Making and Independent Publishing

This time last year, me and a few friends got together because we wanted to put together our own literary magazine. We were all creative writing students with basically no idea how publishing worked (or at least I didn't).

It's funny when you want something, this end product that you have in your head, but you don't really know how all the working pieces fit together. We all kind of had different ideas of what we wanted but we knew we wanted it, and after 4 hours deliberating in the Kelowna Denny's we had a goal to work towards. Our mission statement that would drive the production of the magazine.

OK Magpie is a literary magazine dedicated to fostering a contemporary writing community. Writings in OK Magpie are selected by a jury of our editors. We don’t quite care why it’s good, as long as it is.

Things had to be good, we wanted to build community and it had to have writing in it.

When the thing started I always had this idea of something like McSweeney's, with no idea how that would actually work. So, we decided we would be different and do an audio recording of all our writers.

What was crazy was that it felt like a roller coaster. It felt like we were putting it together with sticks and spit. I had no idea what I was doing but I had seen handmade books before, I had seen Mcsweeney's, I collected chapbooks, so I kind of knew what I wanted.

What I am trying to say is that I learned something completely different from actually making the work than I could have ever learned from reading about it or sending my own manuscripts to publishers. When you make something you learn about it intimately, and there is so much more value when you see finished products because you know what went into it. Doing that first magazine got me building other books, and precipitated my 2014 summer project.

So, now it's March, one year later. Pretty much or pretty close to being the birthday of our magazine, and I have the pleasure of doing it again. We are working on issue #2! and this time is different because we made that first one. I'm still sure it won't be perfect, but nothing ever is. The other editors that I worked with last year have all gone on to do other things, finishing different degrees and moving on. So now we have a team of new editors and there is a better idea of what we want and how the thing is going to look.

This is the part where I shamelessly plug the chapbook contest that we are running... which might be the most exciting part. But before that I think the point of this whole thing is... to make stuff! The best way to learn about something, to really know something, is through making it. We have been making things our whole lives. We learned to talk through talking (making words), we learn to write through writing, and then somewhere along the line most of us forget a bit about the making of things.