from The Charleston City Paper
By Chris Haire
September 7, 2005
A new literary magazine aims at hijacking your iPod's earbuds
Sometimes a helping hand comes from the unlikeliest of people. Some are friends. Some are associates. Some are strangers. But as a rule, you should never ever expect an assist from the deceased. That is unless you’re Daren Wang, and it’s your mission to put together something the world has never seen — or heard — before.
This weekend, Wang will launch his new literary quarterly, entitled Verb. That alone is scarcely something to crow about. But Verb is no run-of-the-mill literary mag. It’s an audio literary magazine, and it will hit bookstore shelves and iTunes alike.
Wang has enlisted the likes of South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth, National Book Award winner Ha Jin, and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler to give the inaugural issue some star-power push, but it just might be the lost voices of two literary giants that give the magazine its biggest exposure. Their names: Walt Whitman and James Dickey.
Wang, who is also the host of the popular public radio series The Spoken Word, first came across the Whitman recording some years ago on an NPR program shortly after it had been discovered. The poetry reading was recorded on wax cylinder, the story goes, by Thomas Edison himself.
“When you hear that recording, and it’s this voice that everyone thought had been lost, and suddenly it comes back from the dead … for me, that’s such an affecting thing. It was such a chilling recording to hear the first time. The power of that has always resonated with me,” Wang says. “I don’t have any illusions that anything I’m doing is as historic [as that recording], but that’s what we strive for.”
For Wang, the recording from the author of Leaves of Grass seemed like the ideal way to lead off his bold experiment. It was also a way to tie the past to the present. “The piece has always stuck in my head as a fascinating piece of American history,” Wang says. “I argue that many people see Walt Whitman as the father of American poetry, the beginning of American poetry, and I argue that Walt Whitman is also, in this case, the beginning of American audio books.”
Whitman’s isn’t the only forgotten voice that can be heard. There’s also South Carolina’s own poet and novelist James Dickey, the author of Deliverance and a National Book Award winner. On the second of the audioquarterly’s two discs, Dickey can be heard reading a passage from “The Wayfarer” and “The Sheep Child.”
“I did that recording about two months before he died,” Wang says, adding that he made the recording while putting together the 13-part series Porches: The South and Her Writers for public radio. “I got underwriting for the program and basically spent two years traveling around the South interviewing authors. Dickey was one of the first people I spoke with.”
Of course, literary magazines, heck, even plain old fiction, make for a tough sell these days, once you move beyond titles like Harry Potter’s latest and The Da Vinci Code. One of the nation’s most revered publishers of American short fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, has discontinued running fiction in its individual issues while many other magazines, such as the Paris Review and Esquire, are turning away from fiction and turning towards non-fiction. Even worse, confessional memoirs, self-help manuals and newsy non-fiction are taking over bookshelves not already taken by J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown. “I certainly don’t think that Verb is going to be the solution or anything like that [to the] trend of the rise and fall of short fiction,” Wang says. “These things always come and go.”
South Carolina poet laureate and Mt. Pleasant resident Marjory Wentworth, who contributes six poems to Verb, agrees that short fiction is far from doomed, although the state of the publishing world isn’t ideal for short story writers.
“There is always something that is hot. People always love stories, and people always love poetry. That’s never going to change,” Wentworth says. “In terms of how publishers are making decisions and marketing, that’s another story. We all know it’s too often that marketing decisions determine what is published, and not literary integrity.”
According to Wentworth, Wang just might be on to something with his audioquarterly. “That’s why I like Verb. It is marketing literature in a new way,” the poet says. “Writers can sit around and bemoan the state of publishing, but what I really admire about Daren is that he is doing something about it.”
She adds, “Storytelling and poetry are often the language that articulates our emotional life. People need that. It’s not going to change.”
While skeptical that Verb might help bring short fiction out of the doldrums, Wang believes that short fiction can only be saved by one thing: good writers. “Memoirs or biographies, there’s a lot of good ones coming out. Right now, that seems to be grabbing all the attention,” Wang says. “When we have another Flannery O’Connor, short fiction will be all the rage.”
Still, don’t underestimate Verb’s potential. While many literary magazines find themselves, at best, on the bottom shelves at the big box bookstores and, at worse, never even squeezed into a space, Verb doesn’t need to worry about shelf space. After all, cyberspace is infinite.
“My first thought was, why hasn’t anyone else thought of that, because I think a lot of people don’t have a lot of time,” Wentworth says, adding that the short story and poetry format fits the time-pressed lifestyle of many Americans. “To just be able to pop the CD in or download it to your iPod, it’s sort of like a book on tape.”
She adds, “It’s silly, once you have the technology, to make believe that you don’t.”
Both iTunes and Audible.com will offer Verb, once it launches in Atlanta this weekend, with download at both sites running $19.95, and Barnes & Noble bookstore will carry 2-CD versions. The curious can either download the audioquarterly to their computer, after which they can burn a disc or move it their iPod, or they can order the discs in the mail. Some stores will even stock the two-disc magazine.
And while it’s true that the $800 million audiobook industry is currently the only segment of the publishing biz that’s experiencing growth, the question remains: will enough listeners pick up an audioquarterly of poems and short stories over the latest bland installment in the Left Behind series? Wang is hopeful.
“Everybody always tends toward bestsellers. I’m curious to see why short stories aren’t more popular, because they fit the commute. A short story read aloud is 20 to 30 minutes,” he says. “To me it would make sense that people would feel comfortable getting into their car, starting a story and finishing it, and walking into the office.”
