If the first year was an experiment to see if the project would work, the second year will capitalize on the success of that experiment. Drash, the Jewish and Northwest-themed literary journal founded by Temple Beth Am music director Wendy Marcus, is currently ramping up for its second issue, to be released in June.
“At this point, I would have to say we’re going to go with what worked,” Marcus says. “We have the same basic staff: Robin Asher will still do graphics, Marti Kanna will still do copy editing.”
Marcus will continue as the journal’s editor, which includes overseeing the submission process and the committee that decides on which entries should qualify for entry. (For disclosure purposes, I was a reviewer for last year’s issue and will likely be one for this year’s as well, serving in both positions in a volunteer capacity.)
One of the reasons Marcus has been able to create a second issue of Drash is that she has the money to do so. In addition to a $1,200 grant from the Alfred and Tillie Shemanski Trust (the second time Drash has received such funding), and several other private donations, people have simply been buying up the first issue.
“We have about $2,000 from sales of Drash, which we hadn’t counted on,” Marcus says. “It hasn’t gone platinum, but it’s not sitting on the shelves, either.”
Though some of the sales are a result of the included writers themselves (Marcus noted they were “so tickled with the look of the thing and getting published”), she has also fielded calls and e-mails from as far away as Iowa and Hawaii. Additionally, she has received several notes from people in Oregon who found Drash in bookstores there, and who were thrilled at the idea that a journal featuring such a local flavor existed.
“It seems to have touched a real interesting Jewish nerve,” Marcus says. “We have a lot of readers in this area…we have a lot of people who go to libraries, we have a lot of writers.
“I think people are really ready, not only to do their own reading, but to do their own writing.”
The 2007 Drash was a mix of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography that covered a wide span of topics from Biblical poems and stories to teenage angst, to Jewish immigration and life in Israel. Some of the poetry has even been used in religious services — Paul Lichter’s poem “Reluctance,” about coping after his son’s death, and which Marcus called “heart-stopping” — was used in a Temple Beth Am healing service.
Longtime local poet (and former literary editor) Linda Clifton’s poem was read at a High Holiday service this year as well.
“It’s interesting to see how Drash is not being [kept] inside the pages,” Marcus says.
Though Drash has enjoyed moderate success in this area, Marcus has had little luck in getting recognition in points east, most specifically the publishing center of the country, New York.
“I think people in the West have a much more respectful sense of nature; I think they understand that the earth claims them, not the other way around, and I think our dealings with one another are perhaps kinder and more gracious and even — dare I use this word — “˜redemptive’. Perhaps less competitive, and perhaps more celebratory,” says Marcus. “I can’t say that I’ve encountered that with the folks back east. Trying to promote Drash, I’ve gotten zero. Closed doors.”
With validation from the east coast or not, this year’s edition will probably be more of the same, meaning a focus on connections to the Northwest and to Judaism. That’s the feel Marcus wants to engender for Drash, but she doesn’t want that to limit the content, either.
“Our funding comes from Northwest and Jewish sources, so I feel like I have to honor that,” Marcus says. “I want and need to have poems that have a Northwest tilt or a Jewish tilt. Having said that, I as a writer also value quality writing, so if I get something in that’s just drop-dead gorgeous, and is neither Jewish [nor] Northwest, I’ll have to think long and hard before rejecting it.”
Also more akin to the publication’s Northwest sensibilities is the way in which Marcus handles submissions, or, more to the point, rejections: “I want Drash to personify that kindlier, more gracious sense of the literary world. I don’t want it to be that dog-eat-dog New York world,” she says.
As such, she says she responds to every inquiry and submission, because she knows from experience the disappointment of being dismissed with a postcard or simply ignored.
“I think it’s really important, because I’ve been a struggling writer. You’re out there naked in public,” she says. “If somebody doesn’t have a really strong sense of self, they’re not going to keep writing. They’re going to feel somewhat trashed.
“I feel like I want to help people be better writers, I want to help our community laud its writers, I want readers.”
That, she says, is exactly what Drash is supposed to be about.
If you submit: