A Conversation with David Wolach,
Editor of Wheelhouse Magazine and the PRESS Anthology

For Prick of the Spindle, Vol. 3.4, December 2009

By Eric Weinstein

David Wolach, editor of Wheelhouse Magazine and the 2009 PRESS anthology, talks with me about the creation of the on-line magazine, its associated projects, and the greater role poetry and creative writing play in contemporary social and political life.

EW: Tell me a little bit about what gave impetus to the creation of Wheelhouse. What were your motivations, goals, vision? What personal experiences inform the magazine?

DW: I was in New York, finishing up with graduate school, working as a union organizer with fellow editor Eden Schulz. I’d spent several years working on my dissertation during the day, or once finishing up with that, organizing workers throughout the northeast, and spending my weekend nights at poetry readings and performances. It was a crazy time, a wonderful time. I was spending some time writing my own prose and poetry, doing some installation work with sound and programming, but mainly my passion for text arts manifested in giving papers on works that activated me, and hearing incredible poets read/perform, people who helped bridge for me experiments in text arts and radical politics. Rodrigo Toscano at the Bowery, Kristin Prevallet, Rachel Zolf—these poets, though they didn’t know it then, were my mentors. I’d had editorial experience working in Detroit, my hometown, with the wonderful, deeply important Broadside Press, but then I was a kid, and didn’t take full advantage of it. In New York, now several years later, I was steeped in a world of political and poetical radicalism, reading a lot of contemporary journals, poetry readings everywhere, and my graduate work focused on contemporary experimental music and performing arts. So I was in a very good place for trying new things out. And I had a good vantage point from which to think about what I felt was lacking in the journals and small presses at the time. As the years went by and journals came and went, those lacks kept emerging, and so at some point we decided that we’d try to address them by starting up our own journal and small press dedicated to the intersection of avant-garde text arts and social activism, a journal that would forefront new voices. By “new voices” I mean that we would aim to dedicate at least half our journal to artists who aren’t—or aren’t yet—widely published. So it was fairly straightforward: we wanted a journal that would push boundaries and definitions both politically and aesthetically, one term informing and transforming the other, while doing so by keeping a submissions process open all the time, taking that open submissions process seriously by paying careful attention to whatever would come our way. To me, there’s no reason for starting a journal or press unless you have a reason, and luckily, we had our reasons.

EW: In your mission statement, you call your selection process “collectively anarchist.” Could you say a little more about how the process works? What do you find advantageous (or disadvantageous) about it? What do you look for in submissions?

DW: Sounds redundant, doesn’t it? I guess we put that “collectively” in there to highlight the process, as well as to say, hey, we aren’t crazy middle-class libertarians who smash cars. Anyhow, that’s another feature of our editorial process, cumbersome though it is at times, that I think is a little different. We solicit feedback from past contributors about upcoming issues. We circulate submissions that we feel contributors will find interesting, ask for thoughts on work, try to decide as collectively as possible. Sometimes a piece will be debated quite a bit, other times contributors won’t have much to argue about, and so it’s up to us, the editors, where “editor” really means “curator” or “facilitator” here. And each editor has equal say in realizing the journal and the chapbooks. Though I’m not a member of the Wobblies, I admire their organizational model. I think a consensus model of some kind is ethically important for any organization, and it turns out it’s also strategically efficacious. Other presses that work as collectives—Ugly Duckling, for instance, or Litmus, or Black Radish Books—are often some of the most vibrant, interesting presses, and they do well. Staying in touch with contributors, collaborating with people over time, is what we’re interested in. We knew from the start that we weren't interested in simply ticking off publication credits as some journals seem to be—we wanted a collective that would privilege the often occluded personal relationship part of facilitating artworks, and this is reflective of our political and ethical backgrounds.

EW: Wheelhouse engages in several literary projects that some would label surrealist, such as Project Infini Entendre, “the skeletal outline of a short, short story, to which you must add your touch, your perspective, your voice—by simply filling in the blanks.” Would you agree with that description? What do you think Wheelhouse owes, if anything, to Surrealism or Dada?

