In their first meeting this past winter, a dozen
writers, photographers, and editors sat around a sticky food-court table at
Marketplace Mall. Speaking above the din was a challenge, but the group was
still able to talk about the stories, poems, art, and interviews in their most
recent publications. Black, glossy copies of HazMat Review commingled with napkins.
Representatives from four member-groups of the
Upstate Publishers Association met that day to discuss their mission. The small
press representatives and magazine publishers have since met once every few
weeks, and are working on the construction of a website and web ring.
If you’re a local writer, the UPA wants you to
submit your work to more small presses than you knew existed. It wants you to
join writing workshops, read literary magazines published upstate, and know
about the accomplished authors who come to town. It also wants you to know
about and read its member-groups’ publications.
Why? So you can give your time and talent to the
Rochester literary scene in which they’re so invested.
“It’s about awareness,” says Bridgett Frey. Frey is
a student at SUNY Geneseo and president of Geneseo’s magazine, Opus. “I had no idea that there were
literary magazines in Rochester.”
Small press publishing is a big industry, with
1,200 publishers listed in national publications like Writer’s Market and the Council
of Literary Magazines and Presses. It has a unique function in the literary
landscape. According to CLMP’s website, “Literary magazines and presses
accomplish the backstage work of American literature: discovering new writers;
supporting mid-career writers; publishing the creative voices of communities
underrepresented in the mainstream commercial culture; and preserving literature
for future readers by keeping books in print.”
UPA founder William Owen is modeling the UPA after
CLMP, a national organization of independent publishers that helps publishers
market their magazines and stay in touch with one another. Based in New York City,
CLMP has not had a great deal of local influence.
Owen wants to battle what he says is “an overall
lack of communication and exposure among the creative communities in
Rochester.”
“It’s a risky venture to try to publish a small
magazine in Upstate New York for Upstate New York,” he says. “The resources,
the interest, and the distribution systems are hard to generate. You can
generate them, but it takes a lot of effort.”
Ideally, Owen wants the UPA to work with most of
Western New York’s 20 or so small publications, small presses, literary
associations, and literary centers.
Kimberly Wehneris looking for a broader audience of readers, writers, and artists
for her magazine, Imprint Journal.
She and her husband, Steve Wehner, began Imprint
last summer after Kimberly Wehner decided that her classmates at Writers
& Books deserved a viable outlet for their writing. “I belong to a couple
of writers’ groups,” she says. “Some people never try submitting.”
A fulltime writer herself, Wehner wasn’t only drawing
on her peers’ frustration. “I got a whole slew of rejections — that’s how I
know how difficult it us,” she says. “I’m not a bad writer. It’s a bad market.”
Despite good sales at Writers & Books, Lift
Bridge Book Shop, Daily Perks Coffeehouse, Mood Makers Books, Barnes &
Noble Greece, Borders Henrietta, and Sundance Books in Geneseo, the Wehners
haven’t made money yet. Imprint‘s
press run is small — 100 copies at this point — and the Wehners pay all
costs out of pocket.
“We’re not trying to be the most avant-garde or
elegant publication out there,” Steve Wehner, art director for the journal,
says. “We want to sustain it.”
Milking submissions from Rochester’s writers has
been the biggest challenge so far in publishing Imprint. Flyers at Writers & Books and word-of-mouth
advertising within writing groups have helped the Wehners spread the word.
Past issues’ writers have been college students,
prison inmates, housewives, and husbands, Wehner says. They write about love,
childhood, murder, music, and their craft.
One standout feature of Imprint, which comes out twice a year, is the interview of a
well-known local writer. S. James Brennan, who grew up in Rochester and
finished his first novel last year, is Imprint‘s
most recent interviewee. “Doing this shows that you don’t have to be in New
York City to become a great, popular writer,” Kimberly Wehner says.
To submit your work, e-mail imprintjournal@hotmail.comand type “submission” in the subject line.
Some editors never experience the submission drought
familiar to the Wehners. “We got inundated with stuff right from the
beginning,” says HazMat Review editor
Norm Davis.
HazMat has perhaps been
Rochester’s most dynamic success story. Davis, tired of reading what he felt
was fluff, started HazMat in 1996.
His wallet funds every issue of the magazine, which currently sees a press run
of 500. Davis has never asked for a grant or run a single advertisement. “It’s
my labor of love for the city of Rochester,” Davis says.
“We spend his money,” jokes David Greer Smith,
photography editor. Neither he nor the authors are paid for their work.
The magazine’s reputation is salary enough for some
bigger-name writers. HazMat became a
national publication three years ago, and is now listed in CLMP and Poet’s Market. Recently, the magazine
was added to the catalogue of City Lights Books, a prestigious store and
publisher in San Francisco started by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
To Davis, Smith, and the rest of the magazine’s
staff, some of the author’s names are worth their weight in gold. “Every niche
has its stars; we have ours,” says Smith. Among those stars are bigger-name
poets like Ferlinghetti and Lyn Lifshin.
Even before the magazine gained national and
international renown, HazMat was
publishing intense, lyrical, exceptionally imaginative work.
“There’s a feeling that Rochester stuff isn’t good
enough,” says Davis.
“It sure is,” says Smith.
From bitter poems about politics, to sentences about
rum so clear you can taste them, to vivid descriptions of dreams, HazMat has earned its reputation.
Getting work published in the magazine is tough — 90 percent of what’s
submitted is rejected for space reasons, and the journal is currently full well
into next year.
“Every page is priceless,” says Smith.
“Fought over,” says Davis. “It’s a high-class
magazine, there’s no question about it.”
Haz Mat sells at Greenwood Books,
Barnes and Noble Pittsford, Mood Makers Books, and Borders Victor for $12. To
request your own HazMat subscription,
or to submit your work, visit www.hazmatlitreview.org.
Owen, a Geneseo graduate, says Geneseo’s Opus might have gotten off the ground
sooner if an organization like the UPA had been around in past years to help
with troubleshooting and publicity.
Past editor-hopefuls at Geneseo have had trouble
translating their ideas into actual pages, president Bridgett Frey and vice
president Katie Steinnagel say. Money is tight. The fact that 40 double-sided
pages were collated and presented as Opus last spring is an achievement.
The women want to build a bigger audience for their
magazine, both on-campus and off, and hope that the UPA will help them achieve
that. “Ideally, we’d love to have everyone on campus pick up Opus like they do the school newspaper,”
Steinnagel says. To read the current issue of Opus, visit www.geneseo.edu/~englclub.
To learn more about the UPA,
e-mail upstate_publishers@yahoo.com.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2004.
