More interesting than any of this, perhaps, is the way we go about producing the zine, and some of the underlying philosophies behind it, and I can maybe extend these philosophies to explore some issues related to contemporary publishing and alternatives to it. If nothing else, you can come get a copy when I’m done talking. So forthwith is one zine’s story.

This is going to be something of a collaborative presentation in that no one else in the core group of people who produce L’Bourgeoizine could come with me today, but a few people sent statements about the zine that they’d like me to read. So first, from our website’s homepage, a bit of history:

(formerly known as) L'bourgeoizine, a free, nonprofit literary arts zine, was founded in 2001 by some Illinois State University students. It has since grown into an international community of 300 million people. The primary philosophies underlying the zine include the beliefs that all literatures are rooted in particular places and times; that artists and readers work together to produce meaningful artworks; that people should create their own art; and that communities should work to minimize the costs involved in both the production of art and the making of that art available to those who want it. The zine has from the start supported copylefting, and every issue may be freely reproduced and distributed (we ask, however, that you respect individual artists’ wishes, if stated).

Since then, we’ve published writers like Curtis White, Jeff VanderMeer, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Nick Piombino, Jean Smith from the band Mecca Normal, Brian Sendelbach, who does the Smell of Steve comic strip, Gabriel Gudding, kari edwards, Philip Nel, Catherine Daly, and Lucia Getsi, among many others. We’ve also published twelve-year-olds. We knew some of these people, but others we approached and simply asked nicely, and they complied.

A good place to start the larger discussion is with Joseph Thomas, who was originally supposed to present with me but couldn’t make it here today, for which he sends his apologies and regards. He wrote up Nineteen Statements Pertaining to the Zine Formerly Known as L’Bourgeoizine, some of which I’ve amended slightly, some of which aren’t quite germane to this presentation but are sort of interesting anyway:

Some of these points bear elaboration from yrstruly. First, the zine really is free. We printed and then hand-collated four hundred copies of the new issue, the bill for which came to just under seven hundred dollars. While that doesn’t sound like much, bear in mind that almost all of the people putting the zine together are college students, and some of our budgets are such that we’ve eaten nothing but ramen since the Clinton administration. We all pitched in; we asked professors, friends, and family for donations, many of whom were very generous; and Joseph and his wife, Carmen, were able to contribute a sizable donation when Joseph was hired to teach at California State University, Northridge. These are standard DIY approaches. Keeping the journal free also encourages careful circulation—we want to encourage community-building by passing copies hand-to-hand, which we think gives more weight to the physical artifact than if we left a stack inside the foyer of the local record store or sold them outright. We’re not elitist; we’ll give a copy to anyone who asks. But we want to say Hi, too.

On a similar note, Adam Jones, one of the zine’s founders (I came onboard with the second issue), has this to say:

My friend Justin got me hooked on Brian Sendelbach’s “Smell of Steve, Inc.” comic strips when he pointed them out in a weekly Philadelphia paper. I got some of my friends hooked on them when I pointed them out in the Seattle Stranger and the Portland Mercury. [L’Bourgeoizine] is another way to help bring those comics to people who might otherwise not see them. The zine also allows the comics to appear in a different context than “weekly comic”: here they are, perhaps more directly recognizable as literature. They form resonances with poems and stories unique to that particular issue.

So the zine is a way to share works with one another—to bring attention to works that we feel need attention—and to build a community around those works. For instance, I think that many of the editors now have a common appreciation for Harry Mathews that wouldn't have existed without the zine. Some of us would have had individual appreciations, but there now exists something more communal. [True enough.] The zine helps bring attention to established artists like Brian Sendelbach as well as to the son of a classmate who’s written his first short story. The community we build shares a literature, and, more importantly, shares the activity of building the zine.

In the future, I hope that we can continue to attract new people to our community from all different backgrounds.

There’s also that matter of doing something as inexpensively and no-frills as possible. Let me compare our little zine to McSweeney’s, which I understand takes all kinds of chutzpah on my part, but I think it’s important. I don’t want to knock the McSweeney’s crew just because they’re the current half-ton gorillas of the literary world, plus both the McSweeney’s journal itself and McSweeney’s Books have produced some excellent literature, and their 826 Valencia project, which teaches writing skills to kids and teens, deserves admiration and support. But if you believe that one of the purposes of literature is to communicate, then the McSweeney’s people sometimes seem oddly uninterested in communication. Most of their print issues are instant collector’s items, going out of print nearly as soon as they’re released. They reprinted their first three issues, the original printings of which usually sell for well over a hundred dollars each on eBay, but, perhaps ironically, the reprints sold out as well and have themselves become pricey collector’s items. The press’s most recent offering is William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3,300-page, seventeen-years-in-the-making treatise on violence that by most accounts is an important, enduring contribution to its field. Yet while McSweeney’s deserves credit for publishing it, they released it in a limited edition of 3,500 copies that retails for $120.00. They’ve inherently limited the audience for a significant work of scholarship and turned the physical product into a fetish object. I’m not entirely comfortable with that.

