Notes From Here Again: RAP at Arrival Art Fair

https://vimeo.com/1118192423

At Arrival Art Fair, Brandon Sheats, Brandon Zech, Amelia Rina, Jameson Johnson announced their new coalition, Regional Art Publishers(also includes Lindsay Preston-Zappas of Contemporary Art Review LA), and engaged in a panel discussion on the changing publishing landscape. 

Full transcript below:

Jameson Johnson: Hi, welcome, and thanks so much for joining us. I'm glad you found our…

Brandon Zech: Bungalow.

Jameson Johnson: Yeah, bungalow is a great word and renegade signage and all of those things. My name is Jameson Johnson. I'm the founder and executive director at Boston Art Review, and I am thrilled to be out in Western Massachusetts. This is a region that we cover in our regional art publication. Someone has a page open up here. We did a preview in our latest issue about all the incredible things that are happening out in the Berkshires this summer, Arrival certainly at the center of that. And I'm really excited because these are three friends of mine who are all publishers and editors and leaders at regional art publications from around the US. We have been in conversation with each other weekly almost for… Brandon and I for almost a year now, and the rest of us for about six months. And I am going to let each of them introduce themselves and share a little bit more about the work that they are doing in their particular locales. But what brought us together was a conversation that we were all brought together for a platform called Discovery. The conversation was called Notes from Here, publishing from East to West. And so this conversation is called Notes from Here Again, and it's occurring exactly two years later. The first conversation we had was I think on June 5th, 2023. And the world has changed a lot in those two years. All of our work has changed a lot in those two years. You've come to exist as a publication in those two years. And so the conversation today is really going to be centered around this particular moment and where we go from here. And if you want to get this inside scoop on the looking back, you can read that conversation from two years ago. So I will pass the mic to Brandon over on my right.

Brandon Sheats: Hi, I'm Brandon Sheats. I'm the publisher and executive director at Burnaway. Burnaway is an experiment disguised as an art magazine based out of Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on contemporary art from the American South, the Caribbean, and this diaspora. And what we mean by experiment is that we not just publish, we are also active advocates for those regions and artists from those regions. So we'll do things like actually participate in art fairs as a publication and as a dealer and some other really fun projects that we work on from year to year.

Brandon Zech: I'm Brandon Zech. Two Brandons. I'm the publisher of Glasstire, which is the online publication for art in Texas. We've been around since 2001. We were founded as an online-only publication back when that was an amazingly novel thing and no one knew how to access the internet in a real way. So we've gone through the entire stages. We had message boards, we were a basic affinity site right back when we started, and we've grown ever since then. We have five full-time staffers, three full-time editorial staffers. We cover all of Texas, so Texas is the geographic boundary, but that means anything that is happening in Texas. So we're covering artists who are based elsewhere. In those years since 2001, we've become the only publication that's producing serious art, writing, art criticism, and art news reporting on a daily basis.

Amelia Rina: I'm Amelia Rina. I am the founder and editor-in-chief of Variable West, which is a publication that I started and it covers California, Oregon, and Washington. It started in 2020, a year when there was just so much chaos. I'm based in Portland, Oregon, and that was a very chaotic year with the protests and we had wildfires, and of course, the pandemic. And somehow out of that, I had a really generative year and started building the platform with a little bit of grant money that we got. And so I was able to start paying writers from the very beginning. And since then, we've grown every year. We're going to be five this August and it's always tumultuous. Variable West is the youngest and a very scrappy organization. We have two part-time people that run it, and so we are limited by our capacity, but we're really working to grow. This is our first year also being a nonprofit so we're going after different types of programming and funding.

Jameson Johnson: Awesome. We all share nonprofit status and a mission to serve each of our regions in really distinct ways. And the same thing can be said for Boston Art Review. It's a publication that started in my college dorm room and has since grown, also very, very scrappy roots. We became a nonprofit organization in 2022, and then I stepped on as a full-time executive director in 2024. And then we just actually hired our first full-time managing editor two months ago. We operate with an incredible team of editors. Jess, who is standing over here, is our senior editor who is a generous volunteer with us. And I think that that kind of spirit that runs through all of our publications is a desire from people in our networks and our communities to be a part of something and to contribute to a dialogue, a preservation, and a documenting of what is happening in our cultural communities for now and also for the future. And the question for each of you to answer in your own way is why local and why art? Why are we doing the work that we're doing in the places where we're doing it?

