Interview: Andrew Felsher

In October of 2022, Andrew Felsher and Yehui Zhao launched the first issue of 128 LIT, a print and online literary magazine focused on showcasing international voices and works in translation. The magazine has published excellent writers like Kim Hyesoon and Najlaa Eltom. In 2023, 128 LIT ran a chapbook contest judged by Mona Kareem, Saddiq Dzukogi, and Jacques Fux. The winner—My Women by Yuliia Iliukha, translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv—will be published in 2024. A sample of Yuliia’s writing is available on 128 LIT’s website.

In addition to his work on 128 LIT, Andrew has also written a chapbook, Notes from a Prison Cell, published by Bottlecap Press. In the story, a prison cell becomes self-aware and communicates with a variety of animals and objects. The cell encounters a talking sparrow who says this about creating art: “Sometimes it invented stories that weren’t true, to make the world seem larger and more nuanced.” Over email throughout November 2023, Andrew and I discussed 128 LIT’s mission to make the world larger with stories, and to collapse the distance between arbitrary borders.

First, congratulations! 128 LIT has won CLMP’s 2023 Firecracker Award for Best Debut Magazine. Where did the name of the literary magazine come from?

Thank you, Sean! And thanks for offering to help out in 128 LIT’s infancy before contributing editorially throughout its maturation. It’s difficult to emphasize one irreducible, causal propellant that injected 128 LIT—through a versatile syringe sterilized by editors and contributors—into the arteries of literature and art. That said, there are sonic, thematic, and linguistic dimensions that were highly intentional in the creation of this “128”, which is an exponential number and can be translated into: 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 128. This calculation happened to my literature first in early 2019, when I was working on a second draft of a manuscript that grappled with the exponential. The number occupied many revisions and derivative works of mine. Then, in early 2022, it auditioned for a role as the leading number to hold the platform in place. I was drawn to the exponential dimensions of 128 and how it sounded, too. So perhaps there is a poetic dimension to it? I also figured maybe readers would be subconsciously reminded of “128” whenever they looked at their phone at 1:28 am or 1:28 pm. You’ll notice the time on our phones never seems to be “New Yorker am” or “Paris Review pm.” Do you have any numbers that resonate beyond form and magnitude within you?

I was a philosophy major and had a professor obsessed with numbers and modal logic—I never had a favorite for that reason. What led to the creation of 128 LIT? Was the process different from what you expected, and can you talk about the current mission of the publication?

In the practical world, I’ve wanted (especially in recent years) to be part of a mode that recognizes and responds to the compounding effects of socio-economic-aesthetic conditions. It would be silly to fold a platform and its mission—that interrogates socio-historical geographies and their weaponized apparatuses, and makes new pathways for seeing and situating within an international context and the many wars therein—into a word compressed into the borders of a single language such as, let’s say, English. Numbers become a logical solution to this disorienting conundrum.

In the beginning, I had no expectations. That’s not to say we lacked discipline or a vision that has swelled and solidified over time. Rather, in the early days we were both spontaneous and thoughtful, without betraying the need to be deliberate and tenacious.

And throughout this process I find myself comparing the platform, and the people that make it possible, to basketball and what it takes to win an NBA championship. However, being a competitive person who enjoys basketball’s conversation with poetry and prose, doesn’t always tread sufficiently in the quicksand of literary trends. I guess what I’m trying to say is, Sean, if you could create a starting lineup of writers (dead or alive) to compete for the infinite literary championship, who would play literary point guard? And what kind of coach would you be?

Good question. The positionless era needs a versatile writer. Maybe Rilke—great essayist and poet. He also wrote an underrated novel. What qualities would you say are needed to do this sort of work? How has starting a lit mag changed your own writing?

I’m thinking of a film, Close-up, by the Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, that’s masterfully positionless and would likely play point guard on my literary starting lineup, after surviving the many accusations that would scrutinize the film’s travel documentation to compete on literature’s shrinking island. After all, Close-up, which would likely get searched at literature’s customs, is part documentary and part fiction. It obliterates the distinctions between the viewer and filmmaker and filmed, fiction and reality, victims and perpetrators. Kiarostami’s masterpiece is sophisticated, humorous, poetic, and dense with joy, where life and humanity emerge like weeds through the cracks of made sufferings and bizarre processes. I would trust it handling the ball for a team competing for the literary championship. It would know when to pass to lyrical personal essays and layered fiction compositions and when to take a timeout to let theory give its X’s and O’s. I wonder if poetry would have its feet set in the corner, waiting to heave up its most concise haiku. And I think the film would, of course, pass the ball as time was running out, a deteriorating temporal window through which only AI and Quantum Computing would possess the skills to produce a full novel that would score the game-winning shot.

