As I prepare the following interview with Sebastian Matthews, I’m thinking of an encounter I had at a workshop I co-taught for teachers early this spring at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District.  An administrator for the Peer Assistance program smiled broadly after hugging one of the attending teachers hello. She turned to me and said, “I had this young woman as a student in my sixth grade class and you don’t know how much pleasure it gives me to see her here today!”

Sebastian Matthews’ father was my thesis advisor at the University of Washington in the early 1980s.  William Matthews had recently arrived to teach in the creative writing department at the UW, and I was taking his workshop before I entered the graduate program.  I remember the days he showed up to class in paint-splattered pants because he’d been fixing up his new home, making it comfortable for himself and his two sons. I remember my love for his father’s poem “Bedtime” in Rising and Falling, especially the lines:

                 From our rooms
we call back and forth the worn
magic of our passwords and let one
another go.  In the morning Sebastian
asks who was the last to fall
asleep….

I remember my sadness at his father’s death in New York City, years after his UW teaching days.  I remember my correspondence with Sebastian, his father’s literary executor, as I reprinted parts of his father’s journal and a poem he wrote in Keeping A Journal You Love.  The entry and poem concern his Sebastian’s wedding.  In the journal excerpt, William Matthews is in the thick of writing seven blessings for the ceremony. But he generalizes about the function of journals saying a journal can be, “a collection of scraps that yearn to be changed from their illusory current form into something else, something future.”

“Something future,” I repeat to myself as I email Sebastian Matthews, now a poet and professor of Creative Writing in Ashville, NC about his new literary endeavor, Rivendell. Just yesterday, it seems, I sat in class listening to my favorite poetry instructor talk about the way words hang around one another. Now I reread the section of his journal in Keeping a Journal You Love where he is struggling with writing seven vows after coming up with five sets of coupled nouns:  bridegroom and bride, mirth and exultation, pleasure and delight, love and fellowship, peace and friendship.  He asks, “But where’s the breathlessness, the giddiness, the risk, the thrill and terror of vow-making?”  You’d find them today, I whisper to him, here in Sebastian’s ideas and his thoughts, his commitment, and his way of extending his literary legacy.

 Note to Writing It Real subscribers:
When I was a graduate student in creative writing, I was returning to school after 10 years and I was brand new to writing.  Feeling the gaps in my information and background, I was always grateful to those I could ask for information, let alone those to whom I could admit that I didn’t know what they did.  As the literary world grows larger and larger, it is impossible for any of us to know even a majority of what is going on.  So, project-by-project, person-by-person, we begin to fill in the gaps and understand more about the writing community.

In this interview, Sebastian Matthews mentions many people, places, magazines, organizations and notions that color his literary world.  We have established links so that you can click and easily visit sites that will give you background information.
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There is an exciting tradition in the US of small press literary magazines founded by writers with particular interests.  Many, if not most, who submit work to these magazines, especially as the years go by, do not know about their beginnings.  I have always found it exciting to learn about the original editors and their visions.   Why did you start RIVENDELL?

I started it because it seemed like a good idea, something that wasn’t being done as far as I could tell.  First off, I wanted to bring together a whole variety of writers and writing styles. So many journals seem to draw from one basic camp.  You’ve got academic journals that won’t touch writers working out of the academic model.  Then you’ve got alternative magazines that wouldn’t be caught dead publishing a mainstream poet like Billy Collins (who started publishing in small journals, by the way, like most of the big names out there). I wanted to publish all kinds of writers and writing.

For instance, I don’t think Black writers get nearly enough attention in literary journals. Or, if they do, it’s only a few established writers who seem to be held up as examples of some larger, largely unread group.  One goal of Rivendell was to publish writers of color, to feature work from writers not yet discovered. I also want to publish writers on the margins—writers out of the academy, working class writers, avant garde writers, etc.

