It is 2003, and those sages who not long ago were wringing their hands over the Death of the Book seem to have scattered and blended into the hills, gone the way of millennial doom decreers and Y2K hoarders. (No doubt a few still survive in culverts or caves, clutching their quills and acid-free copies of The Gutenberg Elegies and Poetry Could Have Mattered.)

But while dire prophecies about the future of the book were often heard in the 1990s, even then few seemed to lose sleep worrying about the death of the literary magazine. Is this because the idea of a magazine matters less to readers than the idea of a book? Or is it because the magazine has never pretended it would last in one permanent form? In any case, the very popularity of the phrase print journal, now bandied about in bookstores, libraries, and wherever else the printed word would most like to hold sway, proves that the heyday of the online journal has begun.

Electronic journals are inexpensive to produce, and for those online editors who recall struggling for both funding and autonomy from their sponsors, this is an especially freeing revelation. As Steven Kelly, who founded the U.K.’s first literary online-only magazine, observes, “If the Richmond Review had to cover print costs, it wouldn’t have come into existence in the first place.” Like Kelly, who says that the Richmond Review is “at heart a print journal, just done online,” John Tranter, founder and editor of Jacket, sees his journal as “an old-fashioned print magazine in disguise.” It’s “printed” in full color and designed for readability, he says, and “gets distributed all around the world instantly, more or less for nothing.”

Excitement generated by a change in the method of producing magazines is not new. Nearly two hundred years ago, in his study The History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas pointed out that the “circulation of Gazettes” made possible by the printing press in the 18th century was revolutionary. Never before, he wrote, were journals “so cheap, so universally diffused, and so easy of access. And never were they actually perused by so large a majority of all classes since the art of printing was discovered.” Like those early gazettes, electronic journals are easily distributed, if not “universally diffused.” Whether or not they are yet “easy of access” or “perused”—or even quickly skimmed—is debatable. Opinions differ, but even many of those who are fascinated by the idea of online journals agree that reading poetry, fiction, and essays on a screen is still not as comfortable as they assume it will be in the future. But are we waiting for technology to catch up with our needs, or are we waiting to form new reading habits? And if the paper page is physical and sensual in a way that the screen is not, does it especially seem so now that we have been asked to imagine life without it?

When asked about what advantages a printed journal has over an online journal, David Hamilton, editor of the Iowa Review, says that print “in our culture signifies a more personal, one-to-one, meditative relation with the reader, and so it seems to speak in a quieter, more personal voice.” But, he adds, there are those who may not find this an advantage and, as generations change, this apparent difference won’t necessarily remain true. Still, Hamilton believes that those who read online may be more “roamers” than “readers.” This is reminiscent of Sven Birkerts’s suspicion, typed in a real-time online interview published in Atlantic Unbound in 1995, that writing might be replaced by “typing.” The main difference between electronic reading and paper books, he typed, is that “paper books dead-end you on the page and drive you back into yourself, while electronic writing sends you into the strange sorcery of the circuit.” Birkerts develops this idea further in a later essay, “Sense and Semblance: The Implications of Virtuality,” arguing that when reading on the screen, “whatever one reads, and however one reads, it is never with the totality in view. Reading from a screen is like traveling from coast to coast with only adjoining maps as guides.” The thought that such transcontinental roaming should be taken seriously is a basic premise of online journals. And indeed, after a surprisingly prolonged rite of passage, online journals have become—while not yet de rigueur or old hat—at least accepted.

Although any writer could publish work on her own Web site (and many do—self-publishing has gotten much easier since Leonard and Virginia Woolf were setting type for their Hogarth Press books), where one publishes still seems to matter. So the challenge for online journals, and for print journals seeking to diversify, is how to establish credibility. For some, this credibility has to do with maintaining the editorial standards set by their print counterparts. For others, credibility depends on originality and innovation.