Like the blurred yet highly magnetic space between imposter and artist, filmmaker and film viewer, the magazine has seeped into my writing. I noticed this first during the fall of 2022, after our first issue was released. We had opened for unsolicited submissions for the first time and received hundreds, many of which were really good. I noticed the writer within me started to look over my shoulder at this selection process, where so many pieces were thoughtfully rejected. This writer quickly became nervous, wondering if he would be accepted by the editor of 128 LIT, or if he would suffer a rejection. Just like the low acceptance rate of the magazine, my self-acceptance rate would have been prestigiously low. In a convoluted way, though, this verdict has been oddly liberating for me as a writer. Once you realize how hard it is to please yourself, you have no choice but to defy this and not care about what you think of yourself. My writing grew. I started to have more joy and, of course, had no idea what genre my writing was attempting to please. Just like two orbiting masses in the universe, the magazine and my writing exhibit gravitational pull and mysterious alignments and events.

What criteria do you use to decide which submissions to accept or reject? How do you maintain a balance between showcasing established writers and providing opportunities for emerging or underrepresented voices?

Yehui Zhao (co-founder, artist, and filmmaker) and I were so impacted by third cinema films and filmmakers like Kidlat Tahimik, artists like Frida Kahlo, and writers such as Frantz Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid, Franz Kafka and Wang Xiaobo. We look for pieces that have a sense of the world and its pains and contradictions without being overly didactic and without abandoning joy and love, that have the ability to evoke a wide range of emotions. We were lucky to have works very early on by known writers we loved like Vi Khi Nao, Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, jennifer jazz and Jacques Fux. There were many moving parts, but it gradually came together well. With each subsequent piece that was considered, we thought about how they would fit into the overall composition of the platform. Once a solid foundation was set across genres, it was natural for the platform to grow organically and attract readers who had overlap with our sensibilities, so when we opened up for unsolicited submissions for the first time, we found so many incredible people from all over the world who wanted to have their work be part of this project. And many emerging poets and writers were honored to have their pieces alongside internationally-celebrated and award-winning writers. Similarly, our multi-talented, multi-lingual, and diverse editors made the selection process effective in elevating underrepresented voices, especially those that weren’t prominent in the American literary canon. Most of our contributors are not American and non-western-hegemon in their experiences and tastes.

Concerning financial foundations, some prestigious and well-funded print magazines have arrived and disappeared in 128 LIT’s time (Astra Magazine comes to mind). How do you balance financial pressures with art? Can you also talk about maintaining a magazine that looks professional without excessive overhead costs?

Money nowadays is not kind to literature and writers on this kaleidoscopic waiting list. Still, it has been important to me to pay the contributors something even if it is small. Ideally, I would like those dedicated to literature to be paid like the top positionless basketball players. Lebron James is effectively positionless and international in scope. At his prime he could play and guard effectively any position. His salary this year is $47.1 million per year. Did you know last year that would have come to around $24,000 per minute he played on the floor? The most talented positionless literature, especially if found in small presses, tends to become giddy if it gets paid 5 cents a minute. I was attending a reading when 128 LIT was becoming increasingly known, and someone who’s involved in grants and funding for literary organizations asked me questions related to funding, to which I blurted, “We need at least $500,000.” They looked at me like I was insane. I think my problem is that I want literature so badly to be a professional sport. I’m also an enormous advocate for a living wage for artists and writers and pretty much the whole population, anything that would help us forget, even momentarily, about the mountain of unsterilized razor blades that literature and debt asks us to climb in order to expect money or not think about money.

Regardless, I’ve viewed this platform like something of a love letter to literature and art. That’s why I volunteer. I obsess. I forget about the many me’s arriving and departing from this place. I don’t remember ever writing a love letter, because I think the recipient will give me a lucrative contract to compete against the best lovers in the world so I can quit my day job. We’ve wanted as many people to experience this platform as possible, especially those who are impoverished by the world and the apparatus of literature and all its containers and factories. Our website doesn’t have advertisements. We care about the experience and aesthetic of the page. I wouldn’t put an advertisement for an exotic sports car in a love letter. 