The idea for Rivendell came to me on a plane ride back from Los Angeles, where I was serving as a visiting writer at Pitzer College, my Alma Mater.  I had just spent my first few weeks there, was horribly lonely, and was flying back to be with my wife.  I had been wandering around the campus feeling simultaneously at home in, and utterly estranged from, my surroundings. This was back in 2000.

Pitzer is located in Claremont, a quiet col­lege town an hour inland from Los Angeles, near the base of Mt. Baldy. It had been over ten years since I spent time in southern California…Early in my stay, I was invited by my old friend and mentor Barry Sanders to sit in on his poetry class; a colleague of his, Peter Harris, was coming to read to the students. I remember sitting in that bright classroom and being bowled over by Harris’ dynamic poetry. Harris himself seemed electric with energy and intelligence; I walked out of that classroom bristling with questions. Eventually, I sat down with Peter Harris and turned those questions into the interview that opens this journal. It was in that congenial talk that I first heard about The World Stage, a writers’ workshop and per­formance space located in the heart of L.A.’s Crenshaw District.

Around the same time, I reconnected with another of my old college professors, the poet Dick Barnes. Dick, it turned out, had been fighting off cancer (and would later that year succumb to the disease). I visited him on one of his better afternoons, and along with his wife, Pat, talked about a handful of subjects. When he asked about my poetry and I told him that I was dabbling with a loose form of haiku, one that didn’t adhere strictly to syllabics, Dick frowned. “What’s so hard about 5-7-5?”

I didn’t get out much that semester, but on two occasions made the extra effort, once to hear Dick Barnes perform with the Real Time Jazz Band and once to visit The World Stage. Both evenings were memorable, alive with the palpable energy that so often emanates from top-notch live entertainment. There were big differences in the feel of the performances. Dick’s show was a low-key affair in a Claremont bar filled with old friends and regulars out for Dick’s final public performance, while the workshop and readings at The World Stage combined the raucous communality of a southern Baptist church with the smoky intimacy of a jazz club. But the overall seriousness and good-spiritedness displayed at each event wedded them in my mind.

In fact, it was on the long, late-night drive back from L.A. that the idea for Rivendell came to me. The 10 Freeway itself brought me to this notion, for it is this strip of road that both connects and separates these two radically different literary scenes. I had a vision of a metropolis made up of a network of artist communities, rife with a dozen World Stages and surrounded by a ring of Claremonts. And, by extension, the whole country was made up of just such clusters and juxtapositions.

It occurred to me that there weren’t any literary journals that took this simple fact as a starting point. Regional ties were often obscured or erased altogether: only in special issues were writers brought together around the place in which they made their home and created their art. To fill this void, I came up with Rivendell, which would focus on this specific place—a geographic location, a pairing of communities, a shared sensibility. Hopefully, by bringing together writers and artists from different backgrounds and communities, an original and “multilingual” conversation will be encouraged.

Last thought: There are enough literary journals out there already. Probably too many. I told myself when I started this that I wouldn’t just put another small literary arts journal out there that worked in the standard model—that is, backed by a university and drawing from strictly the MFA crowd. There are already enough of those, and some good ones, too—journals I send my own work to and would be proud to publish in.  I just didn’t want to replicate that.  I wanted to do something a little different.

So, if Rivendell does fill a niche, it’s because it focuses on place, and the importance of place for writers and creative communities.

Starting a publication is a big endeavor.  How did you start Rivendell and get it off the ground?

A classic case of putting the cart before the horse. We knew we needed a website.  We knew we should bring the first issue to the book fair at Associated Writing Program’s annual meeting. That we should advertise in Poets & Writers and Poetry Daily, places like that.  Finding a distributor is still a work-in-progress.

I have always thought that I needed to put the first two issues out, by hook or by crook, and then I could sit back and see what was next.  The idea being that if we were to start looking for outside funding, we better have something to show for it.

