by Kat Georges

I remember seeing Rosebud magazine at a bookstore back in the 90s. Their cover proudly boasted that this was “The Biggest Little Magazine in the World!” I was impressed. But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that publisher and managing editor John Roderick Clark and I struck up a series of conversations that have led to publication in this fine magazine of stories and excerpts from several Three Rooms Press books, including TIME AND TIME AGAIN: Sixteen Trips in Time by Robert Silverberg, RAY BY RAY: A Daughter’s Take on the Legacy of Nicholas Ray by Nicca Ray, and, most recently, THE COLORS OF APRIL: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later, edited by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, among others. Each issue of Rosebud is filled with literature, poetry, excerpts and gorgeous art. Recently, Rod and I sat down to discuss details of what makes Rosebud such a unique indie publication.

John Roderick Clark, Rosebud Publisher and Managing Editor (Photo by Callen Harty)

Kat Georges: Rosebud is such a beautiful publication, with each issue packed with incredible writing, poetry and art. Describe how Rosebud started and what it was like in “the early days.”

John Roderick Clark: In the late 80’s my life went through many changes. I married my wife Melanie, left my job as editor-in-chief of a series of lifestyle magazines for banks and credit unions and moved with Melanie to a 150-year-old house on 20 acres in rural southeast Wisconsin where I resumed my life as a freelancer. An old friend and new neighbor, John Lehman, remembered that I had been a part of the free press literary movement in Madison as a young man, which was a kind of echo of what had happened  earlier in Berkeley, and he figured that with that experience and the magazine background, I would be a great editor for a magazine he wanted to launch: Rosebud. So I, Wisconsin designer Tom Pomplun, and John Lehman got together and launched the magazine that Lehman wanted to: “Put in every bathroom in America!” He figured he had enough money to get us through two or three issues. That was 1993.

Rosebud Issue 71

KG: How did you decide on the name?

JRC: John was a movie buff and loved the movie CITIZEN KANE. The visual cinematic feeling of the magazine  from the early days forward was reflected in the title, the Voice Over, and the visual appeal of the magazine. At first I thought it was a weird title, but it turned out to be a brilliant choice.

KG: How do you decide what goes into each issue? And how do you determine the amount of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and art that goes into each issue.

JRC: We are interested in a wide variety of materials, which we gather and compost. For PR purposes I suppose I should say that putting an issue together is all part of a meticulous master plan, but as the hour approaches, it’s kind of like getting near dinnertime. You look in the fridge, see what you’ve got, and then try and whip up something that looks as if you had been planning it for weeks.  We shuffle the poems, essays and stories into tonal groups that become departments,  then we name and  sequence the departments, and  decide the dramatic sequence of pieces in  a given department. When the 176 pages are full, we stop. We don’t really pay much attention to how much of each kind of lit we print.

KG: You also include science fiction stories in each issue, something that is increasing rare in a world of university-sponsored literary magazines. What is your attraction to science fiction?

JRC: Aside from my personal addiction to all types of speculative fiction, we are interested in many different kinds of literary expression, and do not share the contempt that many literary pundits have for the speculative genre. If much speculative fiction is trash, so is a lot of so-called “literary” fiction.  If speculative fiction is an inferior form of writing, what do you do with Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Martian Chronicles, Peer Gynt,  or Ligeia? The question raised by speculative fiction is  WHAT IF? That makes it a great ingredient for a 31 year-old lit mag from nowhere put out by not much of anybody trying to do something different from what everyone else is doing. We take ourselves less seriously than the work. As our late founder John Lehman used to say: “We are not elitists. We are above all that!”

Packing and mailing Rosebud Issue #62 (Winter 2016) (photo courtesy John Roderick Clark)

KG: What impresses me the most about Rosebud is the quality throughout, in both design and content. It is truly a gorgeous magazine and the stories, poetry and art across the board almost seem to read like music, starting with the table of contents, where sections have titles such as “Gardens of Peaches”, “Fatal Harmonies”, “What Is Revealed” and “Possible Progress?” What would you say is the overriding ethos of Rosebud, in its current iteration?

