This past summer I attended a reading in Seattle of two writers I know from publishing in online journals, Kathy Fish and Claudia Smith.

I had first heard of Claudia Smith when we both appeared in an issue of The Mississippi Review online a couple of years ago.

I first started publishing online in the late 1990s.

The world of small-press, Web-friendly writers was very small at that point, although around this time, many magazines began to communicate primarily with contributors using e-mail.

Although online literary magazines have always been more accessible than print ones, it wasn’t until after 2001 that the quantity and quality began to dwarf print magazines.

For the longest time, though, writers regarded the world of print magazines as somehow more real (more legit) than Web journals.

A volume arrives in the mailbox smelling of ink and paper.

The volume has heft.

—

Before I published any stories at all, I volunteered to work on a magazine in Seattle in the early 1990s that was published by an erratic woman in Fremont, a semi-bohemian neighborhood then known best for a Soviet-era missile attached to a thrift shop and a biker bar named the Buckaroo. Although I read submissions, the majority of the magazine was made from the writing of the woman’s friends in Seattle. In addition to sending work to each other’s journals, many of these writers published their own work. Not only did they occasionally appear bound together, but because of their closeness, they were working together.

The pile of submissions to her journal smelled. One story had been submitted by a pipe smoker in Bellingham. The fragrant sheets had been typed on a typewriter rather than printed. The type hammers left impressions on the paper. Every story and poem that was accepted for publication had to be retyped into MS Word 4.0, printed, edited on paper, and corrected. The editor took the novel step of having the entire book digitally typeset (that was the phrase used) in a page composition program. We took the laser printed sheet to a copy mart. The cost of production seemed excessive to me. We spent a long afternoon eating pizza and folding and binding the journals. After it was finished, we drove around Seattle to bookstores and newsagents and gave them five or ten copies on commissions. A week later, we drove around Seattle again to staple posters on telephone poles and community bulletin boards. All of this physical activity culminated in readings where the contributors congregated in a room to listen to each other read their submissions and then afterward eat, gossip, and kibitz about grants and writing workshops.

Literary magazines could be found, as they are still found at independent bookstores and local newsagents. But these were the only locations. Yahoo! much less Google did not exist. At this time, a journal seemed an intensely physical object, even though the act of writing itself was something that happened out of sight. A magazine was a result of physical closeness. Even though these magazines included contributions from elsewhere, the limits of community in the 1990s dictated a preference for physical nearness. Most of the magazines in Seattle in the 1990s did include a much larger number, it seemed to me, of contributors who claimed Seattle, Tacoma, or Portland as their home than they did Boston, Scranton, or Charleston.

In the late 1990s, though, Frederick Barthleme, the long time editor of The Mississippi Review, was interviewed in the Atlantic Unbound about his experiments with his magazine. Barthleme said:

My sense is that the Web is a gun. It’s all potential, what we do with it; it’s a device, a system, a ‘site’ in the linguistic sense, a prospect. How we use it over the next decade or two will define it (www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc9702/barthelm.htm).

Before the first dot-com bubble, the Web was wild. The now codified genres of Web forum, blog, Social Media Site, Newspaper Web Site, and so on did not yet exist. Just about every single site offered its own user interface using various permutations of simple hypertext markup, graphics carefully optimized to load quickly over dial-up modems, and sometimes interactive JavaScript elements. The Mississippi Review was one of the first, if not the first, old-style literary magazine to begin publishing original content online. By 1997 when Barthleme called the Web a gun, he regarded the review’s Web site as the center of his publication effort. The print magazine was a product of the vitality of the online work. Most magazines, however, used the Web as a kind of online flyer for the print magazine.

In the ten years since, however, it has become unusual for newly launched literary magazines to have any kind of print vehicle. A generation of writers has started to write, publish, and even find a modest audience online. Claudia Smith, for instance, although she attended graduate school in the early 1990s, began to think about online publishing by participating in the story sharing Web forum at Zoetrope, and then began to participate in a rich economy of densely-linked Web sites and lit mags such as Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Eyeshot, Opium, Failbetter, and the SmokeLong Quarterly.
I met Dave Clapper, the publisher of SmokeLong Quarterly at a reading in Seattle. I mentioned that it was good to meet the editor of a Seattle magazine. Dave seemed amused at this characterization of his magazine. He said that SmokeLong was only on the Web. Seattle is just one point among many. It was hardly the point that determined the identity of the magazine. He noted that SmokeLong included contributors from all over the world and readers from all over the world. He pointed out, for example, that some students in Argentina had written responses to a story by Claudia Smith. SmokeLong, he said, is not a Seattle magazine.

