Sometime last year, I was thinking about the work I love, poems I see from friends, colleagues, old classmates, poems in journals, magazines, newspapers. I was thinking about the magazine as an object, thinking about stuff that’s been happening lately with big magazines (closing) and smaller ones (popping up online & off like inspiring mushrooms. Yes. Awesome simile prize, please). Okay, so none of those are exactly what I was thinking of for me, but they’re interesting, I like many things that they do, and–most of all–they are out there, making magazines and books. I wanted to add to that conversation and I wanted the work I admire to add to it, too.
I thought, all right, that’s what I want to do. I want to be able to take work I love and put it together and give it an elegant, careful home with other stuff to talk to. I want to arrange things in conversations I find interesting and think others will, too.
Basically, I wanted to make a magazine that would be an extension of the things I value: good work, care, play, attention to the daily; I wanted it to contain writing that would be challenging and beautiful. And most of all I wanted it to be something that people who might not otherwise pick up a literary journal would feel like they could approach.
So I made it. It’s called 1110 (say it one-one-one-oh), and you can read all you want to about it over on its very own site. It’s been a lot of learning: how to use InDesign. How to request revisions (over email! I hate this part). How not to get bogged down under the (literal) hundreds of submissions. How to plug my ears when the inevitable naysayers walk by doing their naysaying thing, which, come on, really is about them and not about me (and certainly not about 1110, which they’d have had to have read or even just picked up once before I’d take that seriously).
It’s got ten poems, a short story, and a photograph in it. In the UK, it’s £10, including shipping. If you’re in the US, it’ll set you back just over $20, (also including shipping), but if you’re reading this and would like to have a copy, enter the code “iwanttotry” at checkout and you’ll get 40% off your copy (til next week Monday or Tuesday).
I’m working on putting 1110/2 and 1110/3 together now, relearning all the InDesign I apparently forgot and finding new writing I love. Discovering just how apt VIDA‘s statistics are–it’s one thing to read things and have a sense that women are underrepresented, and another to read someone’s statistics confirming that, and another still to realise as I cull submissions that barely one in ten (ONE in TEN!) comes from a woman. Lesson there, talented women writers and photographers: please submit to my magazine.
What’s all this about, in the end? Because it’s not just about–or even primarily about–sourcing papers or designing die-cuts or publicising or even finding the work for in the magazine.
I think it’s about two things: first of all, the lesson I keep learning (keep having to learn) about how lucky I am that most things I want to do, I can do. I set out, I work hard, and I’m in a privileged position (no dependents; generally healthy; supported financially by doing work I love and morally by a partner who doesn’t have a problem with me doing my work despite its financial constraints; surrounded by people who care about what I care about and generally share my politics) that means I can accomplish those things.
Second, it’s about the rich reward I’ve found in focusing my energy on the things that I really love, regardless of their ends being unsure. I know that it’s possible all my work will disappear–that I’ll run out of energy, or grant money, or whatever, and 1110 will just fade away to a couple of boxes of spare copies in some attic. But I also know that now, in this moment, doing the work of making another beautiful thing from the beautiful work of others is my way of kissing the ground. I believe kissing the ground in all of our ways–all our individual, often unnoticed, ways of caring for all the fellow-beings we meet–is a way to honor these lives and the lives of the ones we don’t see.
