When he was a boy she was always painting the ceiling of his room. Once she painted it blue for a sky with lazy white clouds and faint daytime stars. And in one corner, as if just disappearing into his closet, the tip of an angel’s wing. “It could be only a bird’s wing,” she said, as if she didn’t know. Then just when he began to feel safe under that sky, he came home from school one day and found she had painted the ceiling of his room green for a garden, with tulip borders and the eyes of shy creatures peeking out from among the grass blades. And she had said a dreadful thing. “You can lie in your bed and pretend you are the sky above the earth.” It alarmed him. He didn’t dare close his eyes. All night he tossed and turned to make the bed creak for company and keep him awake. He was afraid that he would either fall out of bed and down to the earth or float out of bed and up to the sky. He didn’t know which. He had cried day after day with weariness and finally his mother gave in and painted his ceiling white. And his floor white. And she said, “Now you are safely sandwiched between two slices of bread.” She said then, “Your literal mind will be the death of me.” …

From “Spent Earth” by Catherine Scherer
Published in Margin at www.magical-realism.com

Magical-realism.com began five years ago when Tamara Sellman set out to honor the place of magical realism in diverse literary genres. Today the site is still going strong with opportunities to publish and with opportunities to read the work of established and emerging writers working with magical realism.

After meeting Tamara at a Field’s End presentation on Bainbridge Island, WA and reading her writing samples, I interviewed her by email to learn more about magical realism and about her efforts among the community of writers.

In this interview, you’ll learn about the genre, those who practice it, how a touch of it will invigorate your writing and about online publishing opportunities.

Sheila
Can you define Magical Realism?

Tamara
I borrow my definition of literary magical realism from an agent friend of mine from whom I took a class in magical realism a few years ago: “Magical realism is writing in which the impossible enters into the material world.”

For me, this is not the same as fantasy writing. While a reader who opens the first few pages of a fantasy novel will know from the start that the story is supposed to be fantastic, there is no such “contract” between the reader and the magical realist author.

 Literary magical realism is grounded in the here and now. Subjects are not treated as if they could be, but rather as they are. Whether the reader believes is less important than whether the author can write the impossible into possibility. And that requires writing almost to the level of super or hyper or über realism. Truly, it is realism that is the foundation of magical realism, not magic or fantasy. (I know for some fantasy writers and experts, that’s splitting hairs, but I do see a tremendous difference between these two categories of writing). I also refer to Magical Realism as literary magical realism because magical realism started out as a style of Post-Expressionist art in Germany back in the early quarter of the 20th century.

Sheila
Tell us about how magical-realism.com and its resources got started.

Tamara
The online magazine Margin came about as the result of merging interests while I was still living in Chicago. First, I was attending a writing group, submitting (for critique) these stories I couldn’t define in any other away except as “weird tales.” Eventually, one of the members told me I was writing “magical realism” (which now I think he was also writing; and I recall now how much I delighted in the surprising twists and turns his stories took without ever leaving the “real world”).

He handed me two books he’d picked up at a used book sale: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. I ate these up and realized there truly was a “real” name for what I was writing, and that gave me a great sense of relief.

About three months after the birth of my second daughter, I made the decision to start a website focused specifically on discussing magical realism. My goal was to foster an international hub where folks could visit and dialog about magical realism, regardless of their educational background. As a stay-at-home mother, I was annoyed that my domestic life was too demanding for me to be able to take classes, as much as I was annoyed with the overriding suggestion among peers that, perhaps because I was a “mommy,” it wasn’t “in me” to stretch myself so intellectually.

Really, all I wanted then was a sustainable intellectual charge and the opportunity to keep my hand in matters editorial. After a few months of exploration on the web, I realized what I really wanted was the structure to publish a literary magazine. A few stories, that was it, maybe a recommended reading list, some links. I wanted to keep it simple, but turn my own personal interests into a public forum. I’d see where that took me, and then I could also keep my editing muscles warm.

I “hired” a staff of two — author Laura Ruby, who I knew from a writing group in Chicago — and Susan Deefholts, someone from Canada who I’d never met IRL (in real life) but who I’d encountered in Café Utne in lively discussions about magical realism. I say “hired” because we’re an all-volunteer shop: none of us work at Margin for anything but the experience, the intellectual challenge and the pleasure of interacting with our readers. Little or no budgets are the norm in small press literary publishing, these days, so it wasn’t a hard decision, to work, essentially, for free.

