Literary magazines have long occupied a sort of members-only, marginal status in the world of publishing. Many of these things are butt-ugly, deadly earnest, and, where not subsidized by universities or literary organizations, marked for extinction from the get-go. What a marvel it is, then, to have Minneapolis-produced Conduit delivered to our door “when least expected,” as its masthead says (but always twice annually). That masthead routinely offers up entertaining surprises, including one of the magazine’s proud mottos: “Grant Free Since 1993.” That’s a virtuous and almost shocking boast. Conduit–without grants, advertising, or paid contributors–is consistently distinguished by its beautiful and playful design, its thoughtful, thematically organized content, and contributions from poets, writers, and artists of international repute. Take the new issue, which tackles the subject of work and features interviews with Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Frank, poems by James Tate, a batch of photographs by Lee Friedlander, and stunning collages by the late Ray Johnson.
Conduit editor (and poet) William Waltz produces the magazine along with his wife and deputy editor, Brett Astor, and a handful of friends who share their zeal. We recently caught up with Waltz while he was hanging out with his three-year-old daughter and watching Bob the Builder at his home in Minneapolis.
Conduit always looks so fantastic, and seems like it would be mighty expensive to produce. How do you do it without grants or advertising, and why?
We’ve become addicted to color, and every time you add more color, the cost goes up. The current issue features the most color ever. We print a thousand copies, and subscriptions and sales of the issues come close to covering most of the costs; whatever they don’t cover, we pay out of our own pocket. We’re trying to approach a break-even point, but that might just be a dream. We haven’t sought out grant money for the simple reason that IÕd rather spend time making the magazine and working with people than researching and writing grants. It’s always a temptation, of course–you’d love to be able to pay the contributors and the people who help to create the magazine–but there’s also this sort of risk-averse, victimization aspect to the whole grant world. I guess I feel like the thing should be supported and paid for by readers, and that it should stand or fall on its own merits.
The spirit of the magazine seems pretty clear, but how would you define its mission?
When I was coming out of graduate school, it didn’t seem like there were many literary magazines that appealed to me. They weren’t much fun to read, and I was kind of fed up with that world. We wanted to make a magazine that was different and that might appeal to people outside the world of academia and poetry circles. At the time, it seemed like humor and design were totally absent from most stuff–everybody these days seems to be paying more attention to design, but I like to think we were way ahead of the curve there. We’ve tried to mix it up, and the object is to maybe get people interested through the interviews and art, and then maybe get them to read a few poems. It’s an uphill battle, but it sometimes seems like we’re making inroads.
The names in the table of contents are astonishing. How do you get so many great writers and artists to work for free?
We’re always coming up with wish lists of people we’d like to get into the magazine, and we’ve been remarkably fortunate. We send copies to them, and to our continued amazement they often agree to send up something. Now that we have a little bit of a profile–that’s all relative, of course–we’ll get people who contact us. It’s all pretty amazing, really.
You guys eschew typical pagination, using words rather than numbers. What’s up with that?
I guess it’s just one more attempt to get humor into the magazine. If nothing else, Conduit has a sense of humor. We’ve abolished page numbers as part of our struggle to emancipate curious minds everywhere, and, given our fondness for poetry, page-words give us another opportunity to squeeze in more language. Mostly, I suppose, we just think they’re fun. Conduit salutes the impractical. We’re all about the good time, you know?
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