IMAGE and the Digital Age

An Interview with Editor Gregory Wolfe

Gregory Wolfe is the founding editor of the literary journal IMAGE, which Annie Dillard has called “one of the best literary journals on the planet,” and the editor in chief of Slant Books, an imprint of Wipf & Stock Publishers. He is also the director of the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Seattle Pacific University, and the author of several books of nonfiction, including Beauty Will Save the World and Intruding Upon the Timeless. He and his wife, the novelist Suzanne Wolfe, live in Seattle, Washington.

Greg Wolfe is a Catholic by conversion, and a thinker by nature. He advocates what he calls “religious humanism”. I spoke to Greg on the phone after meeting him in person at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis.

Sarah Grace Baker: So I’m interested in finding out who your target audience is for Image Journal.

Gregory Wolfe: I don’t want to be coy when I say this, but I really don’t have a target audience. Or let’s put it this way; I’ve got multiple target audiences. I harbor a strange ambition that Image can speak to a pretty broad range of readers. And by that I mean the fact that the journal is interested in art and literature that engage with Western religious traditions might make you think, “Well, the target audience are church-going, synagogue-going people, etc.,” but I really want and hope to go beyond that. We’ve made a very concerted effort from the beginning, once we stated that basic connection with these religious traditions, to then deliberately stop adding any other definitions at all. We leave it wide-open. Once we’ve said that one thing, we say nothing more, and that means that we have published authors, for example, who are estranged from faith, or religious institutions, or who are angry, or puzzled, as well as those who are more pious. So the material in the journal represents three major religious traditions, but a variety of different responses to those issues.

“We’ve made a concerted effort from the beginning…to leave it wide open.”

SGB: I know something that appealed to me in the beginning was that there’s no entrance requirement. No, “You must have this relationship to faith in order to participate in art,” which is really, I think, hard to find.

GW: Well not only that, but there’s no mission statement. Almost every religious organization in the world has a mission statement. That was a fundamental decision too. The question was going to be, “what is the language that Image speaks?” Is it speaking theological language with literary accompaniment? What we ended up deciding was that Image speaks the language of art.

SGB: But as far as how you market that: how you get the word out. What kind of avenues are you using to reach your audience?

GW: Well, if you wanted to get technical then we have rented mailing lists of people who are demonstrated paid subscribers to journals and magazines that do combine religion and culture in some way…So yes, we have in some ways, you might say, marketed to our home audience, but really we try to use social media, we try to use whatever means we have that don’t cost a lot of money. We try to be present in the public square as much as possible. That means that we always go to AWP. We apply to and receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. We try to get bookstore and newsstand distribution, from Ingram to being at Barnes & Noble, to independent bookstores.

SGB: Have any of the strategies that you mentioned worked particularly well, or that haven’t worked at all?

GW: Well, I think we’re at a point in time where nobody knows what’s working anymore. The question is how can a literary publication stay competitive and stay sustainable in the current environment. So for example, we’re completely overhauling our web presence, and when I say web presence I mean more than just a website. We’re going to be trying to monetize our back issues and our content in a way that you can now subscribe not only to the print edition and the digital edition, but you can subscribe in a sense to our current and past archives through the website and you can subscribe to the website itself. Basically we’re doing our best to slice and dice. It used to be very linear. It used to be you’d get something in your mailbox four times a year, and it would be just that indivisible piece of material, paper on the coffee table in front of you. Now you can subscribe for a monthly fee on the website and really slice and dice the way you want to. You can read all one genre. We’re now tagging everything we do, so you can read everything we’ve ever published that relates to, say, mother-daughter relationships.

“The question is how can a literary publication stay competitive and stay sustainable in the current environment.”

SGB: That’s really interesting, and something that I think more and more publishers are trying to do: trying to find different ways to use the content that they already have for multiple purposes.

GW: Exactly. Plus as a broader non-profit, the metaphor that I use is that we need to put out every inch of sail that we can to catch every puff of wind that we can, so that’s why we’ve developed our summer workshop program and online writing classes. The idea is that in some ways, in order to sustain the journal, we need to be a multi-faceted nonprofit arts organization.

SGB: What role does the Good Letters blog play in that? I know that was how I initially became familiar with Image.

GW: Yes, well, we live in a world where the idea of a quarterly cycle is very quaint in a period where you’ve got things popping up on your feed at the rate of two or three things a minute. So the question was, how could we convey the essence of what we are on a regular basis? How could we spin a web large enough to catch people and draw them into the center? So what we did was create a blog with multiple writers, and instead of it being based on argumentation or politics, it was largely personal essays, almost like an anti-blog in that it wasn’t about short blurts of opinion. They were meant to be beautifully crafted pieces of prose that drew you into a more meditative, reflective state of mind. And even though we knew that “too long didn’t read” syndrome that everybody puts on the web these days, #tldr, we thought those who are intrigued are going to get sucked in and they’re going to say, “Who are these people? Who is willing to hold out for the kind of writing that requires a kind of deeper inwardness, a deeper capacity for attention, and for detail and artistry?”

