writing

book, articles, blog,

I started another attempt at writing a book last week, I'm on page 22 already and it is coming along well though I have no idea where I'm going to end the story.

The zine is also coming along well I guess though I worry about submissions, there aren't many and the ones which do come I have to squeze from people and I don't like having to be a mafioso about deadlines and other people's writing. Thankfully though I have been given permission to reprint articles by a number of writers and activists whom I grately respect, so I'm not at a total loss. My only real complaints are first that the reputations of some of these people might discourage new people from writing for me, I want The Christian Radical to be primarily a voice for folks who feel marginalised either by or because of their faith, I don't want to be the next Geez magazine or Adbusters or America, though they are all good periodicals with much to offer the public discourse.

I want to do something different, I want people to feel that they can send me things and that the merit of their writing will be judged not by who I can attract to read the thing but by the quality of their work and the clarity of their thought.

I could probably go out and put together a good zine with republished material from all kinds of sources if I wanted. If I wanted I could probably get lots of stuff by Daniel Berrigan and Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day and Christian Peacemaker Teams and other revolutionary Christians and activists but even though lots of people would read it and it might gain a larger audience or greater credibility in some circles it wouldn't be the paper I set out to make.

I won't turn down permission to reprint people who are respected and well thought of. On the contrary, I use their stuff gratefully and feel honoured for the permission, but I want to publish new voices.

In the early dais of Commonweal Magazine they published Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton before they were anyone of broad importance, they took chances printing people like that because they were new voices, and because they were saying things which were worthwhile and overlooked.

I would rather print unknown and unrecognised writers who have fresh views, which speak to the problems in today's world but first more of them have to send me their writing!

My other problem is that even though I have to squeeze writing for the zine, I have to scrape to get enough art. While I might get one or two new articles in a slow month, I have recieved maybe three submissions of pictures in the entire 7 months I've been printing this zine.

It has come to the point where unless I get more pictures I will have to either steal other artwork from the web or recycle all the pictures I've already used and neither of those possibillities excite me in any way.

I am thinking very seriously of making the coming issue with no pictures at all, just captions where the pictures would be that read "The Christian Radical has recieved no new artwork since late 2005 send original art to the.christian.radical at gmail dot com" and hope that I can guilt some people into sending things in.

I don't understand people sometimes. This zine has an audience, I sometimes think that I could print off 30 or more copies just for the two or three theological schools in this city alone and they would always be gone within the first two weeks. I have a subscription list and though it hasn't grown signifficantly it certainly hasn't shrunk at all, a couple of people in the US have even offered to do print runs in their own cities so there are people reading it, there is a demand. I just wish that more people would contribute, I say it all the time, without new material the zine will have to stop printing. It's not money that motivates this magazine, it's participation. I believe that if people become more involved then it will only grow, and that's a thought which always brings me great joy.