I started advertising for submissions and reshaped the website into an electronic anthology format. The three of us considered the fiction and nonfiction that came in the mail and made decisions based on quality (Laura’s expertise) and content (Susan’s expertise). Finally, in January 2000, we launched Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism.

It wasn’t until a year later that I got smart and bought our domain name: www.magical-realism.com. After that, I brought on a few other staffers to meet our increasing needs in poetry and nonfiction: Kelli Russell Agodon, Wyatt Bonikowski, Bruce Taylor.

Our goal at Margin was to expose the layperson/writer/independent student to the notion of magical realism through the use of examples of original work, lists, interaction with our readers, polls and surveys, and related efforts (for instance, Susan and I authored a large part of the content for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club a couple of years ago when they focused on Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We wanted, more than anything, to get people discussing the definition of literary magical realism. It has never been our intention to create the ultimate definition, but rather to get everyone else to contribute their understanding to broaden the discussion.

Five years later, with 50,000 annual readers from more than 50 countries, we’ve added columns, letters, original work, feature articles, poetry, digital art, creative nonfiction, major authors, film discussions — a whole host of ways to explore what is truly a dynamic, even controversial, subject matter among literary folk. Most of our readers are students, educators and writers, but we also encounter plenty of good ol’ fans who absolutely adore what we also love, and that has been very gratifying.

How do we get our work? Through calls for submissions, market book listings, advertising in the writing magazines. We also solicit established authors who we think have work that truly reflects the diversity of literary magical realism. And sometimes those authors contact us, as well.

Sheila
How did you choose the names “Margin” and “Periphery” for your online and in print publications?

Tamara
I adopted the name Margin because, after some introductory research into magical realism, it became clear that the literary style served as a kind of creative conduit for those voices/ideas/worldviews that are marginalized. The focus of literary magical realism is nothing if not political, a kind of pleasurable journey into truth-telling. Giving speech to the speechless.

In fact, many of literary magical realism’s key constituents have been writers living in some sort of exile from oppressive regimes or experiencing, through generations of cultural experience, similar conditions. Think about it: Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Bruno Schulz, Salman Rushdie.

These folks aren’t magical realists simply because they chose a specific narrative form. They’re magical realists because they needed to tell the truth, and magical realism was/is how they did/do that.

Which goes to show that literary magical realism is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a kind of trend in literature. Its use as a narrative vehicle will always be necessary, as long as voices, ideas and worldviews continue to be marginalized.

When we started Periphery in 2003, it was just a little ‘zine I tackled in order to offer people something they could read to learn more about magical realism. I chose that name, obviously, as a spin off of Margin. It’s since become a 24-page literary journal that has carried its own weight, and I’ve sold it out in the past, which means that it pretty much pays for itself.

Sheila
What do you think people who write poetry might consider about magical realism?

Tamara
Good question. We didn’t really come across anyone who put those two concepts together until Margin was in its second year, and a poet friend of mine from Wisconsin, Shoshauna Shy, suggested we open up a poetry wing.

Granted, it’s hard to find a difference between extended metaphor and magical realism in poetry, so we offer different kinds of work to show how possibility can be treated as probability. Our readers love the work we present in our poetry section. And we’ve had some fantastic poets on board: Franz Wright, CK Williams, Naomi Ayala. Now, people DO think of poetry as a way to capture the spirit of literary magical realism, so I think, in a sense, we’ve been successful in opening up that dialog. I’m now hearing of university classes merging poetry and magical realism.

Sheila
What do you think people who write the personal essay or memoir should consider about magical realism techniques?

Tamara
That’s an interesting question, too. I remember running into an editor who worked for one of the major creative nonfiction journals at a conference in Chicago in 2004. She thought it was ridiculous to suggest that magical realism could be part of the world of nonfiction writing.

Except that it’s no more ridiculous than telling any other kind of truth. We have a few pieces of creative nonfiction, which share experiences that seem impossible, but which clearly weren’t for the writers recounting them.

Again, literary magical realism at its core is about revealing the truths and stories of people who aren’t part of the mainstream. That can mean a lot of different points of view that don’t get a lot of “air time”: women, children, the poor, people of color, non-Christian folks, gay and lesbian people, the handicapped, anyone who might experience oppression or disenfranchisement.

