Pub Crawl: The Normal School

Those of you who attended the 2008–2009 Hugo Literary Series probably remember the wonderful piece done by Aimee Bender involving public sex, written under the Road Trip theme of that evening’s event. The piece Bender wrote and performed is now published in upcoming issue of the brilliant literary journal, The Normal School. In honor of the beginning of this season's Literary Series, and also the publication, we thought it would be only fitting to interview one of editors of The Normal School. Many thanks to Steven Church for his willingness to answer some questions for us.

RM: How did The Normal School get started? What's the story behind the name?

SC: The spirit of The Normal School started in around 2001 with a small writing group in Fort Collins, Colorado, called The Minions, made up mostly of fiction and nonfiction writers who’d recently finished our graduate degrees and wanted something to keep us connected, not a traditional workshop per se, but something collaborative. We did “themed” readings (Evil Twin, Cult, etc.), published a chapbook and collaborated on a fictional guide-book to Fort Collins as well as a Wondercabinet-themed art exhibition in Florida. As members of the group moved away and things necessarily fractured, three members—Sophie Beck, Matt Roberts and I—continued to harbor dreams of another collaborative venture, a literary magazine with a title taken from the names of teacher colleges in the U.S. We liked the title because it seemed both ironically audacious and appropriate to our mission of exploring and expanding the norms of literary magazine publishing. We also like it because it implies a question you have to open the magazine (and maybe your mind) to answer: What is normal?

RM: What books do you have sitting at your bedside? Any great ones?

SC: How about a list? "Inkheart" and "Inkspell" (reading these with my son), a copy of the recent issue of Fourth Genre, Michel Montaigne’s collected essays, "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit, "Fever Pitch" by Nick Hornby, "Pretty Good for a Girl" by Leslie Haywood and Best American Sports Writing (I’m teaching a Sports Writing class this semester at Fresno State). 

RM: I wish I could be in that class! What are a few of the more common mistakes/miscues that make you pass on a submission?

SC: Distracting errors in grammar and mechanics are a pretty sure way to annoy our readers, but really what we spend most of our time talking about are not the miscues but the ways that pieces grab our attention and rise to the top of the pile. Mostly it’s a product of language and voice, a kind of ineffable tension that seems present from word one. There’s nothing really in terms of content (except maybe for cat poems) or form that automatically earns a pass from our readers. We say all the time that we want TNS to be a collaboration and discussion, a kind of collective essaying about literature; and to that end we’ve published a wide variety of styles and voices in the magazine—from the traditional to the eclectic and everything in between.

RM: The Normal School accepts submissions for recipes and other miscellaneous texts. Can you tell us about a few of the stranger ones you've received?

SC: We’ve received and published recipes, letters, collages, lectures, cross-genre and found-texts as well as pieces that might not find a home elsewhere. We pay a lot of attention to layout and design. We published a text-adaptation of Dinty Moore’s “google maps” essay and our Fall issue will feature the text from an online eBay auction. We have an affinity for things that are both fun to read AND smart, artifacts of text that speak to some larger trend or idea.

RM: Do you have any advice for those of us who would love to see our work in The Normal School?

SC: Like most literary magazines, we hope that contributors will read the magazine before submitting, mainly so they can see the range of things we publish and won’t feel they need to write for the magazine. Write for the essay or poem or story and what it demands of you in the dark. Then send it our way. We like to be surprised. We like to learn things, and we like to laugh. Pay attention to language, to your sentences and the way they sound, and make sure the form is serving the piece (rather than the other way around). Send us your best work, and if you have a chance to meet one of us, please come up and say hello. We love to talk about books and writing.

The Normal School considers memoir, personal essays and creative nonfiction with contemporary styles and an attention to language, form and consciousness. They are particularly interested in essays that challenge established norms for the genre or that don’t seem to fit in easy categories of classification. They also like some more traditional sorts of essays and reportage. You can read and submit your work at thenormalschool.com.

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