Our Faculty Editor, Ian Blake Newhem, was recently interviewed by Alex Sorondo of The Examiner.

Interview with 'First Inkling' founding editor, Ian Blake Newhem

By: Alex Sorondo

Ian Blake Newhem is the founding editor of First Inkling, a new literary magazine showcasing the written and artistic work of college students around the world. The magazine, which debuted in October, features an eclectic collection of forms: comics, one-act plays, short fiction, poetry, nonfiction narratives, interviews; a variety matched by Newhem’s own diverse output.

Currently a professor of English at SUNY Rockland, Newhem has written hundreds of articles that, according to his Amazon.com profile, cover “health, education, banking, construction, and real estate,” and his books – some written independently, others co-authored or ghost-written – cover everything from media ethics (Managing the College Newsroom) to diabetes (The 30-Day Diabetes Miracle).

A glance at his bibliography suggests a sweeping expertise on everything and an average of maybe an hour of sleep each night. When I met him in June, speaking to him briefly after a lecture on the state of publishing, he spoke with the pace of a film noir detective, the restlessness of a born journalist, and the broad gesticulations of a caffeinated soul.

We spoke through email in the following weeks about First Inkling. The magazine’s credo can be found in his summarization of the first issue’s content in an opening letter:

We see among them at least the first inklings of future greatness, and we’re proud to be a part of their “discovery.” Some have been published in undergraduate or graduate literary magazines. Some have never seen print before. Some are already widely known. All represent the imminent future of literature in English.

Examiner: Do you have any qualms with publishing that you were hoping to tackle and fix with First Inkling?

Ian Blake Newhem: Arianna Huffington Must Die. One of my biggest qualms is that young writers keep getting the message that they should give away their work, “to build clippings and a portfolio.” While that’s not always terrible advice per se, many publishers tend to take advantage of writers’ eagerness to publish, and, as a result, there are lots of writers out there who never get paid. Part of the problem is that there’s always some “other” writer out there who will undercut you and work for free. This undermines the cultural and literal value of all writing and all writers. So I was determined to ensure we keep raising enough money to pay all our writers – we pay between $100 - $750 per piece –and to walk them through a fair contract, so that their first experience in publishing trains them to value what they do.

Examiner: Have you had any way of measuring the first issue’s reception?

Ian Blake Newhem: Well, My Mother’s Very Proud of her Little Boychik. Commercially, I’d say, it’s tough to measure. We were very pleased to get several thousand dollars in ad revenue. We raised many thousands more in foundation money. We have a few hundred subscribers already, and we’re available on lots of campuses across the country. Having said that, we haven’t sold very many copies outright, because we decided to give a lot away at the beginning to increase our exposure (This sounds paradoxical given my previous answer!). But that’s not how we intended to measure success. We’ve gotten rave reviews from many big time writers and editors, and one of our writers, Lauren Fath, got nominated for a Pushcart Prize. We’ve gotten involved with some amazing partners, from the New York Quarterly and Ploughshares to the Yale Writers’ Conference and numerous colleges and universities. Pedagogically, I’d say this has been the most successful thing I’ve ever done—I’m certain we’ve changed the lives of the 20+ writers we published – often for the first time – and all our 50+ student associate editors. They’ve been hobnobbing with the world’s literary elite. They’ve gotten job offers and jobs. They’ve attracted the attention of the top schools.

Examiner: Dave Eggers, when he started McSweeney’s, spoke of the “hand holding” that most writers need when they’re first being edited and published. Since many of First Inkling’s writers are being published for the first time, how does their inexperience influence the editing process?