These are people who, by necessity, see the world through a different lens than the one portrayed by popular media, governments, and conventional wisdom. And nine times out of 10, how they see the world can seem miraculous to the rest of us. Experiencing first-hand the spirit of another, or talking to long-dead family members through a dream, or seeing one’s own seed of being on the horizon of an entirely different continent…well, these things do happen. Who hasn’t experienced something at once both inexplicable and real? The world is full of mysteries.

Sheila
In your opinion, what do fiction writers do with the genre when they are successful?

Tamara
Well, first of all, they cleave to their own voice and perspective. We reject quite a bit of work for being too derivative of Gabriel García Márquez, for instance. To be authentic, one has to be true to one’s own voice and perspective.

A writer’s sense of humor is vital to successful literary magical realism. It also helps to have an understanding of the living landscape and to be able to peacefully coexist with worlds both magical and mundane. That’s the nexus of magical realism, the place between worlds where things take on lives of their own in a way that is completely possible and utterly convincing.

Also, authors (and readers) who appreciate literary magical realism generally possess the ability to assert “negative capability” [Keats: “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after of fact and reason”].

Finally, the best writers of literary magical realist fiction imbue their stories with layers of political undercurrent. I’m not talking about diatribes, rhetorics or rants, here. I’m talking about stories that seek to reveal and expose the imbalances and injustices in the world, told close to the heart and through the use of the purest everyday details.

For example, here is an excerpt from “The Missing Scroll“, by Christopher Kritwise Doyle, recently published in Margin:

In Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, during the night of the 16th of October 1859, John Brown, a free man and abolitionist, descended with eighteen armed conspirators on the national armory housed there, in a bid to ignite a widespread slave revolt. During the ensuing day, a local army of townspeople forced these desperate guerillas into a small fire engine building off the armory. Either by the ferocity of this resistance or by the absence of a mounting insurgency, Brown was confused. With his options dwindling, and a family history of insanity, he proceeded to trade gunfire for the next thirty-two hours. This delay allowed federal authorities in nearby Washington to deploy a unit of Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. In the early chill of the second day of the revolt, the Marines rushed the engine house. Ten of the conspirators were killed; two of which were Brown’s sons. Brown himself was cut by a saber and beat unconscious with the hilt…a small apothecary jar [was] unearthed during the siege, a jar now on display at the Harper’s Ferry Visitors Museum. Inside this clay jar, a jar known for storing crushed ox bone and lineament oil — a 17th century scroll, that … hadn’t seen the light of sun since it crossed the Atlantic Ocean with a certain Spanish druggist, one Escarcega Nogales — was …[a] scroll….

Sheila
I am enjoying these excerpts from your online magazine. What links on your page are also especially useful to those new to thinking about and experiencing this genre?

Tamara
I always welcome and direct “newbies” to our recommended reading list, our story collection, our poetry collection, and Margin’s many features).

For writers, in particular, we have a writer’s markets column called For Writers Only and a writing techniques column, Practical Magic. Look for Practical Magic as a print endeavor in the next few years; I’ve been working on an easy-to-interpret writer’s guide to magical realism with hopes of demystifying the subject matter, or at least taking it out of the academic arena for those writers who are simply interested in technique but who can’t or won’t go back to school to learn it.

The best way to navigate Margin is through repeat visits. We’ve got TONS of content at the site, to suit most every inquiry or inclination. Go to www.magical-realism.com, click on the front page image, and scroll through our current contents page. There you’ll find links to just about everything there is to say about literary magical realism.

Sheila
As an online publisher of others’ work, can you speak to the question, “Does it count to publish online and how do I know if the site I am sending to has a good reputation among writers, editors and audiences?”

Tamara
Does it count to publish online? It depends upon what a writer hopes to gain from publishing. Some online publishers are more likely to pay than their print cohorts because of lower overhead, so if writers want to be paid, they might have a better chance of seeing money from an online credit.

If writers are seeking exposure for their work, online publishing definitely increases the global exposure to one’s work exponentially when compared to those appearances made in print journals, where the print run is 500 or less per issue and accessibility is limited to quarterly — or less frequent — appearances. Online publications often run their work archivally, meaning it is always available for reading (we do this), so the odds of your story being read by a lot of people over a long period of time are much better online.

Writers who write work that is edgy, risky or hard to classify might have better luck with online publishers, who don’t generally have to deal with money-granting entities. There’s a lot more freedom to publish work that takes risks in online journals because there are fewer boards and other “authorities” whose own prejudices and political connections might affect or dictate content.