L’Bourgeoizine, by chutzpah-heavy contrast, is printed on twenty-pound stock, it’s easily recyclable, and we encourage the zine’s distribution by copylefting it. Copylefting is a dumb word, but it’s a remarkable concept: information should be made as freely available as possible to as many people as want to receive it. Many of us wish that this concept weren’t so remarkable; we wish that it were more commonplace. Realities of the capitalist market being what they are, though, we’d like to offer an alternative. We encourage people to pop the staples on their copies of each issue and make more copies to distribute on their own, if they’re so inclined, or to get a copy of the CD issues and burn all the copies they want. I have a few copies of the seventh issue here, but the first six issues are, for want of a term that applies to our situation, out of print—we have no more copies to give away, and at the moment we don’t have the money to reprint them ourselves. Several readers have indeed made copies on their own, for which we’re very grateful. Admittedly, these generous readers are friends of ours, but the point is that we encourage everybody to distribute the zine as widely as they so desire, as long as they keep our names on it and keep it free.

There’s also this, and it’s clichéd but it bears repeating. The DIY approach allows control over the product beyond that afforded even most successful writers. I don’t want to deny the importance of a good editor, or at least a set or two of outside eyes to critique a piece of writing in progress, but the kind of self-publishing we do lets a writer or group of writers remain nearly independent of the corporate ogre. Of course there are costs involved to the authors as well. For most of us, writing isn’t what we do to make a living, and many of us don’t teach or hold other positions directly related to our writerly output. While we’re as deadly serious about our writing as anyone, for many of us writing is, to reduce it to an utterly demoniac term, a sort of hobby. But increasingly, I see little difference between a desktop-published zine and the latest slew of releases from Henry Holt and Co., and I’ll enjoy what’s in most zines more than I will nearly anything Holt publishes. Four hundred copies of a literary journal is on the low end of the average, but it’s not unheard of; thus our little photocopied thing has as wide a circulation and readership as some slick glossy perfect-bound things that sell for twenty bucks and mostly sit on university library shelves.

But this is where the concept of the “glut” referred to in this presentation’s title begins to come in. One of the reasons why I’m often at odds with some of the other people who work on the zine is because I take a last-days-of-Pompeii approach to what we do. Put simply, as commentators from Gabriel Zaid to Kurt Vonnegut have pointed out, there’s more good literature being produced than anyone can afford to publish and that anyone has time to read. I will die, literally, before I’m able to read everything that I want to read, and I imagine that the same is true of many of the folks listening to me right now. As Zaid writes at the beginning of his recent So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, “The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially. If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.” According to his figures, which he extrapolates from the Unesco Statistical Yearbook 1999, the world population has increased 1.8 percent per annum since the invention of television, while book publication has increased 2.8 percent. And these figures include only books; factor in newspapers, magazines, zines, pamphlets, Dr. Brommer’s labels, Chick tracts, and the vast array of online material, and the amount of written stuff out there is truly staggering, with tons more on the way every minute. The literary tsunami is an awesome, terrifying, and kind of hideous thing for reader and writer alike.

At Illinois State University I have a graduate assistantship, but I don’t teach: I’m the book review editor for a couple of literary journals and the acquisitions editor for Dalkey Archive Press, a well-regarded nonprofit publisher specializing in innovative fiction. The former position means that I’m sent dozens of books each week, and the latter position simply means that I spend a lot of time reading unsolicited manuscripts. Zaid, quoting the Xlibris company (which produces self-published books), claims that for every book published in the United States, nine remain unpublished. Based on my experience at Dalkey, I can tell you that that number is the lowball figure. On average, Dalkey receives one or two unsolicited manuscripts each day, and in twenty years they’ve published only a handful—no one can remember the exact number, but ten sounds about right. Fewer than twenty, in any case. I imagine that most presses would offer similar numbers. And again, this covers only books; stories, essays, poems, and the like offer similar numbers. For example, according to Zaid, Poetry magazine receives over ninety thousand submissions each year. Recent issues contain about thirty poems. Thus one poem in two hundred and fifty makes the cut. As an aspiring writer, it’s numbers like these that make me want to go back to being just a reader; and as a reader, it’s numbers like these that make me want to watch more TV.

If these numbers scare or depress you, it’s understandable. But in the introduction to the new issue of L’Bourgeoizine, which introduction appears halfway through the issue, and sideways—one of those conflicting philosophies I mentioned earlier regarded the layout of the new issue—Dr. Robert L. McLaughlin, a professor at Illinois State University, discusses this abundance in positive terms:

I’ve always believed that the health of a democracy is based in the multiplicity of discourses available for use in it—the more, the better. In the face of the right-wing appropriation of public discourse, it’s the duty of art, I think, to offer alternative discourses—languages and ways of looking at the world that can be thrown up against monologism, that can reveal the dialogue over possible realities that totalitarianism tried to repress. And thus, for me, the value of a publication like this one. Not only do the pieces contained here offer alternative discourses and ways of seeing the world, but they do so in a particularly discourse-savvy way, foregrounding the way language constructs reality and making us as readers more aware of the language-based nature of our social world.

