By Maria Asimopoulos
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Three Towson students sat in a candlelit room, listening to jazz music, munching on saltwater taffy and discussing their new magazine. The idea that they had once mulled over in a diner had become a reality. Their Poe-inspired literary magazine was live.
Ashley Wagner, Matt Lee and Sean Sam launched the first issue of Ligeia, an online literary magazine, on Sept. 1.
Lee, 29, and Sam, 30, first discussed the idea of starting their own lit mag over some drinks at the Towson Diner.
“It all started as kind of a half joke,” Lee said. “We were sort of bemoaning some of the big name corporate literary magazines, these giant institutions that are out there. We have writers just as good, if not better, right here in our own backyard who just aren’t really finding a platform to showcase their work.”
next issue of their literary magazine Ligeia. Photo by Maria Asimopoulos.
Ligeia publishes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Lee and Sam take care of the prose, while Wagner, 22, handles poetry submissions.
They solicited all the work in their first issue from authors who had already been published, including Noah Cicero, Sean Kilpatrick and Esther Ra. After the first issue came out, they opened submissions to the public and were met with support they hadn’t expected.
“I had a really easy time when I was soliciting, and then after that initial release, I was nervous about people actually submitting,” Wagner said. “We don’t have this platform yet. I was nervous we’d get very few submissions, and that ended up not being true.”
They’re hoping to get more submissions from more local writers going forward. They named their magazine after Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” in part to encourage local readership and submissions.
“That story, ‘Ligeia,’ not maybe the most well-known Poe story, but certainly, I think, a very powerful piece of fiction,” Lee said. “It deals a lot with mortality, and duality, and good versus evil, and all these big lofty philosophical concepts, and we like that.”
While the trio don’t have a specific theme in mind for submissions, Lee said their tastes do tend toward the weird and dark.
“We encourage people to send in the weird stuff that they’re nervous to send into other places,” Wagner said. “There are magazines that do ask for horror specifically and stuff like that, but we’re not specifically horror, even though we’re Poe-inspired. We just want weird.”
Wagner also said that they aspire to create an “atmosphere” online that reflects that weirdness.
“We talked about how we liked Baltimore City’s grimy charm as our aesthetic,” Sam said with a laugh.
“Our first real meeting came not too long after Trump’s rats comment about Baltimore, and we thought that would be a good thing to lean into,” Wagner said.
“We’re proud of our vermin,” Sam said.
Sam is a recent graduate of Towson University with a master’s degree in professional writing, and Wagner and Lee are still graduate students there. They met through the program and got to work on the magazine through spring and summer in order to get the first issue out in time for fall.
They decided to publish online because printing copies is much more expensive. Sam handled web design after consulting the team and gathering inspiration from other websites, literary or not.
“I think every step that I’ve taken for design is like, what’s the best that I can make this look without spending any money?” Sam said. “Everything was designed by hand. I wasn’t sure that it was going to be 100 percent done, but I did get it done, and I think it turned out pretty well.”
The three of them want to make custom merchandise and potentially publish a “best of” print edition once a few issues have been published, but they’re restricted by finances right now.
“I want to be real about that. Lit magazines, when they’re small and you just start one, they don’t pay,” Wagner said. “They don’t pay at all.”
They have jobs outside of the magazine to supply their incomes. Lee acts and teaches drama, Wagner works for Brooks Publishing, and Sam just got hired at Hughes Network Systems as a document control specialist.
Lee said they faced some anxiety over whether they’d even be capable of launching a new magazine without money or a big team.
“This was a totally new experience for all of us,” Lee said. “But then you come to find that people you reach out to are super receptive, and everyone’s been super supportive and friendly. So a lot of these anxieties were unfounded, but I think it just comes with starting a new project and not knowing what to expect.”
They’ve received support not only from people submitting their work, but also from Towson’s English Department faculty, including professors Jeannie Vanasco and Dr. Michael Downs.
“Instead of saying this is a useless degree, they’re giving you the possibilities,” Wagner said.
Vanasco is the professor who suggested they start the first issue with solicited work.
“They were so enthusiastic,” Vanasco said. “I shared with them some different lit mags that had an aesthetic that seemed to match what they were going for, and then also thinking about what’s most reasonable. I think they did a great job.”
Vanasco leads the class that designs Towson University’s literary magazine each year, and before that, she had a career in publishing which included working at The Paris Review. She said the biggest challenges in starting a new magazine are getting money and submissions.
“Most people who start lit mags and work at lit mags, a lot of them, they don’t make any money,” Vanasco said. “It’s not a profitable thing, and then as a result you can’t really pay writers. It’s really a labor of love.”
Issues will be uploaded quarterly, with the next release date tentatively set for Jan. 4, 2020. They are open to receiving work by unpublished authors and have already accepted around 20 pieces for the winter edition.
“We really can do this, because there are people out there that do look at the website, and do think, ‘This is what I want my work to appear in,’ ” Wagner said. “We’re just trying to give everyone a voice.”