It’s one of the reasons I work hard to make the journal look and feel good. Just because we’re doing this alone doesn’t mean we can’t make a quality product.  My motto has always been “innovative material, old school product.”  If Rivendell gets placed on the shelf next to The Georgia Review, or Kenyon Review, I want it to be wearing its nicest clothes.

Have you put a staff together to help you in your endeavor and what is its organizational structure?

We have none.  Okay, there is some.  There’s me, Ryan Walsh and Monica Fauble.  We’ve got a board, of course, but I am reluctant to put anything on their already full plates.  Lately, Jon Carr and Rose McLarney have been helping with us.  Caroline Knapp, out in San Francisco, has been offering her help, but we’re too disorganized to utilize her talents in any meaningful way.  We’ve tried to have interns, but we’re not really ready.  They’d just stand around twiddling their thumbs.

When we were trying to get the first issue out, one of my correspondents, a prominent L.A. poet, wrote me, in a slightly condescending tone, that all I was doing was making “a series of excursions into a strange city led by Virgilian guides.” The idea being that I didn’t really know Los Angeles because I wasn’t part of the scene.  He was right, of course.  I thought, Aha! That’s exactly what we are doing. The term “Virgillian guides” instantly became a mantra for me, and for the other editors at Rivendell.

I knew the same approach would work for Northern New England. There were five or six writers I could start with, poets and fiction writers who could point me in the right direction.  It’s a little like driving in a region that you used to live in, but years have passed since you were last there. You’re both lost and rediscovering old terrain.  The whole point is to stop and ask for directions, to talk with the locals.

Since I moved a lot as a kid, and since both my parents are poets, I knew that by picking regions I once lived in, I could in a sense re-trace my early moves back and forth. I had an old map and a name of someone to pay a call to.  And, of course, that’s all anyone needs to start a journey.

A quick word about the journal’s name, Rivendell. My wife tried to talk me out if using it because of the Tolkien movies that have been coming out. She was right to try. But I knew this thing we’re doing would have to be called Rivendell because of what the word carries with and in it.

Just the word itself, with its fusing of “river” and “dell” works for our focus on place. But also what Rivendell stands for in the Tolkien books—a place outside of culture, residing in the periphery. A place where travelers go to rest. A place to sing songs and talk politics.  A place steeped in tradition, alive with a sense of nature and art and magic, but also slowly dying, a threatened place that needs protecting.  All of these things seemed to me to define a literary journal and its intentions for, and its participation, in literary life.

What else will you need to keep the magazine up and running?

Good question. I am not sure I have answer. Yet.  Right now we’re busy rebuilding the cart and persuading the horse to let us strap her up to it. Meaning: I am just now trying to get non-profit status.  We need to raise more money.  Need a managing editor.  Etc. Etc.

I run this thing out of my study.  Ryan, one of the assistant editors, does a lot of work out of an office in Warren Wilson College. We ask for help from folks there—copying, scanning, proof-editing—paying for the services when we can.  But, really, it’s just us three.  We stay up late stuffing envelopes.  Meet every few weeks to look at work.

As founding editor, do you think about your readers’ expectations? Do you think about what those who submit their work want from the magazine? How do you consider the editorial staff’s influence?

You know, I am not sure what readers expect.  We’ve gotten quite a positive response to the first issue. And people have been patient as we struggled to put out Issue 2, which was mailed to subscribers in March. I am just glad that people are paying attention at all.  My mom always says that no one’s out there holding their breath for the next poem, the next book. It’s a sobering but ultimately freeing idea. And it’s dead true.  The same holds true for this enterprise. It’s first and foremost a labor of love. It’s me throwing “a pebble at a freight train,” as a poet said recently about writers protesting Bush’s rush to war.

As for what the writers who contribute think, or expect, I really couldn’t tell you. This whole enterprise becomes such a conversation.  A poet just emailed me about our third issue, which is attempting to look at place from a conceptual standpoint. (Every third issue will try this.)  He wrote, kindly, “the theme is both narrow and very wide open.”  And, of course, he put his finger right on the central problem of our concept (“Workshop to Woodshed”). But, at the same time, this ambiguity may hold some power. The writer’s feedback on the theme helps focus it.