Presumably editors of online journals will always hope for readers, but the idea that they do not need to depend on them for either approval or financial support seems to have fostered a new spirit of experimentalism. Writers and designers now realize that enthusiasm and hard work alone might sweep a project along and carry it onto the screen, where it will either be seen or not seen, now or at a later time (the Internet is busy redefining timeliness). In this sense, online journals have become the open studios of editors, writers, and designers. And these studios often produce collaborative pieces rather than work by a single artist or writer. This emphasis on collaboration and process rather than on a final polished product, combined with the excitement about the new medium, seems to be generating a new media renaissance. This idea of birth and rebirth is explored with enthusiasm in Born Magazine’s Birthing Room and Just Born sections, where some of the most innovative collaborative work on the Web can be found (other sites include arras; BeeHive; Cauldron & Net; and the Iowa Review Web). Anmarie Trimble, Born’s editor since 2000, describes the mission of the magazine as trying to “bring together artists of different genres” who collaborate in order to “interpret into the medium.” For those unfamiliar with interactive media, adds contributing editor Jennifer Grotz, turning to avant-garde traditions such as Baudelaire’s concept of synesthesia, Mallarmè’s “theory of typographical emphasis,” and Apollinaire’s “visual lyricism” might help readers to understand the work that they encounter in Born. Pieces that illustrate these concepts include “Afterbody” by Bruce Smith (www.bornmagazine.org/projects/afterbody [3]), “Story Problem” by Terri Ford (www.bornmagazine.org/projects/storyproblem/sproblem.html [4]), and “Silent Movie” by Carl J. Buchanan (www.bornmagazine.org/projects/silentmovie [5]).

The role that technology plays in new media writing further encourages collaboration. And yet, as Thomas Swiss, editor of the Iowa Review Web, observes, “While the art world remains open to collaborative work in the long shadow of Duchamp’s experiments with Man Ray, the shared labor of producing art in Warhol’s Factory, and the many hands needed to make a film, the literature world has always had a hard time accepting collaborative work, even in our digital age.”

Even some editors of online journals remain wary of what has come to be called new media writing. Jacket’s Tranter is blunt about his doubts: “New media work doesn’t interest me much: The content is so often lousy. The artists remind me of rabbits with their eyes dazzled in the blinding glare from the new medium, whatever it is.” (He does, however, make an exception for Brian Stefan’s site, arras, which he admires.)

Editors of respected print journals are naturally wary of compromising their journals’ print reputations, and some hesitate to include work on their Web sites that does not also appear on the printed page. Kenyon Review editor David Lynn says, “Magazines that publish some stuff on the Web and other stuff in print run the risk of losing editorial credibility, especially as to standards.” But he adds, “There are enormous opportunities as well, given the low cost and unlimited space on the Web.” And although the Kenyon Review site now features only subscription information, tables of contents, biweekly excerpts from current issues of the Review, and information about summer programs, within the next year the entire archives of the journal will be available online.

The Iowa Review and the Iowa Review Web offer an example of how a print and online journal can happily merge and then peaceably diverge; while IRW began as an offshoot of the Iowa Review, the two parts are now under different editorship and share only the first page of their Web sites. But although the two journals are now bound formally only at their point of departure, Hamilton, who continues to edit the Iowa Review and who, together with Martha Conway, Joe Ranft, and Brian Lennon, gradually put the Iowa Review Web into motion, sees them as “complementary, not antagonistic.” For Swiss, it is important to continue to emphasize the connection between print and screen: “The relationship between print literature and digital literature is not one of rupture, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting. That’s why we bring print literature into the site in every issue…to show relationships, to make the site a place where you can see print lit, digital lit, and digital art as all of a piece.”

In many cases the line between print and screen is more rapidly blurring, and many print journals have also developed online identities. One of these is Conjunctions, whose online incarnation is Web Conjunctions. Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions, thinks of them as equally legitimate publications, noting as an example that references to Shelley Jackson’s and Christopher Sorrentino’s work, which appeared only on Web Conjunctions, were included in the Twentieth Anniversary Issue. He and the volunteers who oversee Web Conjunctions view the two journals “holistically,” each “extending and complementing the other.” As proof of how well the two media work together, he offers the example of John Moran’s Everyday Newt Burman, “an authentically innovative music-theater performance piece whose script you can read in Conjunctions: 28, Secular Psalms, while listening simultaneously to a production tape online.”

The Exquisite Corpse is another print journal that has created a second, more fluid identity for itself on the Web. Its 12th cyberissue, in fact, is devoted to celebrating the Mississippi River. In an e-mail written on a plane as he was flying to Baton Rouge, editor Andrei Codrescu described how the project came about:

It began with a call to our contributors and subscribers along the Mississippi to send ideas for a documentary film about the river, ideas that somehow engage the river artistically. The response was tremendous: everything from music written specifically for the film to conceptual-environmental events, and, of course, poetry, art, and fiction. We posted every response with e-mail addresses so that the contributors could begin writing each other and developing their ideas further. This is an ongoing issue we keep adding to as replies keep coming in, and the issue itself is the evolving script for the film—which will be shot this year and finished hopefully in time for the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase on December 20, 2003.

