Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Interview

[Diane Sawyer takes her seat, turns on her tape recorder, and straightens the lapel on her blazer. She takes a sip of coffee. We are at Starbucks. A homeless man is looking at her, and she's a little unsettled. But she's a professional; she shakes it off]

Diane Sawyer: I'm fascinated by this idea. How did you come up with it?

Brian: Well, we were sitting around one day.

Carolyn: You were sitting around. I was working.

Brian: I was sitting around. And I decided, why not make my own job? Why not start a literary magazine? Then Carolyn came up with the nuts and bolts. The concept.

DS: What experience do you two have with the magazine industry? Or publishing?

Brian: None at all. Which, is already coming back to haunt us. I learned that most literary magazines are bound, and have covers, and that's news to me. I mean. I didn't know.

Carolyn: I used to subscribe to New Letters, back in Kansas City, but yeah, pretty much in the same boat there. Whoops. Kinda blew the whole binding and cover thing.

DS: So it must be difficult for you. What do you find most difficult?

B: Well, uh...

C: Um, maybe building a following? Getting people to read our stuff when all they really want to do is cry about the failing of the US Economy...but I'm getting a little preachy there.

DS: Fair. Next question. What are you feeling as you near production of your first issue?

B: Pressure. Enormous Pressure.

C: And not the good kind.

B: Yeah, not the kind that pro athletes feel in the locker room. This is more like being slowly crushed by a freight elevator pressure. I mean, we have three subscribers now?

C: Yeah, three.

B: We're being interviewed by Diane Keaton

C: Sawyer

B: Sawyer?

DS: Yes, Diane Keaton was an actress in Woody Allen movies.

B: Whatever. I'm just saying. Fame came on us pretty quick. It seems just yesterday I was walking to this very Starbucks, and a homeless man asked me to buy him a sandwich. And I told him that I didn't have any change to spare. And I still don't have change to spare. But. I'm a famous editor now. I've..well...we've created this great product. 3 subscribers. Almost 60 Facebook likes. It's different. I'm different.

C: We're talking Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point here. One second we're not tipped, the next second we're tipped.

B: Without a doubt.

[A Ruckus in Starbucks. Homeless man tries to steal Diane Sawyer's tape recorder. He trips over a laptop cord. A man in skinny jeans hands the tape recorder back to Diane Sawyer as the thief scrambles down the street.]

DS: So what's next for the editors of Kindling

B: We have a few new ideas

C: Yeah, but they're probably really far off.

B: We'd like to make a magazine with poems printed on toothpicks. You know like they do the names on the grains of rice?

C: We've also been toying with the idea of just having blank pages. But we can't really figure out how to make it look like we're not just selling Moleskine's or whatever.

B: You can lead a horse to water, and all that.

DS: Right. Well, that's all I have.

[Diane thanks everybody for their time, and hops back into her Helicopter that takes her back to ABC's news desk]

Monday, September 26, 2011

First Post

So Kindling blogs, too. There will be more posts and stuff for everybody to read. Eventually, we might even get some of our fans and contributors to post cool stuff here.

It may be ambitious. Printing the magazine seems like enough work...but so what. At The Whittled-Down Log: A Kindling Venue, there may be book reviews, news, and/or random jibber-jabber. Who knows, maybe one of our contributors might want to post something.