Amelia Rina: So one of the main motivating factors for starting Variable West, besides also just having a dream to run my own magazine for a while: I was living in New York and I had started writing for the Village Voice, which was just a dream. I was doing calendar listings for them, which I was told by my professor, who wrote for them regularly, that's your way to get your foot in the door with the Voice. And the Voice was known as being a magazine that has really good art writing, but also was a place for younger emerging writers to get their start and get a foundation in their career. Just as I was getting ready to pitch a proper review, the Voice went on strike, and then it was shortly after shut down. And so that opportunity for so many writers was just stripped away. And then on the West coast, there was a publication called Art Practical that covered the whole West coast, and that had also shut down, I think in 2018. So I was looking at this landscape out of grad school, trying to figure out, okay, where am I going to work? Who am I going to write for? What's going to happen? And all of these opportunities were taken away. The West Coast lost this regional coverage, and so I was thinking, how can I provide a place for emerging writers to get their foot in the door, get some editorial mentorship, and also provide coverage, or fill in the gap of coverage, that Art Practical left? And that's what we've been doing for the past five years. A lot of mentoring writers, I also started an editorial mentorship, and just trying to show that art is happening both in the major hubs up and down the coast, but also in some of the secondary cities and things like that.

Brandon Zech: I'm a little bit of a proof of concept of Glasstire. So I started with Glasstire full-time in 2015 as an assistant editor, but before that, I lived in Houston, was going to college at the University of Houston studying art history, trying to figure out what to do with an undergraduate degree in art history. And I learned about Glasstire from either some professors or from artists or something, and started using Glasstire’s event listings to figure out what to go and see, I started using Glasstire's job listings to apply for internships at multiple organizations across Houston. And then I found my job at Glasstire through Glasstire. I was also using it to teach myself local art history because when you're young and don't know anything and haven't been in the art world before, there's a lot of local lore that isn't actually captured anywhere. Everyone buys into it and already knows it. So as a young person, I was like, right. And then I would go search Glasstire and figure out what they were talking about. So I used Glasstire as a resource to both learn what was happening contemporaneously and to learn about Texas' art history as a whole. And then when I started at Glasstire, what I really learned was that Glasstire's goal is to connect the disparate idea of what Texas is back to itself. So even if Houston had a full-time art critic at the Houston Chronicle, or even if the Dallas Morning News had a full-time art critic at their paper, which they both used to and don't anymore, people in Dallas would be reading the Dallas Morning News, and people in Houston would be reading the Houston Chronicle. And people across cities, or especially people also in remote regions, like people in the panhandle in Lubbock or people out west in El Paso, which is 800 miles from Houston, those people wouldn't know what's happening in the art communities that are essentially their neighboring art communities that they should be in dialogue with. So the reason that Glasstire exists is for all of the other reasons that all of our local publications exist, but also it exists to make sense out of the indefinable surface area that is the border of Texas.

Brandon Sheats: Something very similar for us. So Burnaway is really true to its name. I like to tell people one, because we come from, I think a Faulkner poem, the title, but Burnaway has had five separate iterations since 2008. We started off to fill a gap to solve a very real problem. No one at newspapers wanted to cover art anymore. There was a recession, and A plus B equals somebody has to talk about it. And we started off as a local-only publication. That executive director left and started a different local publication. And that was the opening for Burnaway to say, well, let's not just discuss Atlanta, let's discuss all of Georgia. And a few years later with a new editor, it was us captured the state that state that state, I think Tennessee, Alabama, and South Florida. In the last two iterations, we became a truly regional publication because we kept running into the exact same problem everywhere that we went. One people were happy to see us, people being artists, the general public institutions, but also what we started to learn were people outside of the region were starting to ask questions about what is the South? And depending on where you're at and really what sense of history you have, the South is either a really backwards place or one of the most forward-thinking places in the United States. And what we've learned through our time is our job is similar to yours, Brandon, and reflecting the South back onto itself, it is also really informing people that the American South is actually the most diverse region in the country, both in terms of race, class and gender and economically. And that means you get really interesting art. And so our job is to keep that focus without it being made too diffuse by the coasts or international publications, so that there is a core identity for the South that is fluid, but still instead of a block of ice, it fits in a box. And we want to keep to that in this iteration. And then two years ago, after I entered Burnaway, we were having conversations about what our future was going to be. And part of me went, we can't have a conversation about the South without a conversation about the Caribbean. Because a lot of the trade went through the Caribbean to create the American South. And so we added the Caribbean as a region in 2023, actually.

