A Few Lines Magazine

AFLM was an independent literary magazine that ran from June 2011 to June 2012.

Founding

A few weeks before my college graduation I walked by one of the humanities buildings and heard Andrew - a guy I'd been in a few classes with who liked to talk and share cigarettes with me - called me over and asked me if I knew anybody who knew anything about magazine printing.

Apparently he and a few of his friends (all Lit majors) had been kicking around the idea of starting a literary magazine. He had no idea that I had been doing layout design for years and had worked on the staff of five print publications at that point. So I sat down with Andrew and his friends and lit a cigarette and told them all the things they were getting wrong about running a magazine, and A Few Lines Magazine was born.

Production

Andrew grabbed a gmail address and created a blogger site, I worked on logo design and started an email thread, and slowly people - and submissions - came to us. Andrew's wonderful girlfriend, Claire, was a grad student who taught in the writing center of a local community college. She became our copy editor and vitally important to the whole operation. Ryan and Nick were a couple of the other founders, and they put in a huge amount of time screening submissions for the editorial board to pare down. After just a couple months, we had enough content for an issue.

Claire worked over every submission, teaming up with me to discuss poetry formatting and punctuation (an interesting concern I hadn't encountered much in previous layout work) and when I had all the words from her, I put them on the pages. Our first issue was somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty pages, 8.5"x5.5" and perfect-bound. We ordered about a hundred of them from the printer I'd gotten to know through doing program design for an infosec conference. The first issue was printed in black and white, the sales of the first issue let us put color in the subsequent issues (the art had color, and there was a spot color to identify each category of submission).

Exciting things happened with the magazine. We held poetry readings (one of which was attended by our wonderful Chaucer professor who also taught the senior seminar where Andrew and I met), we sold posters of the cover, we sold a few issues through the local indie record store, we ran a daily blog with content from all the editors (though I think I was the only one who stuck to the schedule and I also managed the blog), we started a chapbook press and produced an entire chapbook with a poet from Colorado. We hosted a release party and reading for it and started producing a second chapbook for the same poet. We were invited to a small press conference and put on a panel to answer questions about running an indie magazine.

Collapse

We printed three issues and compiled a fourth before everything fell apart.

Three of the editors were on a summer trip to teach English in China when the joint bank account we shared (which we started with five people on it because we were a bunch of doofy college kids who didn't know better) started to drain. There wasn't much there in the first place, but it was gone quickly and then it started going negative. Claire and I were the only account-holders who were still in the US and could visit a bank branch, and we couldn't reach the other three to tell them to cut up their fucking debit card because we'd already accumulated about $150 in overdraft fees. The bank said we needed two account-holders to close the account, and we had to pay off the fees first. I used the cash I was supposed to use for the fourth issue to cover the fees, and Claire and I signed the form that ended the magazine as a financial entity.

Post-Collapse Malingering

We never came back from that. I hung out with Claire and Andrew a few more times, Ryan became a grad student and taught our poetry chapbook for a semester, everybody stopped writing on the blog and eventually I revoked everyone else's admin access. I published the final issue as a PDF online and linked to PDFs of the other issues to be our vast and trunkless legs of stone.