Interview: A. Stevens [The Edgier Waters]

"Corrupting the minds of the impressionable, or at least showing them the alternative, that's what we're about."



Labels can be restricting, but generations need names. In The Edgier Waters works by the New Puritans sit comfortably alongside those of Billy Childish, Steve Aylett alongside the Off-Beat Generation, a term coined by 3:AM Editor-in-Chief Andrew Gallix for the new breed of globally scattered literary upstarts who walk no line. The New Puritans rejected "show-off" writers like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, writers who write for other writers and academics. 3:AM don't have anything as mawkish as a manifesto — nor do the Off-Beats for that matter — but you can see why they get along.

Snowbooks have just brought out The Edgier Waters / 5 years of 3:AM Magazine. Dogmatika spoke to A. Stevens, editor of the anthology and former editor of 3:AM.


What's interesting is that in your preface you mention that the inspiration for Edgier Waters was Maurice Girodias' Best of Olympia, and of course the Olympia Press championed William Burroughs. I read a recent interview with Beat writer Diane Di Prima and she made a good point that was relevant to her times but speaks volumes for now: That poetry and literature had strayed from the honesty, and in the Forties there was so much bullshit in every literary magazine. She said: "It was very stiff, very polished, very literary, and I think part of what we all came out of was a rebellion against that stuff." Is Edgier Waters -- and for that matter 3:AM -- a rebellion against that stuff and "out to cause trouble", as Richard Marshall writes of Stewart Home?

She could have been writing about now as far as I am concerned, though 'tepid bullshit' would be a more adequate description. I don't think 3:AM started out as inherently oppositionalist, just that people of that mindset tended to gravitate towards it. Back in 2000 and the immediate years that followed there wasn't much around in terms of online mags that just anyone, provided they were good, could write for. Since then, people like Word Riot and Scarecrow have spoken of us as a model for their inception and it's great that sites like them and Dogmatika are around to share the load, as it were.

There are a plethora of online mags now and plenty of opportunities for people to publish short stories or get up on stage and read their 'slam' poetry. Like I said, you can count on one hand, maybe two, the ones that are actually any good and as for slam poetry, I'd like to think we're against that. Similarly, the ground covered by the literary press is unspeakably dull, Jeanette Winterson is spoken of as some kind of 'edgy' author, as much as I dislike the term, which seems thoroughly bonkers. So what 3:AM is up against is what I think of as a smug liberal consensus. It's all for Douglas Coupland and Irvine Welsh but would probably draw the line at the Tony O'Neills and Travis Jeppesens of this world. In their defence, they'd probably cite the commercial appeal of most of their coverage and the duty to follow the market in the name of sales. Or they'd probably say 'What are you talking about? We covered McSweeney's again, only last week!' Which is a shame because it's failing in its journalistic duty to snuff out up and coming writers. I mean, why bother when you can just wet your pants at the prospect of a new book by Zadie Smith or, failing that, find the new Zadie Smith.

As for being to out to cause trouble, I'd like to think we were but if it happens it's probably accidental. People like Richard Marshall, in his piece in the book in fact, have written about the protest ethic of 3:AM and the need to restore the link between literature and that tradition. I'm of the post-Thatcher generation that tends to view protest on a more individual basis though, all that collectivism died with U2's Achtung Baby as far as I am concerned. The problem is that the bar's been raised so high and even what constitutes vaguely edgy tends to last about 24 hours before the mainstream co-opts it and claims it as its own. But I'm not precious about ownership, after all, it's about opportunity rather than credit. And there's a world out there still to discover and write about.


Continuing the ethos of Olympia Press, Edgier Water is published by "Independent Publishers of the Year," Snowbooks. How did you hook up with them?

