The editors of Minnesota's Concordia College's Ascent have created a bit of a monster. A print magazine for the first 34 years of its life, it went online-only in 2009. Since then, there have been no issues as such. Freed from the confines of paper and ink, Ascent has become a single, rolling mega-magazine that just grows and grows. Load up the home page and you're confronted by three monolithic lists of names: the 1974-2009 print contributors, the post-2009 online contributors and all the countries in which Ascent is read— it's like a hint as to what's in store.
Ascent deals in it all: essays, fiction, poetry and photography. There are no submission guidelines, at least none that I could find. New work appears on the site every couple of months, but not in a packaged or thematically interlinked sort of way. At one point, I thought I detected a religious vein running through some of the stories, which I triumphantly attributed to Concordia's being a Christian college, but now I reckon that was just thematic straw-grasping on my part. For sure, there are some religious/spiritual themes in evidence – in David Ebenbach's "The Match," a failed matchmaker worries that she's blown her chances of getting into heaven, while in Beverly Burch's "The Plum-Coloured Beach," a woman communes with ghosts as she lies dying in a hospital bed – but not to such a degree that you could say that's probably what the editors were on the lookout for. A lot of the essays are about past events in the authors' lives and felt to me more like creative nonfiction pieces than essays, insofar as there's a meaningful difference between the two.
Contributor-wise, it's a mixed bag. Most of those whose bios I read were teachers of various types, but there were a couple of MFA students and even a psychotherapist, all with a decent roster of writing credits to their names. The site's design and layout is pretty stripped-back, but aside from that the editors are taking full advantage of the freedom that being web-based affords. As already mentioned, there are no issues. Nor is there much in the way of restrictions when it comes to the pieces themselves. There are no word limits for each category and you can apparently submit as many pieces as you want (the maximum document-size you can upload in one go is 500kb which is what, 250 pages?). It's almost as if a decision was made, around the time of the print/digital-switchover, to get the magazine's form to authentically reflect its name. Visiting the Ascent site kind of is like pitching up in front of something huge and imposing. Start with the most recent pieces and work backwards until you get tired; you won't be anywhere near the beginning.
Cool though the unboundedness is in theory, Ascent's sheer size and lack of formal or thematic structure is, I think, its main drawback. It starts to seem a little flabby and aimless after a while. What's more, the looseness of the operation has a trickle-down effect on the work. The essays and stories are between 4,000 and 6,000 words on average and a lot of them don't feel like they really have to be. The essays tend to feature meandering asides that are more self-indulgent than charming and the stories are invariably weighed down by runs of sentences that either furnish extraneous-seeming information or are needlessly reiterative. Which is not to say that these long pieces are no good. Grace Bauer's essay "Fellow Travellers," for example, is deeply absorbing and manages to be both a nostalgic meditation on road-tripping and absent friends and a condensed history of 1970s America. But in the main, even the bounciest, most readable of the pieces I read had sluggish parts and I found myself thinking that the editors ought to have imposed word limits or been more diligent; either way, the contributors should have been encouraged to go back over their pieces with a view to paring them down to their essential elements.
Unsurprisingly, then, it's the poetry and photography that really stand out. Both display the controlled elegance often missing from the prose pieces. Particularly fine are Thom Caraway's "The Man in the Blue House" and Sharon Chmielarz's "I Won't Turn on the Radio," in which the poet writes of rain's
artful way in bed
of leading the listener
to sleep's side
The photos, which are of everything from crosstown traffic to temples, are consistently dazzling and well-suited to the whole infinite-scroll thing that Ascent's got going on.
So, despite being in need of some reigning-in, Ascent's size and eclectic range of content mean that you're bound to find something engaging in there. It's definitely worth a look. Just know at the outset that you're in for a bit of a trawl, but one you'll almost certainly find rewarding.