Skip to main contentDoes Portland really have more bookstores per capita than any other American city? The statistics to substantiate this are impossible to locate, and no fewer than four other cities (Seattle; Cambridge, Mass.; Washington, D.C.; and Charlottesville, Va.) make the same claim, suggesting that our literary pride could well be urban myth. But Portland might be able to make a case for being a center of small-press publishing, if someone would care to do the research.
Tin House, Quiet Lion, Future Tense, Glimmer Train and Plazm are as important features of the city's literary scene as Chloe Eudaly's Reading Frenzy and Powell's Small Press Section (which publishes its own newsletter, Umbrella). Recently there's been a new eruption of publications on the street. Camela Raymond's controversy-igniting The Organ has rattled the art scene (see "Getting a Grip on the Organ," WW, Nov. 27, 2002), while Terry Ross has quietly unleashed a monthly Black Lamb onto the public (a conflict of interest keeps me from reporting further on this publication). These are joined by Pinball Publishing's expansion of its eye-rhyme journal and new foray into book publishing, as well as by the appearance of two new literary magazines, March and Gobshite Quarterly.
The brainchild of Adam Van Loon, March Magazine is a well-designed glossy that offers fiction, criticism and literary journalism. "I want to create a magazine that will be an Atlantic Monthly for 18- to 35-year-olds," Van Loon says, and by the look of the initial issue he's close to achieving just that. The New York University graduate has been plotting his move into magazine publishing for some time. "I was an English major who preferred magazines to books," Van Loon says, laughing. "This is where my interest lies."
Driving across the country in 2000, Van Loon struck upon Portland and found a city of serious readers and progressive politics. The city's sensibilities matched his own, plus, "if I tried to start this in New York, it would be difficult to get noticed," Van Loon reasons.
Released this week, the first issue of March is a free promotional issue to alert readers to its existence. It's an impressive debut. Besides a compelling essay by Van Loon on the uneasy relationship between Evel Knievel and his hometown of Butte, Mont., there are new pieces supplied by Ted Rall and Neal Pollack, among others. "March will be all original work," says Van Loon, who found soliciting material from such established writers as Rall and Pollack unsettlingly easy. "They liked my concept."
March will begin life as a quarterly, with the hope of expanding to a monthly by 2005. Though its distribution is still being worked out, the second issue should be hitting newsstands in August.
Gobshite Quarterly shares a number of things in common with March. The publishing offices of both magazines are in the same building on Northwest Lovejoy Street, it's a quarterly (also premiering this week, on Groundhog Day--the second issue is due on Cinco de Mayo), and it has managed to entice work from established writers. But there similarities cease.
Editor R.V. Branham, former editor of the well-respected-but-now-defunct Paperback Jukebox, has created the antithesis to a glossy with a 10-by-10-inch, bookstock-quality and soy-inked journal. Gobshite is also international in scope, having reeled in pieces by the Lebanese writer Venus Khoury-Ghata, Czech Ivan Klima, Like Water for Chocolate author Laura Esquivel and the Anglo-American Frederic Raphael. "Negotiations with foreign agents takes sheer persistence," says Branham, "but it's paid off."
An interesting feature of Gobshite is that the work appears in its original language with en face translations. "I don't know of another journal that does this consistently," says Branham, and it does make for an interesting design, with Czech colliding with French, Spanish and English.
This bower of Babel, however, is mindful of the local literary scene. Other than Oregon translators Norma Comrada and T. Warburton y Bajo (Gobshite's assistant editor), there's work by poet Doug Spangle (who, it so happens, is a marvelous German translator), an interview with Chuck Palahniuk, and republication of Jon Carr's short story "Floozy," which was at the center of Willamette Week's literary-contest controversy last year.
"We're negotiating with Vaclav Havel's agent for a future piece," says Branham, "but I'm also interested in new work. I'll happily consider anything that comes over the transom as long as it isn't sub-Stephen King." Unlike March, Gobshite already has distribution lined up in Canada, Australia and Europe.
It's the magazine that never was. Pinball Publishing was originally set up to publish Pinball Magazine. But the two founders, Laura Brian and Austin Whipple, became so intrigued by the art of printing that they put Pinball aside to master printing, "out of necessity and enjoyment," according to Brian.
In their airy print-cum-bookshop on Southeast Clinton Street, the two partners, who have known each other since high school in Southern Oregon, chat about their future plans surrounded by some of their antique presses. "A future Pinball Magazine isn't out of the question," says Brian, a Fulbright Scholar who has lived and studied in Egypt and Syria. "But our printing business takes time." Yet the two have just released the fourth issue of eye-rhyme, a biannual journal of experimental literature, and have released their first book, Copia, a collection of poems by Casey Kwang.
Like Gobshite, eye-rhyme is interested in the translation of work otherwise unavailable in America. The current issue features two extraordinary Ecuadorean poets, Aleyda Quevedo Rojas and Edwin Madrid, both of whose work is translated by Portland poet Carlos Reyes. Reyes' own work appears here as well, along with pieces by Australian Fiona Hile, theater director/poet B.Z. Niditch and Kwang. "We just missed Casey in high school," says Whipple of Kwang. "We were a few years behind him, but didn't know him."
The designed-by-hand craftsmanship of Pinball's work distinguishes it from other Portland publishers. "We'd like to move toward more graphic elements in the books," says Whipple. "Still," adds Brian, "I'm glad that our equipment poses limitations, as it challenges and expands our ideas." Ideas seem to be the last thing Pinball should worry about.
March Magazine
$4.95, www.marchmagazine.com
Gobshite Quarterly
$5, www.gobshitequarterly.com
eye-rhyme
$10, www.eye-rhyme.com
Copia
By Casey Kwang
(Pinball Publishing, 81 pages, $14)
Pinball Publishing, 2621 SE Clinton St., www.pinball-publishing.com
WWeek 2015