Interview with Annmarie Trimble
     by Pamela Kallimanis

An Interview with Annmarie Trimble, editor of Born Magazine

Anmarie Trimble is Editor of Born Magazine.  She is an assistant professor at Portland State University, where she teaches in the interdisciplinary University Studies program. Previously she was editor for Second Story Interactive Studios, where she worked on projects for PBS, Experience Music Project, National Geographic, Discovery/TLC and others. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and other publications.

Born Magazine is an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media. Original projects are brought to life every three months through creative collaboration between writers and artists.

PK: Was the collaborative in place before the magazine?

AT: Born is actually a good example of evolution. How we came to be in the present is the result of a number of selecting factors, the main one being the evolution of multimedia technology. In our early years, our contributing designers wanted to experiment with all this new technology coming out… so artists started taking the content and not just creating a nice designed frame for it, but visually interpreting it.  Thus technology started driving content because designers were more interested in playing with poetry and fiction than, say, CD reviews, and they also started creating their own writing to play with. When I came on board I had a couple of goals, one was to get the writing up to the same level as the design. Because of the nature of the internet Born had gone from this little regional publication, to achieving international scope.   We had these really amazing designers excited about Born, and the writing needed to be as strong. The other thing that really shaped Born today is the conversation between the writers and the artists. That is what gets interesting for a lot of the writers. That’s how I came to Born--when I was working in the multimedia industry, I submitted my work to Born – I thought “oh, I never get to see what someone else experiences when they read my poem.”It was just really fascinating to see how the artist saw my work. So sometime after I came on board, we defined that collaboration as the focus. A writer gets to see what’s going on in one reader’s head [the artist]. 

PK: The process of deciding who and what to publish is made by the editorial team, all volunteer.  I wonder how different it is working with all volunteer rather than paid staff, as the Editor?  How is different than working with a paid staff? 

AT: I’ve only worked on volunteer publications. At Born, one of the other principles was to have pure, creative freedom, because a lot of the people who started it [in 1996] did a lot of their work for corporations. They were all designers and copywriters, so they wanted a space where they didn’t have any corporate restraints.  And that creative, free-for-all spirit has been what is consistent, even with all the other changes we’ve made. We don’t represent any particular style, we just want work that translates into the [multimedia] medium or pushes the medium in some way. We aren’t looking for any particular writing style, we are looking for things that may work in that creative spirit. 

PK: How much does your own aesthetic include what the work might be?  In terms of the quality of the writing,are you looking for MFA students or are you looking for previously published writers? 

AT: We like to have new writers, and we have established writers.  If you look through our archives, you’ll see we have both pretty well represented.  I really try not to let my aesthetic dominate, because we are a collaborative endeavor.  I’ve brought on several contributing editors who do almost all of the first-round selections. I trust them implicitly. I think they do a better job than me, and it helps keep the writing selections varied. And since we have different artists interpreting each issue, each piece is totally unique.  For me, my work is actually something I like, because Born is not about a single vision--it’s more about coming together to see what comes out of this creative mish-mash.  As a writer, I spend enough time alone with my own head.  I’m not really interested in seeing it perpetuated in a magazine somewhere.  I don’t know, maybe that’s weird for an editor, but I see myself more as the Managing Editor, the person who brought these people on board. I have to make sure we’re true to our mission and that we’re true to the process of matchmaking. I do work to make sure the interpreted piece remains true to the spirit of the original in some way, so sometimes we send a piece back to the designer with suggestions on how to push it a bit.  But other than that, we leave things to the writer and designer.

PK:  How is it different as the editor than the job of the curator?  Online curators are mostly working with the designing artists?

AT: Yes, the curator goes through portfolio submissions from designers and he selects a roster for each issue. The curator doesn’t know what written pieces he’s working with until I send our selections. The curator checks to make sure an artist’s aesthetic doesn’t totally clash with the poem or story he’s matching, but really, we’re tossing everything into the mix to see what comes out, and sometimes what comes out is incredibly amazing.  We’ve had a few pieces that just didn’t work out at all, but that’s rare.

PK:  Do you find that as a publication not easily categorized or even the media representations online, how does that effect the way that people find you?

AT:  We are pretty much word of mouth. We don’t do any advertising. I go to the AWP conferences often, presenting on panels or participating in the book fair, where I just to talk to people and find out the impressions of online magazines within the traditional writing community. That’s been the biggest barrier we’ve had to overcome, a lot of the prejudices that online publications are inferior in some way.  Somehow, paper is automatically better. Also, we’re not really a literary magazine, we’re something in between, and we kind of like being in that realm. We’re not just a literary magazine because we’re about collaboration, and about multimedia as a new publishing medium.  Also, somehow teachers find us, so we get a lot of student readers and instructors using us in the classroom.  Word of mouth has been really important.  We average 30,000 to 40,000 readers--not hits, but readers--per month.  And, for a literary magazine, that’s enormous.  But a lot of the people we reach are not always those who would pick up a traditional literary magazine. Designers see us as a place for creative inspiration, for example.  I’ve had several people tell me, “I don’t really like to read poetry, but somehow the visuals help me understand the poem better”, which is why I think teachers like to use Born in the classroom.  It has accessibility with readers who might not normally pick up poetry. 

PK:  That’s definitely true, and the quality of the writing is really outstanding.  So, my question about the collaboration is, “do you pair up artists and writers” or are they paired together?

AT:  Most of it has been matchmaking, but we have had people say, oh, I have this writer I’m working with – and they show a portfolio and we’ll say, “That looks good.  Go work on a project.”  We’re open though if someone comes up with a proposal and it fits our mission, we’ll go with it.

