Issue #16, Fifth Anniversary 1999
Voice Over by John Lehman
The Secret Life of "The Little Magazine That Could"
Our editor, Rod Clark, once asked me what the greatest thrill of publishing Rosebud was. It happened in San Francisco about a month after the first issue came out. I should explain that thirty years earlier, right after college, I had followed Kerouac's fictional hero and hitchhiked to the West Coast from Chicago with a friend. We both wanted to be writers. For a couple of months we lived in an unfurnished apartment off Market Street. He sold encyclopedias, I delivered newspapers. We finally decided to give it up (he went back to law school and I joined the Army). We spent the last night before the long bus ride home savoring the City Lights bookstore. Now thirty years and many trips later, that dream all but forgotten, I was back in San Francisco on a business trip. I had a little extra time and out of nostalgia I decided to make a pilgrimage to the famous Beat bookstore again. This time, there on the shelf were five issues of Rosebud. I was so excited I bought two of them, even though there were hundreds back home in my basement. Today we're one of the largest publications of our type and distributed throughout the United States, Canada and parts of Europe, but on that day, I had a rush of heart-warming feeling as I've never experienced before or since. Thanks to Rosebud, I had arrived.
How did it all start? When I moved to Madison (Wisconsin) in the 80s I tried out for a play at Broom Street, an experimental theater. I landed a minor role as a hobo in a play that was still being written while we were in rehearsals by an earnest young man with a voice like a ratchet wrench-Rod Clark. Rod was living in a converted gas station, as I recall, and after the play's short run I thought I would never see him again. But I did, about ten years later. He and his newly married wife stayed at the Night Heron Bed & Breakfast which my wife and I own. Rod and I had both been through some hard times-my advertising agency had gone bankrupt and he had just emerged from a successful struggle with drug addiction. With enterprise worthy of Twain's Duke and Dauphin we decided, "Let's start a magazine."
Rod and Melanie now live on a farmette about a mile from Talia and me. I roped Tom Pomplun, our well-read art director, into the enterprise with a vague promise of immortality, and we were off. He and his wife Georgene, creator of the Rosebud Crossword, eventually moved into a wonderful Victorian house in the country about thirty miles east of Rockdale. Rosebud has no offices, and there never has been a meeting for all the staff (who are almost all volunteers). Mostly Rosebud is the result of animated discussions of two or three of us over someone's kitchen table and an endless stream of phone calls, e-mails and late-night faxes.
Dierdre Luzwick was our Aubrey Beardsley (the 19th century artist whose magazine cover illustrations are greatly admired even today). DiDi is a local artist who has had several books published, including one on the environment put out by HarperSanFrancisco. I called her because I admired her craftsmanship and the cinematic quality of her work, introduced myself and asked her if she would consider letting us use some pieces for our first issue, including one on the cover. I explained we couldn't pay. She not only agreed but recommended several writers whom she felt we should also contact -- including Florence Parry Heide, a well-known children's author who lives in Wisconsin. This tremendous leap of faith on DiDi's part was matched years later when a young, nationally acclaimed poet whom we had published, John Smelcer, wrote us from Alaska that he wanted to be our poetry editor. It's only within the past six months that most of us have met this literary dynamo face-to-face. One of the pieces he brought to us was an unpublished poem that Allen Ginsberg had sent him three months before his death. Ginsberg found it folded in a book where he forgot he had put it in the 1969. He told John we could use it, but that Words (Rosebud, Winter 1997) was rough and John might want to clean it up a bit before publishing it. We liked the poem's exuberance just as it was.
It has never been our policy to talk about the philosophy of Rosebud. We want the magazine to embody what it believes, not espouse it. But Rod expressed our criteria very well once in a letter to our editorial board (an advisory group of members throughout the country which anyone is welcome to join). He said, "The work we publish in its own way transports us, if only for a moment, into the heart of another's human experience. It's a phenomenon with which all of us are familiar. There we are, reading along, critical machineries fully intact, hoping for the best, but not seeing it yet. Then, unexpectedly, a door opens before us and we are through it without having seen the jambs or heard the invisible hinges turning. In a flash we have been transported out of our chairs, and out of ourselves. We have leapt into a new skin, a time and space created by words-not knowing how we got there, sharing a moment of human reality that envelops us, and becomes our own." It's the standard we use for well-known writers, as well as for writers who have never had anything published before. That sense of participation is what writers, readers and people who help put out Rosebud have in common. We're proud of being a literary community without geographic bordersand of the Whitmanesque democracy that implies.
Publisher John Lehman, Poetry Editor John E. Smelcer and Editor Rod Clark finally meet face-to-face in Wisconsin, 1998.