SGB: Yes, I love reading that blog. It’s sort of an opportunity to slow down and to come back to original, non-digital literature. Image is available digitally, though, correct?

GW: Yeah, like I said, we now are going to have two different digital scenarios. One is Zinio, which is the company where you get things like The Paris Review, where you get a digital issue delivered to your device whole, from front cover to back cover. But then there’s going to be an option where a paid subscriber will have access to not only the current issue of their subscription, but up to 35 back issues. And then there’s this other way where you can just subscribe for a monthly rate and then stop it at any time. So we’ve got multiple ways to try to satisfy people’s individual desires.

SGB: Have you implemented that yet, or is that still in the works?

GW: We’re about a month to six weeks away from the public unveiling of the new website.

SGB: So moving to a little bit of a different track, I’m curious what made you become interested in publishing and editorial work. Was there a point that you can remember where you became interested in going in that direction?

GW: Yeah, that’s a good question. My father was in advertising, and he was constantly putting words and images onto paper in ways that I found fascinating. My mom loved the arts. I was lucky enough to grow up in New York City, and she decided that a fun outing for little me was to go out to the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art. So I had this almost natural gravitation toward what words and images can do in communication. I was a kid who literally started with my junior high school magazine, which was printed on what they call mimeograph paper. I did every literary magazine and every student newspaper from junior high to high, through college. So I guess I just love to put words and images on paper.

SGB: You recently started Slant Books. I think that was about 2 years ago, right?

“I joke that we’re the vinyl of publishing...These are keepers.”

GW: Yes. It’s a literary imprint. There’s a parent company, Wipf & Stock, which handles the technical dimension of it. I’m not doing this from scratch. But I’m the editor-in-chief; I get to choose what’s in there…The irony is, what we’re doing at Slant is there’s either a hardcover or digital, there’s no paperback, which kind of goes against a lot of publishing logic at the moment, but the way I put it is, when I think about what I do with Image and Slant, I think a little bit about the way music people, the really dedicated music people, still buy vinyl. I joke that we’re the vinyl of publishing. There’s something about the traditional medium of the hardcover book that says that this is a book that you might want to reread, that will last: that this has got a quasi-permanence to it. These are keepers.

SGB: In terms of digital marketing, digital publishing vs. the long-form content that you favor, does that affect what you choose to publish?

GW: Well, we’ve decided that we were not going to let it alter what goes into the quarterly journal. Nothing has changed. In fact, what we’re actually now exploring is the possibility of doing longer pieces than we could even do in the journal — what they would call #longreads. As you may know, there is a market, however small, for the kind of long piece or novella or long investigative or personal essay that actually is 10–20,000 words in length…So I’m now exploring the possibility that for $1.99 we can publish a 10,000-word essay or a 15,000-word long story or novella that we could never fit into the actual print journal.

SGB: And that would be available through the Image website?

GW: Yeah, through every digital medium that we could get together, so hopefully it would be something you could click on and download and read. That’s second layer after the basic website goes up, but it’s on my to-do list. I’ve actually been gathering some pieces that have been submitted to me that I would have normally said, “Sorry, I can’t do that. 6- or 7,000 words is our limit.” Now I’m like, “I’ve got some ideas up my sleeve. If you publish this elsewhere let me know, but otherwise I’m holding onto it.” So I might have a couple or three pieces ready to go from day one…If the technological revolutions mean anything in the positive sense, ultimately what they’re going to mean is, the capacity to slice the pie in so many different ways and cater to every potential niche that you can imagine. There are people who just want to get lost in a really absorbing reading experience, and we may find a way to serve those people in a way that we haven’t previously been able to.

SGB: It’s interesting because part of what I’m hearing is that by catering to all of these different niche groups, you’re able to cater to a larger group.

GW: Yeah, if you think about it, it’s already a highly selective world. That is, compared to the populace at large, it’s those who are interested in literature and literary production, that‘s already a niche. So the question is, how can we operate within that world and meet as many different desires as possible? Frankly, we’re interested in making greater inroads in the visual arts and music, even though literature remains our fundamental base. We’re trying to think of ways to keep people who are interested in other art forms connected to what we do. A lot of publications are trying to do that these days by publishing a section of visual art in their quarterly journal. Some magazines are doing a digital music issue where the entire issue’s writing is based on music and then you can download an entire album’s worth of stuff. We’re game to try to explore those other media and not just be purely literary.

Find out more about IMAGE & Slant Books

Photo by Luke Rutan. Photo & bio courtesy of www.gregorywolfe.com