DW: That’s an interesting observation—I don’t think surrealism factors into our thinking very much—at least not mine, though that exercise as a sort of mad lib does have its roots in surrealism, maybe more so, Oulipo. Those collaborative projects—between Wheelhouse and anyone interested—is a way for anyone, anyone at all, to publish their work, and in so doing, sort of see how their work takes shape as public utterance. To use another French term, it’s a way to essay the creative process, to try it out, and to play with various modes, conventions.

But surrealism, at least in the sense Breton originally thought of it, its insistence on automatic processes and a Freudian paradigm and at times really problematic politics—interesting, but not an aesthetic we’ve really embraced. Dada does shape our aesthetic to some extent, I suppose, in a general or overarching sense, or in the sense that a lot of artists would consider Dada influential. I mean, when I was in middle school and getting my first inklings of what difficult artworks were out there, Dada certainly left its impression on me, maybe scarred me a little. I distinctly remember hearing The Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra,” and having some older kid tell me that this was originally a Hugo Ball poem, later, confused, reading up on who Hugo Ball was. And I certainly remember when I first read the Dada Manifesto, and pretty much all that year I was proudly nonsensical. So, the revelry in nonsense, which arced into an attention to the details of sensuous modes of expression, yeah, I can get behind that. Also, a radical attention to the use value of art is very much what we’re after, that expression of Ball’s—“For us, art is not an end in itself… but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in”—it captures the spirit of a lot of our interests.

I’d say, though, that if there is any historical movement that’s informed us maybe more than any other, it’d be Situationism. Here’s a movement, that for a short period, came as close as any to addressing the deep concerns of the Vienna school, concerns about art and resistance, art and the commodity. Though not overtly Situationist, and though his personal politics I think are dubious, Hakim Bey and Poetic Terrorism come immediately to mind as early influences that probably helped shape my thinking about Wheelhouse.

EW: Wheelhouse also does a lot of work in visual art, including the provocatively-named Suicide Shows. Could you talk a little about your/the magazine’s involvement with visual art in general and the Suicide Shows in particular?

DW: As a magazine and press we’re interested in reconfiguring and re-narrating old divisions: politics/art, poetry/fiction, visual art/poetry. We’re interested in having these terms and their supposed referents translate into and through each other. The only thing that we hope will keep these distinctions alive is their conventions and histories, which we hope will serve as sides of a sort of dialectic.

We’re also fortunate to have Eden Schulz as co-founder of the journal. Eden, besides being a full-time union organizer, is also a visual artist, is trained in visual arts. She is involved in every visual art element of the journal, from design to playing the lead in working through visual art submissions and curating works for the issues. As designer for a lot of the labor movement’s posters and websites, she’s constantly amazing everyone.

The Suicide Shows, which we’ve done in Detroit, Seattle and in New York, are an important part of our collective’s interest in reclaiming public space. When I was in high school growing up in Detroit, growing up poor and part of what was a necessarily underground LGBT community, I was really aware of class, gender, and race divisions in ways those outside the city weren’t. I volunteered for the Heidelberg Project, which took a whole condemned neighborhood and turned it into a sort of junk-art installation—part reclamation project, part artwork, part protest. Since then I’ve come to have political qualms with that project, but have always been interested in how art can inform and be informed by its contexts, where contexts are usually privately owned spaces where landlordliness rules the day, where we’re all shackled and beholden by corporate interests. There are no more common areas, and people are treated as commodities, and that’s it—but it rarely occurs to us that dominant forms of protest (legal actions, petitioning, picketing) can work hand in hand with a more bottom-up attitude: just because the sign says “keep out” doesn’t mean you have to keep out. So, one way I thought of reclaiming public space was to have art openings in foreclosed or condemned spaces, sneak in there, put up some art, and then perform obeying, that is, to obey the keep out sign, such that those who attend the opening have to imagine the art instead of actually seeing it. It’s both protest and installation, an installation that says the real art, the really important work here, is the injustice, what’s being done to us in the name of private interests, and if you think that privatization doesn’t affect our aesthetic practices, then you’re lying to yourself.

