classified as prose poetry or short fiction, but White says that “Inch” doesn’t believe in stressing genre over a piece’s intrinsic beauty. “The walls between flash fiction and prose poetry are semi-permeable,” he says. “But if the world that the work creates is self-contained, if it speaks to the human condition, those boundaries don’t matter.”
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