Snow had signed up Lisa Crystal Carver, which at the time was completely out of kilter with the rest of their roster. I knew James Bridle there was a huge fan of Bruce Benderson: we'd published sections of his book in 3:AM before it got published in the US, and I put those two in touch and that led to The Romanian. I mentioned that we actually had on my hard drive an entire manuscript of what would later become the Edgier Waters that I'd discussed with a few publishers but never brought to a successful conclusion. The difficulty with anthologies now, compared to say the late 1990s when a new one came out every week, is that they're not author product and therefore harder to market. Even something like New Writing gets a handful of reviews now. To be honest, I would have done it via Lulu or something if that situation had continued, not least that as a website you can promote such things better, though others didn't agree with doing it this way. After all, Girodias and co. didn't just sit around bemoaning the darkness, they lit a candle. So it seemed logical to do it with Snow following those two books and, much to their credit, they gave us complete editorial control over what went in it. I don't believe another publisher would do that, they'd probably want a gimmick or something. A few years back someone like Serpent's Tail probably would have put it out, when they thought the market was there for such anthologies, but now they're chasing the next Elfriede Jelinek or Lionel Shriver. From what I hear, Snow's latest signings are very 3:AM so obviously it's in good company there and I think Snow, an unknown quantity 12 months ago, are the one of the very few real risk-taking publishers left in Britain now, especially in age when Dennis Cooper can't even get published here anymore.

3:AM started in April 2000, but were certainly no fools. The list of contents to your anthology is testament to this, proving 3:AM are constantly ahead of the game. With such a strong archive compiling Edgier Waters must have been a nightmare. How did you come to choose these pieces? Out of the hundreds, why these?

Thanks for the compliment, though if what you say is true then it's mostly been by accident rather than design. Certainly was in the early days. Even something like 3:AM accepts that if you're putting something on sale in the open market then the rules are different to publishing online, where you can afford to take more risks. When I conceived the idea of the book, which actually came from someone else's suggestion, the basic rule of thumb for inclusion was either published authors of note or actual involvement at 3:AM. This was primarily to settle any arguments over people who others who might not fit into those categories but thought they should be included, but once the rule was established the content just assembled itself. It wasn't exactly creative editing.

Is there anything you wished had gone in there but didn't?

Not really. Nothing springs to mind. Perhaps we could have stretched the second inclusion criteria to have included Lee Rourke. But when you hold it in your hand, it's great to see stuff like the essays by Steve Almond and Bruce Benderson on writing and Paul Tickell's take on BS Johnson within contemporary culture. So long as they're in there I stand by my decisions.



I'm glad that Edgier Waters includes non-fiction. We get to read Paul Ewen's pub reviews, Richard Marshall's 'The Defiant Prose of Stewart Home' and Bruce Benderson's 'When Libido Ran Wild' alongside some great fiction and poetry. Aside from Mark Simpson's 'Metrodaddy V. Ubermummy', there are no interviews. Considering 3:AM has talked to some of the best writers of the underground -- Richard Hell for example -- why aren't there more?

Before the book was even a glint in the editor's eye, there was some discussion around publishing a book of the best interviews from 3:AM, though then the question was do you extend the scope for inclusion to all or just those done by Richard Marshall, as he did 90% of them seemingly and it'd be a good thread for any such book. So the interviews book idea predates the Edgier Waters and it was best not to mix the two up. Maybe that book will come out and I hope Richard develops it as an idea or a publisher picks it up somehow.

I actually regarded the Mark Simpson piece as an article rather than an interview in the strict literal sense. Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The title 'Edgier Waters' comes from a write-up of 3:AM in The Guardian. Do you find that the mainstream press get 3:AM, or are they just letting the likes of 3:AM do the leg work in finding the best new edgier writers before they'll write about them in a "cult" manner?

If you look at the book cover, our mentions in the broadsheet press during the past five or so years are on there, purely for commercial purposes. We accept your average bod buying books in Waterstones might not have heard of us and will need some convincing to part with their cash. But yes, they're probably content to do that and even then, when they've engaged with 3:AM it's only been with regard to comparatively commercial writers like Matt Thorne, whom I certainly wouldn't regard as 'cult' and neither would he I imagine. As Alan Warner said in a recent interview, these people are just churned out from Oxbridge with very narrow imaginations, so to them 3:AM is either just some poxy website or deals with distinctly uncommercial themes and therefore isn't going to do their sales any good. The chances are that any authors from 3:AM who do end up capturing their interest will not be mentioned in that context. But fair play to them, they have a job to do.

When you started writing for 3:AM, it was on music. As the Beats had Jazz, 3:AM has Punk/New Wave and even elements of BritPop, especially in the early days. Two of my favourite pieces in Edgier Waters are Billy Childish's poems and Blackout with Thurston Moore. Why do you see a natural alliance between literature and music?