Since moving out here to Olympia, since Wheelhouse editors live in three different time zones now, we’ve had less opportunity to organize Suicide Shows. But we have organized several other guerilla projects, and intend to do more in the near future.

EW: One of my favorite aspects of the magazine is that once an artist has contributed, he/she may consider him/herself a member of the Wheelhouse Arts Collective. What motivated you to continue to actively include artists in the magazine after their appearance in a single issue, and what kind of participation do you look for from members of the collective?

DW: Though we’re a journal and press, we’re really committed to forming and maintaining a community of artists, writers, alternative learners. Publishing in and of itself is only so interesting—it doesn’t feed one’s hunger for a community of interests. Building an artistic community—or, as I prefer, a collective—helps us rethink what is possible, pushes each of us outside our ethical and aesthetic comfort zones. Online publications can really easily and unwittingly capitulate to or simply become a part of the vast landscape of alienation and dehumanization that is our capitalist culture, that is much of hyperspace. Already recognizing the limitations of this medium, we’re always looking to get outside it, as well as to use it in unusual, less dehumanizing ways. Of course it’s a major challenge—establishing a collective, one that isn’t static but that is alive, involving past contributors in the larger questions of Wheelhouse, and I’d be lying to you if I said that we’re not always struggling to realize our hopes in this regard. It’s not as if any journal, online or otherwise, is going to be in and of itself a community, a living, breathing organism. It’s not like we can be a collective without face to face contact, etc. And even then, it’s difficult.

But inviting members of the collective to be as active as they’d like to be in realizing Wheelhouse projects, we get extremely interested when past contributors bring new ideas to the table, ones that are doable. Because we’re all working and busy, and because we’re a small group, it’s unfortunate that we can’t do more projects—like PRESS, or our guerilla poetry / visual art collaborations—but I think as time goes on and more people get involved in deeper ways, we’ll be able to do more without losing sight of our aesthetic and socio-political interests.

As far as receiving work, we receive quite a lot, and it’s been difficult to keep up. Upon first receiving work, at the first of every month we split up the submissions, one reader per x number of submissions. Work that is recommended by one of us then gets discussed—is often sent to past contributors for comments, and so forth, until, finally, at a later meeting, we vote based on all the discussions—the yeses, nos, maybes, why this work fits the issue and in what ways, etc. That’s how it goes for the vast majority of work we publish.

EW: What’s in store for Wheelhouse in 2010?

DW: We’re really excited for 2010, as a lot of new projects are in the works. In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing Wheelhouse 9, which will feature new work from Rachel Zolf, Tina Darragh, Brenda Iijima, Julian Brolaski, Ben Friedlander, and many new voices in poetry, prose, and film. Around the same time we’ll be releasing several new chapbooks, including a really amazing book by Uche Nduka that will, along with two other books, be our first in a new series of limited run letterpressed chapbooks, slated for summer 2010. We’ll also have our hands full with our ongoing series, PRESS, which explores through readings, performance, conferences, and guerilla projects, the intersection of radical text arts and radical politics. CA Conrad is up first—he’ll be giving a reading, then doing a (Soma)tic workshop ending in a PACE action. Following Conrad will be events out here in Washington with Lydia Davis, then Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, and Eleni Stecopolous. PRESS has been really generative in that it’s co-sponsored by The Evergreen State College, and so students and other communities have the opportunity to interact in dynamic ways. By summer’s end we hope to have done another Suicide Show. So we’re busy, and we’re extremely excited about what’s around the bend.

David Wolach is a text and multi-media artist and is professor of poetry, poetics, & philosophy of language and music at The Evergreen State College. Visit Wheelhouse Magazine at www.wheelhousemagazine.com.

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