2008 Woodie Awards
Read Good: Literary site breaks out of the norm
Creator says journal gives writers a platform and makes good writing free, accessible
By Signe Cluiss
Issue date: 9/25/07 Section: Life & Arts
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For this week's Read Good, I interviewed creative writing senior Gene Morgan and the creator of www.bearparade.com, an online literary magazine featuring works by Tao Lin, Michael Earl Craig, Ellen Kennedy, Matthew Roher, Noah Cicero, Ofelia Hunt and Maize Louise Montgomery. Morgan's bear parade is a prime example of the underground literary communities that are forming online among young writers. The stories and collections published on bear parade are astutely written, bite-sized and available to read for anyone with an Internet connection.
How did you first get involved with an online community of writers?
I'm not really sure. I think I just started commenting on other blogs and talking to other writers who were doing the same thing I was doing, but in different parts of the country. It wasn't some sort of pre-meditated 'I want to get involved with an online community of writers' objective. I just sought out writers I liked and talked to them.
Why did you choose to start bear parade?
Tao Lin had a lot of poems he was working on at the time. I told him I liked his work, and I think he asked me to start something, or we talked about starting something, or we complained about every other site and wished there was something else. I'm not exactly sure. The next day I developed an entire site and sent him a link. The idea was that instead of a collection of cherry-picked individual pieces, which is largely the extent of online literary content now, bear parade would publish small bodies of work by individual writers and develop single-site designs for the work to exist permanently, for everyone, for free. Tao made me pay him $50 for the collection of nine poems, and I published it a week or so later. I did it because I couldn't find anything like it on the Internet and was bored wasting time on vanity projects of my own.
What attracted you to the writers that you publish on bear parade?
Noah Cicero had a good explanation on his blog a few days ago. He basically said that the writers that we publish don't think of themselves as writers. They are just people who do things like other people and feel the need to write down those things in a very simple and succinct manner. If you are in junior high, you can read bear parade and feel the way the authors feel without thinking that they are above you or better people or something. And if you have your MFA in poetry, you can also feel these same things.
How did you first get involved with an online community of writers?
I'm not really sure. I think I just started commenting on other blogs and talking to other writers who were doing the same thing I was doing, but in different parts of the country. It wasn't some sort of pre-meditated 'I want to get involved with an online community of writers' objective. I just sought out writers I liked and talked to them.
Why did you choose to start bear parade?
Tao Lin had a lot of poems he was working on at the time. I told him I liked his work, and I think he asked me to start something, or we talked about starting something, or we complained about every other site and wished there was something else. I'm not exactly sure. The next day I developed an entire site and sent him a link. The idea was that instead of a collection of cherry-picked individual pieces, which is largely the extent of online literary content now, bear parade would publish small bodies of work by individual writers and develop single-site designs for the work to exist permanently, for everyone, for free. Tao made me pay him $50 for the collection of nine poems, and I published it a week or so later. I did it because I couldn't find anything like it on the Internet and was bored wasting time on vanity projects of my own.
What attracted you to the writers that you publish on bear parade?
Noah Cicero had a good explanation on his blog a few days ago. He basically said that the writers that we publish don't think of themselves as writers. They are just people who do things like other people and feel the need to write down those things in a very simple and succinct manner. If you are in junior high, you can read bear parade and feel the way the authors feel without thinking that they are above you or better people or something. And if you have your MFA in poetry, you can also feel these same things.
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