It used to be that writers could only achieve a certain cachet if they published in print journals, but I now believe that was a ploy to convict web publishers of amateurism during a time when there were more amateurs than there were pros. Web publishers have become savvy in this industry, though, and the fact is, there are some amazing websites out there publishing high caliber work, like these 20: The Alsop Review, Archipelago, The Barcelona Review, Blue Moon Review, Bomb, Carve Magazine, Diagram, DMQ Review, Exquisite Corpse, Guernica, Literal Latté, McSweeney’s, The Pedestal Magazine, Rattapallax, Salon, Slant, Small Spiral Notebook, Switched-on Gutenberg, Web Del Sol, Zuzu’s Petals.

I’d be proud to have my work appear in any of these online magazines.

The vast majority of online publications are run by people with publishing expertise and background, regardless the conventional but false notion that, since anybody can publish on the Internet, that somehow all Internet publications are produced by people with little or no background in publishing. While that might have been true even five years ago, it’s not true anymore. It takes a lot of work and technical communications expertise to publish a magazine on the web. You see startups all the time from people who think they know how to do this, but their efforts fade as quickly as their domain names.

Many established university and independent presses now offer their publications only on the web. It’s due to economic factors, mostly. There’s so little money in small press publishing, even with the money that colleges are granted.

So how does one know whether a web publication is “worthy” of their work? It’s the same advice I give to anyone marketing their work: study your markets.

I generally spend a few hours every couple of months bopping around the web looking for homes for my work. It’s easy to study markets online: you pay a visit to the website, read the work they’ve published, check out the contributors’ notes, read the backgrounds of the editors, take into account their longevity. Any website that’s been up for two years or longer should be stable (meaning, they’ll be around for a while). Online journals, which are new or have been around for a year or less can still be good markets for your work; in fact, they might be open to newer writers than others.

Whatever you do, don’t send them your B work! Editors of online journals have high standards like their print cohorts and can just as quickly reject underdeveloped work. Always send your best.

(Anyway, if you publish a story online that you know isn’t finished, it will always be there to read! Do you want to go back in five years and find your second-rate story still out there, embarrassing you?)

Online publishing, after all, is real publishing. It counts; it has copyright. Writers need to fix this fact in their heads. One of the biggest problems online publishers have with their writers is this mistaken notion that work published online is not really published. Those writers then go and submit that same work to print contests where only “original” manuscripts are accepted, then suddenly find themselves in hot water when their manuscript is simultaneously chosen as a winner while also being recognized as previously published by the industry.

I know some writers are concerned about copyright protection on the web. My stock answer is this: the chance of your work being plagiarized is really no different online that in print, with one exception: you can search your own work online to see if it’s been lifted and republished elsewhere. You can’t do that with print publications. If anything, publishing online gives you that added advantage.

Sheila
Thanks for your passionate informing! You’ve been busy and involved. What’s coming up next for you?

Tamara
Yes! We’ve moved up production of Periphery IV this year and have dedicated its subject to hurricane relief. Our project, Periphery VI: Southern Revival, will be a fundraiser which benefits First Book, and we have set as our goal $2500. If we can donate $2500 through the production, donations and sales of Southern Revival, First Book will donate 5000 books to those hardest-hit libraries in the Gulf States, which need restoration. What a terrific way for all of us to support our devastated neighbors while recognizing our mutual love and need for books!

We at Margin/Periphery pledge to cover all the production expenses for Periphery out of pocket and will not be accepting any of the funds raised by this project. They will all go to First Book.

For writers guidelines: www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/guidelinesSoRev.html

In lieu of our annual contest fee for Periphery, we are asking that writers send in a donation with their submissions, which will be turned over in its entirety to First Book. Since our goal is fundraising, submissions without this donation will not be considered for publication.

This is going to be a fun project, by the way. We’re hoping to see some terrific manuscripts representing the best of Deep South magic. We’ve also extended our boundaries beyond magical realism for this special edition of Periphery to include all manner of imaginative writing.

If this fundraising effort succeeds, I’ll consider making it an annual venture.

In the meantime, Margin’s Autumn 2005 edition launches November 18. We’ve got some great work in this issue, featuring the work of a terrific new magical realist author, Paola Corso, a fun film discussion about Steve Martin, and a spotlight on Jewish magical realism, as well as our Short Story and Free Verse contest winners.