by Keesha Johnson
Think you’re limited to driving in your own lane as a writer? Think again. Independent literary magazines are an excellent way to celebrate good writing and build your portfolio. Columbia College Chicago MFA Creative Writing Alumni Ira Brooker and Molly Each are the founders and editors of No Touching Magazine. No Touching is a creative nonfiction literary magazine distributed at various coffee shops, bookstores and restaurants in the Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Sit back and let Ira Brooker convince you of how satisfying creating a lit magazine can be.
What were your reasons for creating your own literary magazine?
Molly and I had a [graduate school] class that was heavy on nonfiction, and we were hearing tons of short, personal, true stories that were wonderful without being heavily researched or necessarily earth-shattering. Since there didn’t seem to be an outlet for that type of work, we decided to make one of our own.
How important are small press/independent literary magazines for writers?
The indie lit mag gets a bad rap sometimes, but I think it’s a vital resource for writers of all stripes. I’m not saying you shouldn’t dream big, but the odds are that The Atlantic isn’t going to run that piece you’ve labored so long and hard on. Should you just file it away and wait for the literary world to catch up to you? Hell no! Submit it to some no-name publication, get it out among the people, maybe even read it in public at the launch party.
In addition to having the focus of creative nonfiction, one of the marketable aspects of No Touching is that each issue has a theme. This makes the stories that much more exciting to read. Can you discuss the decision to make each issue have a theme?
I’m not really sure how we decided on giving each issue a theme, other than that Molly and I are both fond of gimmicks. The theme for the first issue was kind of self-revelatory: The First Issue, with all stories about first-time experiences. After that, we’ve just tried to come up with concepts that are broad enough to attract a wide range of stories and universal enough that just about anybody can write about them. I mean, who doesn’t have a story about music, obsession, danger or home? Or surprise. I think the themes have had a really positive effect on the magazine, because they help to emphasize how many different responses people can have to a single stimulus.
What advice would you like to give burgeoning writers seeking ways to present their work and/or market themselves?
Do two things first. One, proofread the hell out of your piece. We’re probably one of the most lenient magazines you’ll find when it comes to receiving rough cut manuscripts, but we get some pieces that barely resemble written English. Two, make sure you know where you’re sending your piece. Our only hard and fast rules are that stories must be nonfiction, 3000 words or fewer and suited to our latest theme, yet we’ve received 5000-word fiction stories that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Once you’ve got those things squared away, get that thing in the mail. Rejection is your worst-case scenario, and there’s nary a writer alive who hasn’t racked up a slew of rejection letters. Eventually, you’ll make it into print, and that’s a sweet enough feeling to offset any disappointments that came before.
Keesha Johnson is the Portfolio Production Manager at the Portfolio Center.
