For those of you who have not yet heard, Rock & Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art, and Faith is suspending publication until further notice due a lack of funding. In their hiatus they will be looking for a sustainable source of income. We at Relief are devastated by this news.
Since learning of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fate of literary journals in general and the fate of us here at Relief. Granted, we’re not quite at the place where Rock & Sling is, but we come darn close at times. But then we get a donation, or a few more subscriptions and then we’re afloat once again for another print run. It’s a constant struggle. We think about money all the time, always on the lookout for more funding and more subscribers. We’re all part-time volunteers doing a full-time job.
I can only imagine what Rock & Sling is feeling.
There are times when we all wonder if our effort is even worth it. At AWP in New York, I attended many a panel all designed to help literary journals gain funding and keep subscribers. And wow did I hear some stories. One guy told me he sold his truck in order to fund a print run! One woman's marriage ended because of how much time she was devoting to her journal! Every journal, at some point wonders, "Is it worth it?" Earlier this year, at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing, when I was introducing the purpose of our journal to one woman, she replied, “Oh, so you’re just like Image? Well, why do we need another Christian literary journal?” [and here’s me, stunned and speechless]
How do you sell something to someone who doesn't think that that something is worthwhile?
Why We Need More
I'm not going to type out every reason, but there are a few main points I keep coming back to in discouraging times. There are literally hundreds of print literary journals out there in which to choose. In my database alone, I have about 450 named. Of the Christian literary print journals running strong (and here I’m distinguishing journal from magazine), there are only three. THREE. And Rock & Sling is one of them. Did you know that there are more gay and lesbian journals than Christian ones?
A friend of mine who was enrolled in a well-known and somewhat prestigious MFA program was told by a writing professor to not write a Christian-themed/influenced story because there would be no place that would be willing to publish it. And so, my friend wrote a different story.
The Christian publishing industry NEEDS Rock & Sling. WE need Rock & Sling.
What You Can Do to Help:
1. Give them some money. 2. Find money for them. 3. Tell someone else to give them money.
Spread the word. Put the Save Rock & Sling widget on your blogs, Facebook pages, whatever. Twitter/Plurk about it. Stumble and Digg it! Tell your grandmothers about them. Dedicate a song on the radio to them. Do whatever it takes to get them up and running again.
What are you doing still reading this?! Go. Help our "competitor"!
But don’t let that stop you from ordering your copy! These beautiful books are ready and waiting to fulfill their purpose all the way to your doorstep :-)
Tell Friends about Relief
Last week, Coach gave you guys a link to download some Relief buttons to place on your own blog or website. But for those of us who want to be able to tell friends about Relief on Friendster or their Facebook page, we have another, more high-tech option available for you: The Relief Mini-Site!
If you’ve visited the Relief Journal Facebook page recently, you’ve probably seen it already. But for those of you who haven’t, we’ve wrapped up the best of the Relief Blog and placed it inside this handy little widget.
To copy it to your website: 1. Click on the “Share” button located in the lower right-hand corner. 2. Choose the kind of site you’d like to upload it to (i.e. Facebook, Blogger, etc.), or alternatively you can just copy the code. 3. Then simply follow the directions for uploading content for your site, or (if you've copied the code) paste/embed the code onto a page.
On July 3rd, Kevin Lucia posted a blog about what writers should be prepared to give up when pursuing their craft. I’ll start by saying that, while I agree with almost all of Kevin's thoughts, I’d like to build upon his final point: that it is important not to go too far when hacking things out of your life to make room for writing, and would add additional caveats to the ones Kevin outlined.
I’ve seen many writers maintain the illusion that writing is a purely solitary profession, one in which the artist sits secluded in a lushly cushioned chamber (or, depending on his temperament, a pleasantly impoverished one) and reflects upon the distant world outside. There is, of course, some truth in this. Many activities in writing—reading, editing, planning, revising—are best conducted in isolation, as is the sincere reflection that legitimate art requires. Nevertheless, reflection doesn’t do much good if there is nothing on which to reflect. With that in mind, the message of today’s blog is simple: if you want to be a good writer, don’t forget to do something other than write.