Ian Blake Newhem: Il Miglior Fabbro. As a general rule, the students we publish are super-eager for us to edit them. We definitely do a lot of the same kind of “hand-holding” that Dave does. Almost universally, we’ve found our emerging writers receptive and grateful for editing—even extensive editing. It’s often the first time they’ve found themselves and their work under such scrutiny, and it’s both exhilarating and agonizing. Because most college lit magazine editors see their role as “acceptors” or “rejectors” (and not editors as such), these writers are not used to critics offering anything more than praise. Our goal is always to make the writers the best at what they’re trying to do, and who they are. For our first issue, we worked with every writer on edits. Only one young man took great exception at first to our suggested edits. I believe he said he felt “violated.” But after my co-editor, Cliff Garner, and I, had a couple of intense conversations with him, he understood our role better, and really came to grasp that we were improving his work and helping him with his mission. He wound up writing us a very thoughtful and contrite letter saying he had “seen the light.” I think we really helped that writer for his long term future with editors. For our upcoming issue, only one of our potential writers balked at editing. She had sent her work in, and we reviewed it extensively. And we decided we would publish her, assuming she was willing to discuss with us a few of her choices, which we thought we could improve dramatically with a few judicious cuts and additions. I’m not even sure these were dealbreaker issues; we just wanted to talk. She said she was “not interested” in any discussion with the editors, and that, “from [her] experience,” this was “not how things are done.” First of all, I wonder what experience she’s talking about, because she’d never been published before. Secondly, what a snarky, silly, and self-defeatist attitude! So she won’t get published. She won’t even listen to counsel on her writing. She won’t learn the way it is done in our profession, from long before Pound resuscitated Eliot. The day I got her message, I’d been editing the three Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winners we’ll have in our upcoming issue, all of whom, of course, respect the role of the editor, but here’s this sad young writer who’s unwilling because her poems, and presumably, her poops, are all perfect.

Examiner: How has ghost writing influenced your personal approach to editing?

Ian Blake Newhem: Who You Gonna Call? That’s a really interesting question. As a professional ghostwriter, I guess I’ve gotten very good at getting into the head – and, naturally, the voice – of the authors for whom I write. I think this is very similar to the editing process. I like that I can usually figure out very quickly what a young writer is trying to do—then offer counsel about how to edit the piece effectively, doing in a way that keeps the writer comfortable. And when that’s done, the writer doesn’t feel that I’ve co-opted their piece to my own end; he feels I’ve understood him, I’ve “gotten” him, and helped make him better.

Examiner: In June, at the Yale Writers Conference, you gave a lecture on the state of publishing, suggesting that it isn’t dying (contrary to popular belief) but evolving. Whatever the industry’s health, what are some of the adaptations that this up-and-coming generation of writers will have to make from the publishing ways of old? Does the effort to accommodate those changes make your job any harder than it might have been, say, fifteen years ago?

Ian Blake Newhem: Writing’s Easy: Just Sit Down at Your Typewriter and Open a Vein. It’s always sucked for the vast majority of writers; it still sucks; and it will suck. And yet, if you keep doing it, regardless, you know you’ve got the stuff to succeed eventually. On the one hand, I think the future is somewhat brighter now that there are so many more options out there for finding audiences. But on the other hand, truly breaking through now commercially is even harder than it was in the past. Write all the time. When you’ve got a few thousand pages under your belt, some of them might be good. But get them edited anyway by great editor-friends. All the while, build your “platform,” accreting an audience online and elsewhere. Then polish your very best work and get the best agent you can, and listen to his or her advice.

Examiner: Which bits of editorial advice do you find yourself most often repeating?

Ian Blake Newhem: Some of These are as Old as the Crust in Your Underwear. Ahhhh! So glad you asked this! This is my top ten, in no particular order.

1. Kill the passive voice.

2. Murder your darlings.

3. Search and destroy abstractions.

4. Smother clichés with novelty.

5. Trust yourself and the reader.

6. Show, don’t tell.

7. Say it once the best way you can.

8. Read constantly, widely, and dialectically.

9. Write without self-criticism, THEN edit savagely.

10. Less is more.

Bonus:

11. Put all your f[------] contact information on your submission! How am I supposed to find you? Facebook? Jesus.

Examiner: Are you noticing thematic or stylistic trends in First Inkling’s submissions? If so, have they been surprising, or the sorts of things on which one might expect a young writer to be fixated? Also, to make this question obscenely long, what do you think these trends reflect about college students today? / Based on all of the amateur fiction you’ve been reading lately, do you have any sense – however abstract – of the themes that will loom large in American literature once these young writers mature and step into the literary spotlight?

