n+1 founders share magazine-starting experience

Feb. 9, 2011, 2:04 a.m.

N+1 founders Mark Greif and Keith Gessen spoke Tuesday evening on the pleasures and perils of starting a small literary magazine. In a presentation filled with humor and flecked with colorful anecdotes, Greif and Gessen offered advice to aspiring writers and entrepreneurs, sharing stories about the humble beginnings of what has in the last five years become a successful literary enterprise.

Greif, a current co-editor at n+1, opened the evening with a public reading of what he called “The Truth about n+1,” a piece he wrote for the Welsh journal Raconteur, about starting one’s own magazine. His work has also appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times.

n+1 founders share magazine-starting experience
n+1 magazine founder Keith Geissen spoke Tuesday about his experiences starting his own publication (Ian Garcia-Doty/The Stanford Daily).

Discussing his early doubts about founding a literary and political journal, he said, “it’s a foolish act to start a magazine.”

Nevertheless, he launched one.

“I write things that nobody will publish, and my friends do, too,” Greif said.

Greif also recounted the financial troubles that plagued the magazine’s earliest volumes.

“The real source of worry, as it is for all small magazines, was money,” he said.

Greif told tales often as colorful, and as unpredictable, as n+1 itself. From conflicts with Gessen, whom Greif said he frequently wanted to “throttle” during the magazine’s tough early days, to the unexpected pleasures of unpaid literary achievement, Greif offered an unconventional inside look into the world of literary startups.

“All of my life, I had wanted to find out what Bohemia was like, and I did,” Greif said.

Though he suffered from sleepless nights writing content to dreary afternoons looking for distributors, it was all worth it in the end, concluded a smiling Greif.

“People at small magazines work for free, because freedom is what’s at stake,” he said.

Co-editor and co-founder Gessen, who has written for The New Yorker, The Nation and the London Review of Books, took center stage for the last half of the event. Dryly observing that his chief inspiration for starting a magazine was really just to “get out of the house,” Gessen lit up the audience with snippets of startup life, from post-publication parties to late-night editing woes.

Lamenting the fact that n+1’s first two staff parties ran out of beer — a disaster he described as “very traumatizing,” and which led the staff to proclaim that “we would not run out of beer as long as our magazine lives” — Gessen proceeded to elicit appreciative laughter from the audience as he lambasted his alma mater, Harvard.

“The Lampoon was not funny [and] the Crimson was not informative,” he said.

Citing the bad impression he got from Harvard’s literary magazine, the Advocate, which he called “pretentious,” Gessen criticized academic atmospheres that promote “a psychology of constantly trying out for something, but never producing anything for the people around you.”

In the ensuing question and answer session, Greif and Gessen took questions from the audience, which ranged from how best to deal with stubborn writers to the advantages of moving into book format. Concluding the lecture, Greif said, “no one could pay us for what we do.”

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