The design and layout is all Yehui Zhao’s work. Her risograph prints were adapted in the header. I think what makes the platform special is how art and literature have been in constant communication from the beginning, when on the day before we started the magazine, I said to Yehui, “Hey, do you want to start a literary magazine? You can design and I’ll deal with the writing.” Soon, we brought in a really a versatile and talented team. Your help was invaluable, having run your own magazine, LIGEIA, coupled with your facility with HTML and CSS. And Yehui knew some coding too, so implementing a clean and organized website happened without much disturbance. I think the timing, the versatility of the team, and my desire to be the best and to give myself to literature has helped sustain this project. I believe in what we’re doing and I want to continue to find new ways to make this a place an opening, and a possibility.

Thanks, Andrew, I was happy to help. You have recently written and published an illustrated chapbook, Notes from a Prison Cell, through Bottlecap Press. In the story, a prison cell is an art installation that becomes self-aware. How did this chapbook take shape?

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I played with perspective, situating myself within the socio-economic and literary landscape. Like countless others, I realized people and their circumstances, identities and expressions are collisions of so many historical, linguistic, economic, emotional and artistic forces. To depict a human without the countless inhuman forces that form them felt limiting and even deceptive. A prison cell felt like the ideal protagonist to evoke the wrenching anti-human condition. I wrote it like a fable too, because I wanted it to feel playful and human (something typically associated with reading to a child) while filtering this through the most inhuman protagonist conceivable: a prison cell. Another dimension of that prison cell was its lack of individuality, expressed in the opening, “The prison cell resembled other prison cells,” in order to unearth the many ways in which apparatuses and colonizing systems can approximate individuals.

I wrote the first 6,000-word draft in one day in October 2021. A few months later, when editing Fi Jae Lee’s artist statement as the first post on 128 LIT’s website, I was reminded of my story, especially in these lines Fi wrote: “Even though I am a place and a whole as a visible body, there are complicated times, events, figures, relations, and social structures that are inscribed in my body. I construct the body of such a space. Even though I am a body, there are several thousand bodies like parasites latched to my body. They became my emotions, sense, and reason. I let them—right before they turn into me—be involved with the place, which is my body.” Inspired, I told Fi Jae Lee about my story and she said that she would like to read it. I sent it to her. She liked it. A year or so later, we collaborated and decided to include her drawings. Again, this movement between genre, magazine, and people to me is a defining characteristic of the platform.

Thanks for this interview, Andrew. A final question—in what ways do you engage with your readership, and how do you see your magazine contributing to the literary community?

We’ve had many in-person events to connect with readers and communities. I remember our first event was at Wordup Community Bookshop in my old neighborhood in Washington Heights. We invited Carla Bessa (Brazilian writer based in Berlin who was in New York for the month) and María Ospina (Colombian writer and professor at Wesleyan). We had a multimedia event that included art, photography, music, and poetry, hosted on one of our editor’s (Phillip Thompson) rooftop. We had a picnic in Prospect Park to celebrate the firecracker award for Best Debut Magazine. Just after our first issue launched, we had a virtual multilingual reading to include contributors outside New York City and outside the U.S. Our second issue launched at The People’s Forum in New York City. We were at a few book fairs like Indie Lit Fair (Pen World Voices Festival) and Rehearsal Artbook Fair. At these events we engaged with familiar and unfamiliar readers of our pages.

We also have had contributors participate in cross-genre and multimedia conversations posted on our site. One of the requirements of this was to step outside genre and discipline. We had a poet engage in a video interview with a musician she met at a post office. Beyond the conversations, contributors have even reached out to each other and translated each other’s work. It’s rewarding to be part of this gradually forming community, a collapsing of distances between genres, geographies, people, and languages. Mona Kareem—a poet, scholar, translator, professor—who was also a contributor and judge of our recent chapbook contest, once tweeted about 128 LIT something like, “128 LIT is a magazine that finds the stranger within and afar.” I think about this from time to time. It was an opening for me and allows for me to better see the platform and its impact. The world is strange and it comes so powerful when we find geographies and wars within us that rub against the world. It’s powerful and so effective.
 

Andrew Felsher is a writer based in New York City. His fiction and essays have appeared in São Paulo Review, Fiction Writers Review, Action, Spectacle, and elsewhere. He's also the Editor of 128 LIT, an international print and online literary magazine.