Ian Blake Newhem: Polterzeitgeist. These are very keen and very uncomfortable questions for me and the staff. When we set out, we had, as our tertiary mission (after publishing the best college and university writing, and bringing young writers into meaningful contact with pros) a bold and noble goal: To articulate the Zeitgeist of this generation of writers. Ha! We actually spent considerable time, effort, and money with sociologists and surveyors and researchers trying to do just that. The result? We still have no idea. We were hoping for smoking guns. We would have loved to find some convenient label for a new, discernible “movement,” like “Post-Terroristic-Pansexual-Anti-Romanticism” or some s[***] like that. Turns out, young writers are as varied and eclectic as writers have always been. I will say, though, that some of our expectations got turned on their heads, and others met squarely: We get thousands of submissions, and we comb through hundreds of college lit mags. The immense majority of undergraduate writing is pretty awful, as it’s always been. It’s the still-immature, angst-y emergence of adulthood, and what could possibly be more dreadful to read about? Those “themes” from the quotidian heap are obvious. She broke my heart. My parents never understood me. I’ve got a dark, violent, scary side. Of course those themes could produce spectacular literature in more mature hands. Surely some of those writers will mature beyond their juvenilia and embrace wider, deeper, and more diagonal angles to attack those themes, someday. Meantime, about one in a three hundred pieces we see makes our veins dilate and our scrota contract. Sometimes these pieces will explore similar, pedestrian themes, but usually with much more clarity, novelty, and gravity. Flaubert did it, didn’t he? Perhaps the greatest novel ever written in French, and its theme is: bored housewife.

I just read a piece by a college freshman. He had never submitted any of his writing to anyone before. I read his 18 pages at 4 in the morning, stunned. I immediately e-mailed a book editor friend and called my agent to say, “You want to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing?” (What did I just say about killing clichés?) I mean, I did that before I even responded to the writer. Of course he needs some development, but he’s really that good. The dialog just sang to me so realistically and so poetically at the same time. The complexity and sophistication of the character development. The choices this kid made. 18-years old: Astounding.

Common themes and fixations?

1. Gay stuff. We’ve joked around at our editorial table that we get a lot of gay-themed pieces – including the one I just mentioned above – and several of us have tried to figure out why this is. One assumption is that a high proportion of young, gay people tend to self-select into the arts as a means of finding expression and acceptance. Eh. I don’t know about that. Another is that the advent of shows like “Glee” and other media have brought the gay stuff more into the mainstream. That’s plausible. It is interesting, though, that the vast majority of our staff is straight, but we published several gay-themed pieces in our first issue. Proportionally, was the quality of the gay-themed pieces better than the straight ones? That would be an intriguing surmise.

2. Rural stuff. We were surprised, and often comment on it, that we get a lot of young people writing about life in the wild backwoods. We’d expected a lot of urban and suburban writing, and that really hasn’t happened. Is there some move afoot to get back to our country roots?

3. Artificial hymens. I’m just kidding—We got only piece with that theme. But we ARE publishing it. It’s awesome.

Follow the link to read the interview on The Examiner's website.

Interview with 'First Inkling' founding editor, Ian Blake Newhem

The editors of First Inkling, the national student magazine based at SUNY Rockland, are overjoyed to announce that one of our writers, Lauren Fath of the University of Missouri, has just been nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize for her essay, "By Being Written, They Would Disappear," which appeared for the first time in First Inkling. 

Fath was "discovered" by SUNY Rockland student associate editors Roxy Moskowitz and Sarra Schwarz, who contacted her professor, E.J. Levy, after having read Levy's work in the journal Salmagundi. Our students solicited Fath's work and presented it to the First Inkling editorial board.  After acceptance, the faculty editors, Ian Blake Newhem and Cliff Garner, edited the work while the First Inkling students learned editorial techniques.

We have more good news, too ... watch this space.

- Ian