I don’t worry what my editorial staff thinks. I expect them to tell me what they think.  And I do my best to let them into my messy closet mind. They help me clean it up or persuade me to turn out the light.

What have you found out from your experience so far?

I am not sure what I’ve found out.  I am still in the middle of it all.  Maybe I should let the opening of the editor’s note for Issue 2, North of Boston, do the talking:

When I tell people about RIVENDELL, they often shake their heads and say, “That must be a labor of love!”  I want to say, “What isn’t?”  But I smile, instead, and tell them how much fun we’re having.  It is hard work, but the kind that repays our efforts ten-fold.

Hands down the best part of the job has been the correspondence.  I thought this might be the case going in, for I have always loved sending and receiving mail.  But there’s something special about the connections I’ve made compiling each issue.  By exchanging letters with so many other writers and artists, I am deepening my own understanding of the creative process.  Or maybe it’s Rivendell’s special emphasis on place.  Whatever the reason, I end up feeling like I am in close touch with a region.

The writers in this issue are a particular, dare I say peculiar, bunch.  Many are editors of small presses, independent bookstore owners, handset press operators, farmers, carpenters.  Some don’t use email, or own a computer—and are proud of it!  The one thing they all do, and do well, however, is write letters.  It’s exciting to come upon their letters in the mailbox.

There’s something thrilling in reading one of Donald Hall’s typewritten pages or poring slowly over Kate Barnes’ calligraphic lettering.  Twice, I have received brittle overseas envelopes from Cid Corman that fold out into a page of hand-written poetry.  Then there is the elegant handwriting of Wesley McNair, small and neat on its note-sized paper, or the even smaller writing of naturalist David Carroll.  I came to cherish the few letters that arrived from Ted Enslin, which were friendly but prickly, challenging me on my half-formed ideas of place while whole-heartedly supporting my endeavors.

It is just plain fun to receive packages stuffed with poems, essays, photos and ads.  I never know what to expect.  One envelope came bearing maps of Maine, another a cartoon illustrating a contributor’s poem.  On one summery weekday, a large package arrived full of original watercolors painted in the late sixties.

Other than that, well, I have found out that, as an editor, I need to be more patient. It’s true for me as a person, so it makes sense it would be true here too.

I just received my copy of Vol. 1 No. 2 and I notice it is fatter than No. 1.  Is this the direction you are going? 

It sure looks like it. I told myself, and my editors, that Issue 3 would be closer in size to the first issue. But it’s growing by the day. Somebody, please, stop me.

I can certainly see the way the idea of place is taking shape.  As a subscriber, I’m experiencing the intangible something becoming tangible.  The “illusory current form” changing into “something else, something future.”  Do you have some more themes of place in mind after the third one, “Workshop to Woodshed,” you old us about?

It’s been an exciting, challenging experience putting together this third issue. The theme has come into focus as we’ve collected the work. I knew which poet I wanted to interview, for instance, and that I would feature a specific workshop, but I had no idea what or whom I could juxtapose with this group. Or, for that matter, how I could organize the issue around a theme instead of a geographic place. And the title, “Workshop to Woodshed,” though evocative, has caused a good amount of confusion. Our contributors are unsure what we’re looking for.  I could only answer, “I’ll know it when I see it.”  Not the best editorial approach.  I still haven’t found artwork to showcase. Still looking for specific pieces to fill in gaps.  In my mind, though, this is the fun part.

Other thematic issues?  I want to do an issue on “the road.” And then one on nature — the artist’s relationship to it and place in it.  A friend just suggested an issue that looked at writers who have been displaced, or for whom “home” is not exactly the place where they currently reside.  I like that idea.

 I am open to ideas.

To learn more about the writing Sebastian Matthews and his staff publish, visit www.greenmanwalking.com.