Counterintuitive, you say? Simplistic? Perhaps true on both counts…but the reminder is also sometimes necessary. As Kevin mentions, many writers are naturally shy, sticking to what is comfortable, familiar, and consequently they sometimes struggle to generate material. Such writers slouch paralyzed before their keyboards, claiming writer’s block; in worse cases, they substitute tired plots and situations for fresh, sincere experience; in the worst cases, they write maudlin stories about writers with nothing to write about and stick them in the mail.
I would argue, however, that the root of such difficulties is often a lifestyle problem rather than a writing problem. While you shouldn’t get up prematurely (good writing often approaches cautiously, requiring patience), sometimes the best thing you can do for writing is, for the moment, to stop writing and experience something else. Ideally, this should be something that jostles your routine, even taking out of your comfort zone entirely. Such experiences can put your own material into higher relief, sharpening it, and can even give you new material entirely.
This is especially true, by the way, for writers who churn out solipsistic prose, which sometimes results in work without the breadth and comprehensiveness of actual life. One of the worst mistakes writers can make, after all, is assuming that everyone sees things the same way they do, or (even worse) assuming that the only rationale or comprehensible perspective is their own. Both of these illusions are easier to nurture when you only occupy one sliver of the world, and therefore many writers—and, for that matter, many Christians—find it difficult to tolerate conflicting worldviews, ignoring or invalidating their existence rather than seeking them out and grappling with them. Such myopia, I think, can limit growth both as an artist and a person.
For that matter, you never know what encountering new things can teach you about your own craft. For example, one of my fresh hobbies is barbershop music, and a few months ago my chorus brought in a consultant named Steve Jameson who believed that musicality results from a calculated process of sustaining and releasing tension. I don’t mean tension in the voice; I mean tension created around and within an engaged listener. Let me put it like this: a song—through this theory—is compelling because something initially unsettled within the music is soothed (or, in contrast, something tranquil is disrupted). It can be a chord that takes its precious time resolving, a crescendo that drags the listener through the wake of its momentum, a tone sustained beyond its expected breaking point, or a narrative lyric portraying some uneased conflict—anything that causes a shift in the song. These disparities—like a thermodynamic imbalance between hot and cold—create energy that propels the music forward, resulting in a listener’s invited agony as they expect something to happen in the piece and then have those expectations skillfully denied or satisfied. These musical principles of tension and release, of course, are analogous to the notion in fiction of conflict and catharsis, the idea that we read a story because there is something compelling that we wish or expect to happen next. The best writing (like the best music) engages its reader by generating tension—in the drama of a scene, the unexpected collision of metaphor, the balancing act between phrase and line break—and then releasing that tension at key moments to optimize emotional depth. It’s a new—and useful—way of thinking about an old problem, and one I never would have encountered if I’d stayed all cooped up in an office.
And of course, there are all of the magnificent experiences, stories, and people you encounter while out of your shell. I’ve been singing with a barbershop chorus for about two years now, and the variety of people and perspectives I’ve encountered have already begun to infiltrate my fiction.
I think it’s only fair to mention, here at the end, that this is a personal axe for me to grind. I started graduate school at twenty-two (probably too young, in retrospect) and one of my greatest challenges dealt with discovering what to write, as opposed to how to write. Some of my classmate’s assessments, in the first few years, were that I wrote some lovely but unseasoned stories, ones which failed not because of lack of skill, but lack of perspective. I bristled at these comments—they were true—but once I expanded who I was and what I did, I feel that my writing improved. Such activities work best, incidentally, if you make them a deliberate part of your creative process, rather than a distraction from that process. With appropriate scheduling and moderation, outside activities can enhance your writing, rather than restrict it.
Alan Ackmann, Relief's Fiction Editor, received his MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and teaches at DePaul University.His work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Clackamas Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Ontario Review, and elsewhere. He is a former fiction editor of The Evansville Review and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2007 Sewanee Writer’s Conference.Find out more at www.alanackmann.com.
The Battle of the Buck
On July 3rd, Kevin Lucia posted a blog about 