 "Photo: Courtesy of Wag's Revue")
The "death of print" may be looming, but three seniors don't plan to mourn for very long.
Reacting to what they see as a "powerful stigma" facing online-only literary publications, Will Litton '09, Will Guzzardi '09 and Sandra Allen '09, all members of the improv comedy troupe "Starla and Sons," have launched an exclusively online literary journal with a distinctly print flavor.
The literary quarterly, Wag's Revue, features the work of prominent literary figures of today's Web-minded generation and published its first issue earlier this month.
Released March 21, the debut issue contains work by the Director of the Literary Arts Program and Professor of Literary Arts Brian Evenson and an essay on the "'hipster/douchebag' dialectic" in contemporary culture. It also features exclusive interviews with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Dave Eggers and with founding editor of the literary quarterly n+1 Mark Greif and writer Wells Tower, who recently released a book.
The journal, whose URL is wagsrevue.com, opens with what Litton calls a "hyperbolized scathing manifesto declaring the death of print," in which the three co-founders emphasize their belief that online literature doesn't have to exist in its current state.
With strict editorial controls, Wag's Revue's founders hope to combat the mediocrity they said results from the ability to publish such large amounts of lackluster material on the Web.
"When there's unlimited space to print whatever, you can blog everyday and end up with a crockpot of really mediocre writing," Litton said. "So much is getting published, there's no journal with stringent editorial controls."
The word "wag" in the journal's title means a mischievous joker, and the use of the word "revue" - a collection of theatrical performances - was chosen over "review" because "it's just a little more waggish that way," Litton said in a press release.
Their goal is to selectively establish a body of work that maintains a level of quality equal to print while changing its form of output.
"For literature, it's interesting because there's this incredibly powerful stigma if you're only published on the Web - there's something bastardized about that," Litton said. "A lot of that has to do with the certain aesthetic to holding a book in your hand and smelling it and turning its pages, and also the way that literature is put up on the Internet right now looks very plain and boring."
To fight that stigma, Wag's Revue's online material looks like that of a print journal, complete with an issue cover, table of contents and page numbers.
"We wanted to create a space online that resembles a physical page - that has the same sort of safety and certainty that you can get with print," Allen said.
The founders said they hope for the journal, which is free, to be economically sustainable through its upcoming contest, in which participants pay a small entry fee to submit a piece and have the chance to win $500 dollars in three different literary fields - fiction, nonfiction and poetry - which are the respective interests of Litton, Allen and Guzzardi.
Rather than profit, the trio's goal is to create a reputable literary outlet for upcoming writers of today's online generation, which they hope to maintain for years to come.
They plan to publish Wag's Revue quarterly, with release dates timed to equinoxes and solstices.
"Starla is a model for what happens when we fully commit to something," Allen said. "In a perfect universe, this will take off and be something we do for several years."
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