Inside Fringe Magazine

Tell us a bit about the origins of Fringe. How did it differ from other Internet litmags at the beginning, and does it still differ in the same ways? How much of your original manifesto still holds true, especially as regards the "state of modern literature"?

Well, there weren't too many online magazines around when Fringe was founded -- there are definitely more around now -- but in general, I think that what differentiated and still differentiates Fringe from other literary magazines is its strong aesthetic aim, to publish experimental and political writing by a diverse group of writers, both new and established. I think Fringe, then and now, has also been unique in our whole-hearted embrace of the Internet medium, which is reflected in our editorial organization and also in our web design; we wanted to look like more than a dead-tree journal put online, and I think our new website, which publishes work weekly, and encourages readers to engage with our site through comments and cross links accomplishes that.

So far as our original manifesto goes, I think that it still does hold true in a broad sense. The media industry in America is in trouble, and the loss of smaller local bookstores means that a small set of powerful people driven by marketing concerns (i.e. the folks at the chains) are controlling what books are available at your local stores, and by extension, the types of books that you are exposed to. Fortunately, there is a strong tradition of small presses and magazines in this country, and in the years since Fringe began it's gotten even stronger.

I love the world of small literary magazines, but sometimes it feels too serious and high-brow to me, bound by the idea of what literature ought to be, bound up in form and format. One thing that I like about Fringe is that we have a place for some of the wilder stuff that doesn't fit into more conventional categories, like flash poetry or digital installations, one of which will appear in our upcoming Working issue.

These experiments excite me because I think they have the
capacity to attract new audiences for literature.

The Internet certainly fosters experimentation in a lot of ways. As little print mags continue to fold, and those with enough funding make the switch from paper to screen, how will Fringe stay ahead of the pack? Do you foresee the need for any stylistic changes? Will you have to continue to grow more and more experimental and political as the number of competitors increases?

The name of the game with small journals seems to be endurance, figuring out how to run the back end of the journal in a way that makes it sustainable for the editors, and finding new staff to help sustain the magazine. As more journals make the move to online journals, the main advantage that Fringe has is that we've been working on Internet deadlines for some time and we have our staff trained on things like SEO and how to work our CMS.

In other words, we've figured out what we're doing just in terms of the technology and building site traffic through advertising and web design. In terms of stylistic changes, I'm pretty happy with the structure and layout of the site right now, although I suppose it's possible that we will update its look and feel as our tastes evolve.

Will we grow more experimental? Well, we could re-design the site for each issue, stage literary happenings, and shoot laser beams directly into the eyes of our readers, but frankly that'd take a LOT of money for designers and way more time than people with day jobs have. So, in some sense, no.

On the other hand, as the magazine endures and as people get to know us, I think we'll continue to grow in terms of what we publish and how we edit. I don't really focus on the fact that we're competing against other literary journals -- my goal is to make Fringe the best and most enduring magazine that it can be, not just in terms of what we publish, but in terms of the satisfaction that readers, writers, and editors get out of this venture.

I do this because I find it satisfying, and I will continue to do it as long as it's satisfying, and I think that our staff feels the same way.

Fringe is a not-for-profit publication. What went into this decision in the beginning? In what ways does this free you, and in what ways does it bind you?

Originally, we incorporated Fringe to absolve our editors of legal liability on an individual basis. We applied and obtained nonprofit status because our business model doesn't rely on sales, and we wanted to be able to solicit donations and give something tangible back to the people supporting us -- a tax write-off. We also thought that obtaining nonprofit status would give us permanence. Because of the transitory nature of the Internet, we wanted to give our contributors some sort of guarantee that the organization and therefore their publication credit would persist. Finally, having nonprofit status means that you can apply for grants. The editors have always paid for Fringe out of pocket through monthly dues, and one of the things we'd like to do is to get a grant that would both make the magazine free for us and give us enough funds to afford to pay our brilliant writers, who deserve recompense for their excellent work.

We're often imagining the cool things we could do if we had money, like quit our day jobs to work on Fringe full-time, or collaborate with schools or other nonprofits to spread our love of writing and reading, but it hasn't happened yet.

Mostly, being a nonprofit has bound us. We can't sell merchandise without having to fill out a lot of additional tax forms, for example, and we have to pay a substantial amount of our yearly budget into legal fees in order to keep our status as a 501c3. As it turns out, finding and applying for suitable grants takes a substantial amount of time and
effort, and right now we don't have the personnel to spare for that job.

On the other hand, because we're not-for-profit and because we're small-scale, we have the freedom to publish whatever we want whenever we want, without too much regard for the laws of
economics.

So you're saying that your Assistant Fiction Editor shouldn't expect a raise anytime soon?
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What kind of writing merits a second read from Fringe? What advice can you give writers to make their work stand out to the Fringe editors? If a writer wants to read a piece we've published that exemplifies what we're looking for, where would you steer him/her?

As for writing that merits a second read from Fringe, an editor can probably answer that question better than I can, mainly because I don't do a lot of reading of unsolicited manuscripts these days. In general, I'd say that we're always looking for that un-defined Fringiness, work that is well-written and compelling, but that has a twist, has something
outrageous about it, that really pegs the experimental and political aspect of our manifesto. It's not easy to describe what, precisely that is.

In fact, a quote by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart comes to mind. When asked what constituted hard-core pornography he answered "I know it when I see it." Although the writing that appears in Fringe has little else in common with pornography, that phrase really nails it. When the political or experimental sensibility is there, along with solid writing, that's what makes the ideal Fringe piece, and we all know it when we see it.

In terms of some pieces that really nail our mission, here are some of my favorites: Art: Anita Wexler  or David Barnes, Fiction: Rosalie Morales Kearns' The Revolutionary's Wife  or Brett Alan Smith's Needle! Now! Broken!, Nonfiction: Jon Chopan's The Oldest Guilt I Know, or Ethan Bernard's Forget The Birds, Poetry: Jehanne Dubrow's Fragments from a nonexistent Yiddish Poet  or Pattabi Seshadri, (de)Classified: Jennifer Coke's Blue Black Berriesor Thea Zimmer and Joey Bargsten's Cake It,
Criticism: Heather MacNeill's essay on OuLipo or Molly Gaudry's essay on the aesthetics of environmentalism.

In terms of complete issues that really nail our aesthetic, I'd probably point potential submitters to our yearly theme issues -- Feminism, Ethnos, Environment, and now, Working.