Not that everyone approves of Rosebud. John Smelcer had contacted former President Jimmy Carter about publishing some poems in the magazine. He asked to see a few copies of the publication first. One of those John sent was the Third Anniversary Issue with art by musician/illustrator Andy Ewen. Carter's only comment when John phoned him for his decision was, "Is that a penis on that man on the back cover?" We never received the poems. A more serious controversy erupted when our first circulation manager quit over our including a piece she considered obscene. She informed me that she was leaving because she thought Cleopatra (Rosebud Autumn/Winter 1996) to be a "godless piece of senseless sex and violence" she didn't want to be associated with. The work is violent and raw. It involves New York gangs who are killing the children of rival gang members. What's most alarming is that the story is based on the real life experiences of the author. Through writing he has raised himself out of that environment. I respected her reason for being upset, but felt that not publishing this powerful story would deny the reality it represents, and that denial would hinder anything ever being done to change it. We lost many subscribers over that story, which is not easy for a publication fighting for its own survival. Ironically, two years later we fought a publisher of pornography over the name Rosebud to which I own the registered copyright. That ended in a legal stalemate.
We never dreamt of publishing Seamus Heaney, Ursula K. LeGuin, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine (my personal hero), Jacquelyn Mitchard, X.J. Kennedy, Louis Simpson or Robert Pinsky (though they all have appeared on our pages). Even more exciting is knowing that writers everyone will recognize five years from now -- such as Kandis Elliot, Christopher Woods, Ben Miller, Vincent Larkin, Louis Jenkins, Judith Azrael, Vincent Zandri, Rob Mariani, Frances Park and many more -- were first being read in Rosebud.
All we've ever cared about is finding well-written stories and poems that people would actually enjoy reading. In the process we also added "malaphors," "the one-minute playwright," and "dream-on-sentences" to the lexicon. We championed simultaneous submissions for writers, the "new-autobiography" and women in science fiction. We are proud to have re-discovered America's greatest unknown poet -- Lorine Niedecker -- and through our "Writing in the Classroom" Teacher Resource Program to have provided thousands of copies of Rosebud to schools and workshops without charge. Among our many contests the biggest hit was the first One-Minute Playwright, our biggest flop the National Literary Scavenger Hunt. The full-page ad we did apologizing to Marion King in our Autumn/Winter 1995 issue was also unique. We had fallen so far behind because of the staggering number of submissions (200-300 each week) we felt we needed to tell her and other writers who had waited so patiently that we were genuinely sorry for the delay.
In 1997 the Boston Globe reviewed Rosebud side by side with Ms., Esquire and Sports Illustrated. They called us "the little magazine that could." A full color article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel picked up on a comment I had made at a writers' conference that Rosebud was not a pretentious literary magazine, that our goal was "to be in every bathroom in America." Not that this national publicity generated much awe at home. Remember the breakfast scene in Citizen Kane, or the part where Joseph Cotten's character writes a scathing review of the opera his publisher, Charles Foster Kane, has produced starring Kane's mistress? Well, my wife still reads Neale Donald Walsch books rather than Rosebud, even though she works many hours each day to make our publication a success; and after I had a collection of poems published by a small regional press, I submitted one of the best to our poetry editor which he promptly turned down. But each issue does take on a life of its own and always surpasses our expectations. Usually they are referred to after-the-fact as the "car" issue, "the flying saucer" issue or the "bird" issue. If you haven't noticed, we're also the only quarterly that comes out three times a year. They're long quarters.
The personality of Rosebud comes from Rod, Tom gives it "the look." But the vision, though I may have originated it, is something the magazine owes to many people. Most have appeared on our masthead over the years; others, such as Barbara Goodwin, our representative for distribution at Eastern News in New York remain behind the scenes. I was reminded of the power of a collaborative effort with regard to another issue recently. Our idyllic Wisconsin countryside is being threatened by the construction of a high-polluting power plant. We feel this isn't a responsible use of resources but rather the corporate greed of an out-of-state developer taking advantage of weak state legislation. Rosebud was well-represented among the opposition. I did what any writer would do, wrote letters -- to the newspapers and television stations. Rod assumed the task of getting political support on behalf of the local community action group. Lynn Needham, the first member of our editorial board, and Talia Schorr, who is my wife and Rosebud's office manager, began fund raising for them. The poet Ron Ellis (Rosebud Autumn/Winter 1995) created mobile billboards and editorial helper Katie Nekola convinced a nationally known environmental law firm to join the fight. Staff members Dori Knoff-Roselle, Bob Wake, Melanie Werth, Noel Valdez and even seventy-seven-year-old Mecca Dane Kennels, who opens Rosebud's mail, have all stepped forward to express their hearts through words. And words lead to action; action to results. I like to think that this "can do" attitude comes, in part, from our experiencing the success of "the little magazine that could." Will we win? Will Rosebud ever make the 10,000-issue break-even point (we're at 9,000 now)? Will each of us achieve our lifelong dreams? The answer is as near as the words by Erica Jong on my Rosebud coffee mug: "If you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
(to be continued in five years)