Flipping the bird at answers

This idea of the ‘anthology dream’ – of publishing new writers alongside emerging writers in a coherent context – is more what I’m talking about when I ask about the Brow. Wet Ink does it too, and I understand at the Brow you avoid government funding because you want to publish smaller Australian writers alongside bigger international writers. Why do you think such a policy is important for a magazine and its community of contributors and readers?
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No, the reason I’ve never applied to get a grant for the Brow is just that we’re able to do without one. Grants are a great thing for plenty of arts projects that are just starting out, but my fear was that if you start out with that money built into your structure, it’s probably going to be difficult to imagine living without it. Wet Ink, Phillip Edmonds told me, aims to get itself independent of grants at some point, but most magazines that are grant-dependent, which means most magazines could potentially just fall apart if the grants ever went away, and they seem not to have any backups thought through at all.

We are pretty successful for a literary journal, but that’s still not very successful, and I just don’t see how a grant would change that. There’s lots of complex economic theory I don’t understand around protectionism policies, but for me, if I want more people to read the work that I publish, it’s tough to see how pumping money into the form I’ve already established is going to do that. I’m more interested in trialling some substantive changes, which I can do on the money we already make; and if that leads naturally to earning more money for the magazine, then I’ll know that people actually want the product. The Brow is switching to a bimonthly magazine format for 2011, as a six-issue experiment. Since the Brow’s accounts happen in a tiny book on my desk that I make stupid notes in, it’s a very easy decision to make, and just as easy to put into effect. And if it turns out to be less fun to make than a literary journal—which is a form I do love—and doesn’t impact sales, then there isn’t any obstacle to just… switching back.

Lots of very good and interesting literary journals, ones that are under good editorship, are at least partly dependent on grants, and I wonder what would happen if you took the grants away: would you see those magazines disappearing, or would you see them figuring out better ways to get people to read interesting work? It won’t ever happen, and it might be terrible. But nobody knows.
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You’re online presence is not huge: you’re hard to Google. But I’ve heard about your RSS feed. Who’s you’re favourite blogger? Hey, why don’t you blog?
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My favourite blogger is this guy named Sean T Collins, who writes a blog called All Too Flat. It’s hard to recommend to anybody, though, for the exact reason that I love it so much: it seems custom-built to satisfy all my most particular interests, which I never thought a good and regular and thorough writer would ever be around to just indulge. Like, bad 90s superhero comics from the speculator boom, and torture law, and analysis of Stephen King books. And tonnes of really good links to new alternative minicomics; I’d have never found lots of the artists I publish in the Brow without him. I like this guy’s writing, and his tastes, so much that I committed to watching all of Battlestar Galactica—and have now committed to reading all of George R.R. Martin—just so I can skip fewer of his posts. People are really not lying when they say the internet is good for satisfying niches.

I used to blog, when I was about nineteen, and all my friends had Livejournals. A couple of them now have “ransom editions” of my blog saved on their computer, since it was dubbed Honesty Hour, meaning it was a public forum for me to passively shit-talk people who pissed me off when I was nineteen. I am recently having to read over this for a project I’m working on, and it’s totally excruciating and horrible. The friends who have my blog archived on their computers are going to have to be friends for life. I will probably blog one day if it becomes clear that I have to blog to sell more magazines or sell a book.
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What’s the project you’re working on? From what I can deduce from your Facebook profile, you’re answering these questions from a self-made writer’s retreat in the archipelagos somewhere. This must be serious – is there a full-length manuscript in the future?
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Yeah! I’m working on a book of nonfiction that asks the question, ‘How do people learn to be adults?’ It’s equal parts research into serious stuff; research into stupid stuff, like America’s Next Top Model; profiles, sometimes of people who don’t know they’re being profiled; and, since I happen to have done a lot of gross and regrettable things in my life, a pretty exhaustive catalogue of those.

It’s in a weird phase right now because I’m starting to write fewer chapters that can easily be taken as essays by themselves—which is what the book started out as, before I realised I was writing a book—and I’m starting to write more chapters that are kind of unwieldy and only work well as parts of a bigger project. Which is I guess why it’s a book. But I’ve never written a long thing of nonfiction before, so it feels very strange to slowly commit to it.

I know this one amazing writer who has been collected in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, and Best Australian Poetry, a trifecta, and I once asked her how she managed to write in all three genres. She looked at me like she was confused by the question, and said, “Well, they all just work from the same muscle, don’t they?” It’s probably true that they do, but I didn’t know I could even write decent nonfiction until a few months ago.

The reporting voice, especially, is fun as hell. Like I’m writing a fucktonne of sentences that start with “Recently,” for example. “Recently, my friends and I were ‘summering’ in Barcelona.” The reporting voice is full of these wonderful tricks that smooth out and make everything feel objective. It’s relaxing.
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And where could readers keep in touch to find out more about your writing and any projects you get involved with?
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www.theliftedbrow.com
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