PK: Matchmaking is tricky.  Certainly, people are very attached to their poems, we know that.

AT: Only particular writers are attracted to Born; it has to be someone who was not too married to how the reader experiences the poem.  Bruce Smith is probably the first person who pointed this out to us. As a person, he’s really open, adventurous. He just wanted to see the poem, literally said “give the poem to the artist and I want to see what they come up with.” If the writer is too wedded to what they think the poem should look like, they probably aren’t for Born.  We had a big publisher contact us, wanting a collaborative relationship with us, and having some of their writers work with Born. But they wanted final editorial control, and they wanted to guide the designer to what they wanted, and we said, “No.  We don’t do that.  It’s completely against our spirit.” People who come to Born are excited about what’s going to happen, they’re like “What’s going to happen to my piece?”

PK:  What expectations do you set for the creative content?  Is the technology ruining the writing?

AT:  No, actually, I use this analogy a lot … There are historical complaints that writing would ruin people’s memories.  Writing was going to ruin our minds, because people will get lazy. We won’t have to memorize things like we used to.  So from the beginning, technology—including writing itself--has impacted people’s perceptions and attitudes towards literature. We see this in poetry’s oral tradition, where there are certain elements that you traditionally see, such as repetition and mnemonic devices, that shape what a poem is.  What we think of as a poem is a reflection of writing technology--you can’t have visual and homonym puns happening in the oral tradition. Stanzas, line breaks – all of these things really come from writing technology; they don’t define what a poem is because poetry came before writing. Now with multimedia, we ask, what happens when you can bring the voice back into the published piece? With streaming, you can actually have the poet or someone else reading the poem as part of the published work. And what happens when the poem can move? Jennifer Grotz –one of our contributing editors – did a presentation with me years ago that was brilliant and discussed how the French literary avant-garde played with synesthesia, visual lyricism, and other elements to bring together visuals with writing.  Some of their concepts are coming to fruition with multimedia.  For me, poetry is so much about the voice, not just in terms of language and tone, but literally you can have the poet’s voice as part of the piece, and you don’t just have to be in the room at a poetry reading to experience it. It’s now available anywhere, anytime. That’s probably one of the main reasons I’m involved in Born – its ability to reach a broader audience. For me, poetry is more than just silently reading it on a page.  It’s not a private experience for me, and I think Born makes poetry a more a public experience.

PK:  I do think about it as I wonder what might be lost with multi-media? One thing I know that is changing in terms of what’s changing is the loss of letters between poets, and that’s one of the forms that it being lost in our modern poetry tradition.  What might be lost in terms of these forms?

AT: Well, my main thinking is that there’s always going to be writing, and the internet requires writing: email, etc. I agree with those who suggest multimedia is going to create an aesthetic shaped by these new technologies. And also, Born is a different animal when it comes to literary publications. A great illustration of this is Timothy Liu’s reaction to the piece we did with him. He spoke on a panel with me and he said he felt the Born piece is the definitive version of the poem because it captured its emotional experience. Because the music and the visuals amp the immediate emotional experience. I was floored to hear him say this, and that’s a rare reaction, because most writers tell me they see this as a separate medium—they see their piece in Born as a separate artwork from the original written version.  I did an event with Marvin Bell once and he joked that he wished there was a poetry television station, and imagined it would look something like Born. I guess my point is that poetry has so many different expressions and schools of thought and different little communities. Born is just one of the communities, doing its own thing with poetry. And prose. We’re working with prose, but it’s more of a challenge; it’s hard not to imitate print.

PK: With so many schools of thought about poetry and poetics, and so the electronic media is one more facet of this expression.

AT: I hope it is … I hope that Born and these other online publications don’t supplant other expressions.  Printing didn’t kill the poetry reading. People still go to hear readings because it is an experience you can’t get on the page.

PK: There is an experience with multimedia and so the technology driven artist is very new and quite fascinating.  When you’re talking about a publication that’s only been around for 11 years, it’s still early in its career. 

AT: But in internet years, we’re really old. One last thing: the advantages, there’s really great things about publishing on the Web, but also some disadvantages. We have limited accessibility.  I can’t currently look at Born at home, because my computer is so old that I can only view it at work. So, there are barriers as well as opportunities. Another disadvantage that’s often discussed is the impermanence of multimedia. If something is in a book, it’s not going to disappear off your bookshelf if the publisher goes out of business. Things disappear all the time when you get onto the internet. Though we don’t really worry about that at Born because we’re about multimedia’s uniqueness; we see the advantages. For example, our archive is always accessible and includes every piece we’ve ever done, even the early more “primitive” works, when people were trying to figure out what to do with this technology.  If someone wants to see my work in a traditional print journal, they have to go to the publisher and request a back issue; they have to figure out what issue my work was in, hope there are some issues left, etc, whereas you can just hop onto Born.  Everything is there.  So, a piece is always alive for us—unless you have a really old system or the plug-in is outdated.  So, there’s the good and bad. But the good is why I’m involved in multimedia. This is going to sound weird—but having come from a strong science background, I tend to have a “natural selection” view of poetry’s diversity. Poetry will survive as long as there are all these different species out there.

About the Interviewer:
Pamela Kallimanis has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Poetry and a BA in English Literature from Stony Brook University. She lives in the Bronx, New York. She is a part-time writing instructor and yoga teacher. She writes poetry and is at work on Zero Elegies which chronicle the lasting effects of 911 on New Yorkers.  She can be reached at pkallimanis@slc.edu.