JRC: Well, we are interested in nurturing reading and reading, skills that are decaying in our culture. And because, from the beginning we had no marketing budget, it was clear that the magazine would have to sell itself to achieve its goal. That meant not just bright and dramatic covers to get people to pick it off the shelf, but an appealing interior architecture that would draw readers into the content and hold them there. And inside that “attention trap,” we wanted to present the reader with a wide variety of material so that they would not only find things they liked, but so they would also  get introduced to writing they may not otherwise be exposed to. This meant trying to bring a wide variety of literary materials into a coherent structure. Not easy! So we don’t do “theme” issues. Instead, we do lively quilts. We arrange the materials into tonal groups featuring synergies and contrasts. Then we turn those groups into departments. Then we sequence the departments in a given issue (in general, lighter materials earlier, heavier stuff later), and sequence the pieces in each department for dramatic impact. When all the pages are shoehorned in between the repeating  elements, and all the pages are full—we stop, proof, and publish. So I guess you could say we try and let an issue find its own shape. We grow it rather than build it.

Loading up the truck with Rosebuds to take to the Post Office (photo courtesy John Roderick Clark)

KG: You are based outside of Madison, Wisconsin in a rural area near Cambridge. How does your location play into the magazine’s history?

JRC: If you are in a big cultural hub like Los Angeles or New York City, you are surrounded by a loud babble of culture, and of course, there is nothing wrong with that. And out here, although we are somewhat distanced from all that, we have something else. Out here, especially in the country and in small towns, we have more land and less people, and because of that, the land has a louder voice. Landscape injects feelings into us. Trees, grass and corn whisper to us in voices that are not as easy to hear in the parks of a great metropolis. So although we draw on the larger cultures creatively, we also draw creative substance from the ground beneath our feet, and the dreams that trickle up from it.

KG: What have been your favorite moments in Rosebud’s 31-year-old history?

JRC: Oh gee, there have been lots of remarkable ones for us and for me personally. I got to make contact with people like Ray Bradbury who declared that Rosebud was his favorite magazine. The first time he called me, and my wife asked who was calling, she nearly dropped the phone. And I knew the great Ursula Le Guin. Sadly I received a thank you letter from her for the publication for some of her poems on the day she died. There were many other unique moments—like when Universal Pictures asked us to give them some copies of Rosebud to gussy up the office of a literary agency on the set of one of the “shades of Grey” movies.

KG: You’ve published a number of major Beat and revolutionary writers and artists including Allen Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sam Shepard, Mark Strand, Jim Morrison, and this list goes on and on. Describe the their relation to Rosebud.

JRC: I think we have been popular with writers in particular who established fame in the last century, many of whom are now deceased. I think they have been very generous with us. I suspect it was because they knew that our goals were not fame or fortune, and that we valued their contributions to American letters. I also think that they appreciated the fact  that we offered a handsome and different kind of venue for work that other publishers might be less interested in.  For example, we printed stories by Bradbury and W.P. Kinsella that appeared nowhere else. And for a tiny magazine we have a pretty big impact. There are something like 5,000 lit mags in the US, but most people have never heard of them. B&N stores carry about 20 literary magazines, and in over 150 stores. Rosebud is one of them.

KG: What are your plans for the coming year?

JRC: We are still coming out of the covid/independent political doldrums that have savaged independent publishing.  Everything costs more than it used to and is more technologically complicated. In the long run, we need new subscribers, new donors, and more younger readers and writers. Nonetheless we will put out two new 176 page issues this year, one in July  (#72) and one in December (#73).  It’s like log rolling, easier to keep going than to stop!

10.

KG: If someone wants to subscribe to Rosebud, what is the bd,netest way to do that?

JRC: You can either send a check or money order ($25 for four issues, $25 for eight issues) to: ROSEBUD SALES, PO BOX 459, CAMBRIDGE, WI 53523 (make sure and include your snail mail address!), or go to our website at www.rsbd.net and subscribe through PAYPAL.