Dear Reader,
Over the last month, I've been slowly reading Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, written by John Cook and Merge co-founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance. Merge is one of the most well-respected indie music labels out there, founded twenty years ago and responsible for some of the most-loved and critically-acclaimed bands of the last two decades, including Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, The Arcade Fire, The Magnetic Fields, and many others. Even after all that success (and millions of records sold), Merge still has only thirteen employees, and seems as committed as ever to putting artists above profits, choosing bands not on the merits of their marketability but on their ability to make great music. (As you may know, this is a philosophy we at Dzanc share as well.)
One of the inevitable conflicts that pervades the book is between bands that want to stay with Merge and build a career with them and those who see it as a launch pad to go on to do something else with a bigger label, and so one of the most interesting chapters takes place during the early-nineties, post-Nirvana explosion of indie-bands signing to major labels. Superchunk, the band which both McCaughan and Ballance play in, was courted by the major labels but eventually took their band from then-indie Matador (which was being bought out) and released their next albums themselves on their own tiny Merge, even as many of their friends and colleagues were accepting bigger paychecks and bigger deals. When asked to reflect back on his friends’ decision, fellow musician Jonathan Marx said that McCaughan and Ballance didn't sign to a major label because, in the end, "they weren't desperate for cash; they weren't desperate for fame. The only thing they were desperate for was the thing that they were doing."
I love that sentiment, and I feel like it describes my sense of so many of the writers and musicians and artists I admire, including the exciting group of writers we've assembled in our February issue. Each one of these writers has created work that I can easily believe produced by a kind of singular intensity, a relentless ambition for the making of art above all else. Obviously, I expect to see these writers continue to become better known, and I wish them the best of luck in getting well-paid for their artistic endeavors, and I assume that all of them have their own goals in those areas. Still, all that feels less important to me than my belief that each of these writers—like most of those we've published—will continue to hungrily pursue whatever being a writer means to them with or without the most obvious kinds of rewards most people trade their best efforts for, because, for truly great writers (and musicians and artists), the work itself is both the goal and the reward.
In this issue, you'll find new fiction by Mark Edmund Doten, Amber Sparks, Lucas Southworth, and M.T. Fallon, as well as novel excerpts from two forthcoming novels, Lily Hoang's The Evolutionary Revolution and Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel. Dawn Raffel and Aaron Plasek contribute two very different kinds of essays, and Peter Schwartz, Nicelle Davis, Henry Kearney, and Patrick Rosal round out the issue with their fine poetry.
In book reviews, we've got coverage of Baby Leg by Brian Evenson, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal by Lydie Salvayre, as well as Anna Clark’s video review of The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov.
As always, thanks to all of our contributors for letting us publish their fine work. Thanks also to everyone who reads the magazine, everyone who sends us submissions, and of course everyone who takes the time to post about the issue to their blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else. We really appreciate your time and talents, and can't thank you enough for sharing them with us.
Sincerely,
Matt Bell
Editor
The Collagist