I realized in talking to him that, well, it was a Seattle magazine in some ways because here we were in Seattle talking about his magazine. But the Paris Review could be a Seattle magazine by the same measure. The physicality of literary magazines which was something that was a given in 1997 when the Atlantic published Barthleme’s observations about the potential of the Web had become just one aspect in a far richer economy of literary transactions. What was often physical proximity has given way to other modes of connection. I wondered then, what the relationship between some clearly Seattle magazines and the Web looked like?

I decided to map the social network of four Seattle magazines over a three-year period. Unlike SmokeLong, I wanted to pick magazines whose editors clearly identified the magazine as belonging in the context of Seattle or the Pacific Northwest, even if they included contributors from all over the world. I picked the Raven Chronicles, Pontoon, Poetry on Wheels, and The Crab Creek Review. All four magazines stuck to a more or less regular publication cycle and I could easily discover information about their print contributors from their Web sites. I realized, too, that these magazines all predated the wide adoption of the Internet.

My assumption in gathering this information was that each print magazine formed a kind of temporary community or social network. My study would have three parts. First, I would map the relationships of individual contributors to the four magazines over a three-year period. Second, I would collect Web forum and blog posts regarding the magazines over a six-month period, map the domains where relevant posts occurred, and then expand the domains to identify the online context of the conversation related to the four magazines. This was because my source for the data (BlogPulse) only retained the last six months of data. Finally, I would compare the two networks to discover any similarities or contrasts.

This is what I found: From 2003 to 2008, 454 individual authors published 552 articles, including poems and stories. From March to September 2008, there were only 31 posts on Web site and forums related to the four magazines.
The print network is very open to voices new to the network. The majority of articles were written by authors who had only published a single time. 80 percent of the authors wrote 70 percent of the articles.

However, a fragment of the overall population of authors contributed a disproportionally large number of articles. 2 percent of the authors contributed 12 percent of the articles. This was intriguing, but I lack any evidence about what might be going on. Are a small number very active? Or are a small number in control of publication outlets? Without further investigation it is hard to say.

Floating Bridge Press provided an accessible point of entry for first-time writers seeking publication. Pontoon was central to the Print Network, and was home to most of the most highly-linked authors, but also had slightly more than half of its articles written by first-time authors.

Crab Creek Review didn’t contain any of the most prolific authors. The magazine had the highest ratio of authors
with single publication compared to authors with
multiple contributions.

Each magazine published about the same number of articles over a three-year period.

Authors who were central to the Print Network were not central to the Web Network. In reverse, the Web Network
had only a few shared authors with the Print Network.
These authors were often far more prominent on the Web then in Print.

Unlike the Print Network where a small number of authors held a disproportionate number of connections, the distribution of connections was spread throughout the Web Network. A cluster of sites had a lot of connections. Another cluster of about the same size had a modest number of connections. Some of the sites had no connections at all.

Unlike the winner-take-all distribution in the Print Network, there was a fairly uniform distribution of connections in the Web Network. For example, nearly as many sites had around 64 inbound links as had four inbound or zero links.

The Web Network reflected the Print Network in terms of prominent key terms, place names such as Seattle and Washington, and the network composition.

The Web Network magnified the nature of the Print Network. The Pontoon/Floating Bridge Related Discussion was far larger and in fact nearly subsumed The Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles networks. Pontoon was very close to the very active, densely-linked conversation of poets online. Both the Crab Creek Review and Raven Chronicles were remote from this conversation.

I should also note that unlike the Print Network, joining in the Web Network is voluntary rather than requiring a submission. To become a contributor, a new author merely posts a blog and links to the network.

Note about the social network maps
Each social network map shows an issue of a magazine as a grey circle with the name of the magazine and a much larger circle around all of the contributors. Each magazine is a consistent color: pink (The Raven Chronicles), green (The Crab Creek Review), yellow (Pontoon), and Blue (Poetry on Wheels). Individual authors are names. An arrow indicates the author’s contribution to a magazine. A contributor with multiple publications will have multiple magazines pointed at her. Thus, in this context, she is highly-linked, or central to the Print network. If you want to spread a rumor, she is a good person to contact.

by Matt Briggs
Info graphics by Josh Covarrubias