One clear advantage that the online magazine has over its print counterpart is its ability to contain more material and to reach a wider audience. When asked how the two versions of the journal differ, Codrescu explained, “The printed and cyber Corpses are different creatures in many respects: While the editing is just as careful, we are able to present entire novels (we serialized six novels), artwork in color, ten times as much poetry, and instant reader responses.”

Online magazines have both their nostalgic skeptics and their enthusiastic champions. After all, both Birkerts’s “Sense and Semblance,” in which he rather mournfully predicts that “specialization and teamwork—the game plan of the sciences—will become the procedure of art as well,” and Rebecca Seiferle’s essay “Illuminated Pages,” in which she observes that “the advantage of limitless space is that the Web lends itself easily to projects, to the passionate obsession,” were inspired by the same new medium. Whether or not this passion will dim, as novelty settles into necessity, remains to be seen. But perhaps Paul Valéry envisioned our new need for the World Wide Web, if not for new media writing, when in 1928 he offered this prophecy: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

And he might have been interested to hear of the innovative American Sign Language project being planned for Slope’s fall issue, which will include movie clips of ASL poets signing their poems. Ethan Paquin, Slope’s editor, believes that the ASL poetry contest that Rita Rich and Chris Janke have coordinated may be the first of its kind. “Although there’s a lot of talk in the literary world about making sure underrepresented groups of writers have venues in which to express themselves,” Paquin remarks, “until now ASL poets have, to our knowledge, been excluded from these venues, or totally ignored.” The editors hope that Slope’s National ASL Poetry Prize (judged by deaf poet Peter Cook) and the ASL Poetry Feature will help to establish a virtual library of ASL poetry by deaf poets so that, as Rich says, “Deaf and hearing readers can learn more about how deaf poets use wordplay, visual puns, metaphor, and rhyming movements to create meaning.”

The new, less expensive medium of electronic publishing has prompted some editors to question the ideas that have driven traditional publishing ventures. One editor who decided to subvert the value placed on an author’s reputation, for instance, is the anonymous editor of Anon., a new print journal that accepts only unsigned and previously unpublished submissions (www.anon.be [6]). After submitting their work contributors can look at the Web site, where the first lines of accepted and rejected poems are posted with the editor’s comments. According to Editor A, the idea for the journal was inspired by the notion that “breaking the traditional bond between a written work and a single known, or at least knowable, author/persona seems to do something to the way a work is written and read (even when the author’s ‘true’ identity eventually comes out).” So far, fewer than a hundred submissions have been received in seven months. But Anon. has not yet had much publicity, and the editor is still working on the first anonymous chapbook and issue of the print journal. Editor A remains optimistic about the project, convinced that “anonymous publishing has the potential to serve a checks-and-balance role, providing a forum for pressure-free writing, favor-free editing, and bias-free reading.”

Another new and anonymously edited project is “The Human Dictionary” (www.humandictionary.org [7]). The chain invitation for submissions includes a list of “possible guidelines and editorial policies.” These tentative guidelines and policies are presented as a list of “what if” propositions: “What if people were asked to send in a word or phrase, known or invented, along with their own definition of that word or phrase”; “What if these definitions were personal and were attempts to situate the word in a particular time and place and human context”; and “What if they could include anecdotes about the sender’s experience with this word or phrase.” That these what-if suppositions are all presented as statements rather than as questions suggests that the project means to devote itself simultaneously to definition and uncertainty, and thereby to undermine the authority that readers customarily invest in the word dictionary. One can imagine, for instance, what a definition of war or homeland security would look like in a more humanized dictionary, in which words and phrases were defined by placing them within a particular context.

Just as the automobile mimicked the buggy, the shape of the literary magazine on the Web pays tribute to its previously printed form. The familiar rectangular frame of the screen tries to persuade readers that they have entered a small, intimate space where there might be individual pages of poetry and prose (and in some cases even chat rooms and cybercafes), or single Flash performances, instead of a vast matrix of shifting text and images. It is clear that to some extent editors of online journals desire to fence in the territory they are providing, to have the journal’s pages be turned over in the mind if not by the hands, and to have the journal be admired for its individual grace, beauty, scope, novelty, ideas, and edginess. But even as editors can preserve the illusion of what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls “intimate immensity” by offering a small and measurable space, they can also make use of the new possibilities of connection that the medium allows, and thus break economic, cultural, geographic, and linguistic boundaries.

Katherine Swiggart is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Willamette University. Together with D.A. Powell, she edits Electronic Poetry Review (www.poetry.org [8]).