Library Journal praises 2 state literary upstarts
Imagine you’re from Idaho Falls, a mile high up a Rocky Mountain slope, and your name is Margie. You’re a middle-aged, young-at-heart reference librarian at the local campus of the state university.
Yes, yes, it’s all for fancy. No, neither “Idaho Falls” nor “Margie” have anything to do with the story here.
You pick up the latest Library Journal because, duh, you read it every month. Ooh, Steve Black’s annual roundup of the best new magazines for 2011. Here’s one put out by Welshman Les Jones and, ugh, HGTV Magazine made the list. “Spare me,” you mutter.
Finishing up, a funny fact settles in. Two of the top 10 are published in Arkansas.
You are newly impressed by this small Southern state you never associate with American belles-lettres.
Bryan Borland’s Sibling Rivalry Press and its Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, now on its sixth issue, is a quarterly review that features only poetry by men identified as gay.
“Alexander, Arkansas, might not immediately spring to mind as a center for gay poetry,” writes Black, and you nod along with the author.
Black tells you over the phone from his own library at The College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y., that, “actually, what I liked about this, and I communicated this with
the editor, is it gave a broad spectrum of the gay experience.
“In reviewing these every year, I run across gay periodicals a lot, and a lot of them for my taste are too pornographic. There was very little of that here, and what it did is present a broad range of gay experience. I told him that I hope to goodness he can keep that up.”
Borland says that, first off, he doesn’t “vet” poets for their sexuality. “If the poet thinks they belong in Assaracus, then I don’t question it, and my willingness to be flexible on who appears in the journal has produced some beautiful juxtapositions of poets.”
Secondly, he’s publishing established poets and emerging poets side by side, and really “what matters to me is the authenticity of the voice.”
Further down — the list is in alphabetical order — is a title that makes you blush, Toad Suck Review. How very cheeky!
Toad Suck, of course, is a location just outside Conway on the banks of the Arkansas River. The name comes from a tavern on the quay there, a boatman’s favorite, where “it was said they would suck on the bottle until they swelled up like toads,” according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Two years ago, there was a Toad Suck Park, a Toad Suck Ferry Lock and Dam, a Toad Suck Ferry Towboat, and, the Toad Suck Daze festival. Today, there are all those and a literary journal.
In the very best tradition of an upstart literary magazine, Toad Suck Review features the whole pincushion of writing tags: fiction, poetry, translations, literary criticism and other essays. There are abstruse titles like “Platypii Polemics” and “Disco Pigs: An Ambiguous, Nietzschean Madness,” from authors in New York and Romania, respectively, but there’s also Bear State poetry by recent Little Rock Catholic High School graduate Conor Woody, and a genealogical essay that spans some 10 generations back to 16th-century Devonshire by Frank Thurmon at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The cover “pulled people in like an electromagnet at the AWP Bookfair” last year, Spitzer says in the latest (only the second) Toad Suck Review, which is published annually.
Toad Suck Review’s second issue features a staticky-eyed, squat amphibian perched above the word “OBEY,” graphically composed in the red and pastel blue signature of the Obama-hope poster by Shepard Fairey (who contributed urban mural images for the back cover).
Toad Suck Review, Black said, “leans toward the experimental without being excessively weird.”
Actually, Spitzer hopes Arkansans see “just a big ol’ pot ... a big cosmos of things going on” — and one that’s strongly Arkansan in content and mettle.
“We’re going to remember our place in the world as well as the world in general.”
You, Margie, have seen journals like Assaracus and Toad Suck Review make the bibliophile scene with clack and fanfare. Within two years they’re out, too pretty to last. So you ask Black about the staying power of Library Journal’s annual Best Magazines list.
“I thought there would be a pattern of a whole bunch of them failing in their first couple of years, and then, if they made it past that, they’d last a long time. Turned out it’s actually a very steady drop-off. Yeah, there’s quite a few that fail within one or two years, but then there’s a bunch that fail in three years, a bunch that fail in four years, then there’s actually a pretty smooth curve all the way down to 30 years old.”
Borland says he prints 300 copies of each new Assaracus, but that he has had to reprint continually to keep up with demand for past issues. Black says that if the journal has a future it will be partly explained by the growth of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) studies on college campuses, which all have libraries that, presumably, will subscribe to the journal Borland says is the only one of its kind in the world.
Spitzer says Toad Suck Review’s circulation is “between 1,000 and 2,000 a year and growing.” The next issue, its third, is scheduled for publication in February, with a three-dimensional cover and complimentary 3-D glasses. To get the first or second issue, you have to kick it old school, by sending $15 per issue (payable to “UCA”): Toad Suck Review, Department of Writing, University of Central Arkansas, Thompson Hall, 201 Donaghey St., Conway, Ark. 72035.
Books from Borland’s press are for sale under the Shop link at SiblingrivalryPress.com.
Both are also available at Wordsworth Books as well as River Market Books in Little Rock. They can be found at major online retailers like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Toad Suck Review is also stocked at Hastings in Conway and the UCA campus bookstore.
OK, you can quit being Margie now.
Unless you like her.