It's symbiotic as far as I am concerned. In a general context, music and literature have sparked off each other for generations, be it David Bowie singing about Genet [Jean Genie] and The Cure about Camus [Killing an Arab] or Pete Doherty about Huysmans [A Rebours]. Even then, you had the post-Dylan situation whereby the likes of Richard Hell and Patti Smith picked up guitars rather than becoming poets in the conventional sense. The Brat-pack lot positively dined on New Wave, particularly Bret Easton Ellis the failed new wave musician who named his first after an Elvis Costello song [Less Than Zero]. In terms of 3:AM however, while I recognise that music plays an increasingly important role among younger authors, we're more into it to draw upon aspects like people such as Thurston Moore, people better known as musicians, and how they communicate via the printed word than the spoken or sung one. There's also 3:AM's cultural remit to consider, it's not just about books.

Again, the punk ethic that informs us would appear to be by accident rather than design in terms of editors and writers who were around then and feel the need to cover it today. I have entire back catalogues of that stuff but I certainly didn't live it like others at 3:AM did. For instance, you have George Berger and Richard Cabut who write for us, who were integral during the post-punk era. Bizarrely 3:AM might be considered better respected among musical concerns than among literary concerns.



In his introduction, Michael Bracewell talks of Kathy Acker and draws a comparison between the perennial outsider and 3:AM. If she were alive, it's likely that she would have contributed to the magazine. Is she a good muse for Edgier Waters?

I hope that's the case. She was friends with Michael Bracewell, so who knows? As I mentioned in my preface, the ghost of Elizabeth Young looms centrally throughout. If you read her Pandora's Handbag, assembled after her death in 2001, in 2000 she was hugely bemoaning the state of fiction, the absence of risk etc. After that bad patch then, I'd like to think she'd have less cause to complain these days, even if it would have been us rather than The Guardian who'd have been publishing her reviews of Tony O'Neill, as patently ludicrous as ascribing literary tastes to the dead obviously is.

Webzines drop like flies, but five years later 3:AM is stronger than ever. Why do you think it not only has stayed the course, but is still so successful?

I hate to get all Anne Rice or Poppy Z. Brite on you, but new blood, basically. Andrew Gallix aside, the team involved now is a different one to that of a couple of years ago. Things happen, people move on, acquire different priorities or whatever. One guy left and started up his own magazine and then got a three-strikes bust for drugs and ended up in jail. That kind of thing just doesn't affect people like Zembla.

I'd also like to think our international scope stands us in better stead than some webzines that base all their activities in one country. We've done live events in London and Sao Paulo, there's not many who can say that. We've more editors in Europe than the US but more readers in the US than in Europe. The other thing going for us is longevity. Once you've amassed an archive and something of a reputation then the impetus for quitting lessens. At the end of the day, if the files are destroyed and it no longer exists then there'll always be the anthology.

With 3:AM anthologised, the Scarecrow Pages, BLATT Books, Social Disease and the forthcoming Spike anthology, is this the end of the on-line zine?

Not at all, far from it. The anthology was just about adding an extra dimension to our work, after all the likes of Nerve and Salon have done it. The other things you mentioned have varying degrees of connection to us but they’re not dependent on our efforts or vice versa. We'll just see how they pan out.

If Edgier Waters is a time capsule, how well do you think it will date? Do you hope that someone will discover a dog-eared copy fifty years from now and get the same inspiration you did from Best of Olympia?

As a rough sample of non-mainstream literature in the opening years of the 21st century I think it will do the job. While Olympia reflected the whole US expats in Paris scene after the war, 3:AM is more about literature in its globalised context, there is no scene in that sense and we're not all hopping in and out of bed with each other.

What I'm more interested in is the possibility that someone could randomly stumble across it now and get them thinking that there is a possibility and audience for stuff that's not "very stiff, very polished, very literary", to use your earlier quote. That's what happened with me and the Rebel Inc. anthologies when I was at university, which showed me you didn't need to get off your face all the time to avoid the worst excesses of the 1990s lad culture that seemed entirely inescapable at the time. Maybe some 15 year old who's bought McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories and thought "Fuck it, if I wanted to read Margaret Atwood and Stephen King I'd do it some place else."

Yeah, corrupting the minds of the impressionable, or at least showing them the alternative, that's what we're about.

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[3:AM Magazine]