So as Dr. McLaughlin suggests, contemporary polyglossia, despite its overwhelming aspects, is, perhaps paradoxically, a Good Thing. I think what publishing like ours offers is some small way to negotiate an overwhelming amount of reading material. A zine like ours is a safe haven in many ways: this is a photocopied little scribble journal, so the pressure on younger writers is off—there aren’t any real editorial constraints or anything; they simply give us what they’re going to give us, and we take it, print it, and people read it. And sometimes, because we run most contributors’ contact information, the contributors get feedback on their stuff. The fact that established writers appear alongside newbies is empowering for the younger writers and kind of fun for the more developed writers. Our zine is a community, and if you feel comfortable in that community, you’ll feel comfortable with what part of the literary landscape we present to you, and we invite you to contribute to that presentation as well. Our zine does indeed add to the overall literary tsunami, it’s true, but at the same time we give order to one small part of it. We comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, in Viktor Shklovsky’s words.

For much of the eighties and nineties, Illinois State University’s English department was a nationally and even internationally known center for writing and publishing. FC2’s National Fiction Competition was a joint project with ISU, after which FC2 began production work through the university. In 1990 the English department’s Publications Unit was established to house FC2, the poetry journal Spoon River, and Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse. Dalkey, which was already making a name for itself as one of the best publishers of innovative fiction in the country, followed in 1991. In 1993 a guy by the name of David Foster Wallace was hired; in 1995 American Book Review, published by Ronald Sukenick and Charles Harris and with an editorial board that reads like a Who’s Who of modern literature, was included within the Unit for Contemporary Literature. ISU’s English department was pretty amazing.

What I didn’t know when I started at ISU as an undergrad in 1998 was that I was seeing the department’s glory days, as far as innovative literature goes. In the past several years, due to budgetary, personal, and sundry other reasons, the department’s lost most of FC2 and Exquisite Corpse, David Foster Wallace moved to California when ISU wouldn’t counter Pomona College’s offer, Dalkey is still more or less on campus but now operates through the university’s library, not the English department, the publishing program went belly-up because of a lack of funding and organization, and the Unit for Contemporary Literature is closing, putting American Book Review in serious jeopardy. As far as ISU’s reputation for innovative literature goes, the Unit’s closing isn’t quite the final nail in the coffin, but only because the lid’s on pretty tight already.

So it says a lot about both the state of ISU’s English department and L’Bourgeoizine itself that our little photocopied thing is now one of the program’s most impressive features. It would be trite to say that art will always find a way, or something, because the zine isn’t really associated with the university; it was started there, and most of the core group either graduated from the program or continue to attend school there, but by no means is it a department publication, and we definitely receive no money from the school. But we’re the department’s de facto literary publication, anyway, besides the fine undergrad journal Druid’s Cave. Our zine should be one voice in a localized glut instead of one of the only voices, but it’s not. And this, however good the zine might be, is to everyone’s detriment.

As for the future of the zine, Adam Jones has one suggestion:

I want to see the zine explore different formats. Ideas we're discussing include:

1.      An issue in response to the closing of ISU's Unit for Contemporary Literature. The zine, if nothing else, can help explain to more people what the Unit was, why it was closed, and what consequently has been lost.

2.      A group of chapbooks, so we can focus attention on longer works or one or two artists at a time.

3.      An issue that's a series of pamphlets.

4.      A series of broadsheets.

5.      Performance issues, where the issue is a reading or other kind of public performance.

6.      Some kind of public display issue, as in posters.

7.      Another CD music issue.

8.      A video CD issue.

I want to explore what can be considered an issue, and what can be considered a submission. I find myself moving more toward found art: works by friends and students, posters and photos that I see. Reprinting works from decades old zines and magazines that I fear no one will otherwise see: there's a prose poem by Daniel Castelaz on the back cover on an issue of Salt Lick Magazine (Volume III—Numbers 3 & 4, 1982) that I want to be able to reprint in a future issue. And a friend from Normal made a great one-issue zine, Garbage Digger, that collected kids’ drawings and writings that were thrown out at a local grade school. I’d like to reprint that.

So. That brings me to the end of my presentation. Here’s the beginning of another: If you want a copy of the current issue, come see me, and I’ll give you one. It’ll be awkward, you coming up to a stranger to ask for something and me being a bashful sociopath, but we’ll get over it pretty quickly, and then you’ll have a free zine that we think is pretty nifty and that we hope you will to. And if you’re so inclined, feel free to give us a couple of bucks or something—I pledge my word that it’ll go straight into the Bourgeoizine checking account as soon as I get back home. Maybe think about contributing something for a future issue, since there are a lot of talented people present here who we’d love to have in our xeroxed thing. And finally, of course, think about doing your own. In 1976 a British punk zine, either Sniffin’ Glue or Sideburns, there’s some dispute, ran a now-famous diagram, one of the most exciting, urgent things I’ve ever seen. It depicted guitar tabulature, with the captions “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” I now offer something similar: Here is a word. Here is another. Here are a million more. Now go publish something.

I thank you for your time.

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