Jameson Johnson: And I think something that I've heard all of you saying, we talk about all the time, is this gap. I think all of you use that word. I was actually thinking in my head, instead of being regional art publishers, how could we be GAPG art publishers? Okay, that's for later. But I think this is part of when people say, well, why do we need a Boston Art Review? Why do we need a Burnaway if we have an Art Forum or name any publication based in New York that supposedly covers the entire United States? And it's because of the work that we do in our communities to be responsive on truly a daily basis. And I know Glasstire publishes a newsletter three times a week. Boston Art Review puts out a newsletter once a week called The Weekly Happenings. It's the only curated roundup of art events happening in the greater Boston area. And with that, we also get this pull, I get emails every week, can you include more main events? Can you include any events in New Hampshire? And we try to do it, and we source a lot of these events by ourselves, by scouring, and we will email people and say, do you have anything coming up this week if it's not on their websites. And this is the work that we can do when we have a team and a community that is rooted in a particular place. And I'd love to hear from all of you about how this gap that we're all filling does extend to a kind of national gap right now. And I think the gap that we're seeing is the collapse of local media. I forget what the statistic was that we were all looking at, but was it like 2000 local publications closed their doors every year since 2011? And that pressure for coverage, especially in the cultural sector and a broadening cultural sector, it gets transferred to publications like ours. That pressure does not get transferred to local newspapers. The Boston Globe is not sitting around trying to fill the gap of the publication that closed its doors two years ago. But that is what happens when you have a mission-driven organization. And so I'd love to hear more about how our work is situated within this broader national media crisis.

Amelia Rina: I mean, we talk a lot about how one of the first things that goes at newspapers is art and culture coverage. The newspaper that I used to work at based in Portland, I tried to encourage them to do more arts and culture. I worked on the marketing team, not the newsroom, and I was like, we should do more arts and culture publishing. And I was told in no uncertain terms that there's no money in art and culture. You don't get readership from that. And so it's this self-fulfilling prophecy where if newspapers think that cliques and readership comes from sports and breaking news, then that's all they're going to publish. And it means that people who are looking for our coverage aren't going to go to the newspaper, which means that they're not getting that readership.

Jameson Johnson: Yeah, it's a whole self-fulfilling cycle.

Amelia Rina: Exactly. It's this horrible cycle when really what they need to do is say, this is important. It's important to provide context for our world. And the best storytellers are artists and writers. And if you have that kind of cultural context within a publication, then you're giving people a way to have a dialogue, either locally and nationally, and even internationally. And I feel like that's one of the gaps that we're trying to provide, we're trying to fill, is this way of saying, what is happening in the world? What does it mean that these things are happening? And then how do we talk about it? How do we visualize it? And without artists and without writing about those artists, then we miss out on a really important part of the world that we live in.

Brandon Zech: I think, considering the ecosystem as a whole, if you're looking for kind of an analogy to help make it make sense, think about the gallery system. There's a bunch of galleries in New York and LA that are showing artists who are based in New York and LA, and there's tiers to that gallery system. There's the blue chip galleries, there's the mid-tier galleries, there's the small artist-run spaces, which are all feeding themselves within their own ecosystems, within their own cities. But then also all of the other galleries that are not located in New York and LA are feeding into those galleries. Once an artist gets big enough in Houston and is repped by the best gallery in Houston, they'll probably start also being repped by a gallery, at least a mid-tier gallery in New York. So if you think about that in terms of journalism, it used to be that there were all weeklies within many cities across the US that would train writers, that would be like the Village Voice, that you could do event listings. You could kind of begin your career through there, and you could learn what it's like to work in a publication. And then you hone your writing there. And then eventually one of the multiple art criticism or cultural criticism jobs would open at the Houston Chronicle, and then you would step into that role and then maybe the lead art critic job would open and you would step into that. And then maybe you would eventually end up at a coastal publication or go to a more well-known publication elsewhere, or even go to a specialty art publication afterwards. That ecosystem doesn't exist anymore. That pipeline has been broken. So we are all trying to cull writers from a community of writers that has nowhere else to publish. So we're having to do the entire work of training these writers, onboarding them, teaching them how to pitch, teaching them how to work with publications, teaching them that when an editor edits their work, it's for their benefit so that it reads better and our benefit so we can publish the best thing possible. We've kind of become full-service organizations in ways that organizations of our operating budgets and sizes were never necessarily meant to be. It also means that if we're hiring to replace staff, it's hard to find staff because that writer that was the full-time writer at the art weekly might've eventually been Glasstire's editor in chief, but if that writer at that alt weekly doesn't exist anymore, or if that alt weekly doesn't exist anymore, we don't have any pool to hire from that is trained how to do that job. That sounds very pessimistic, and there's other elements to this conversation, but that's a very real thing that I think a lot of us encounter in a lot of different ways.

Brandon Sheats: I think I want to flip it on its head. Because for me, in my experience, so I have a weird experience in this room. I've worked in advertising in tech before I came back to art. And one of the things that I kept dealing with when I came back to art, I worked at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the very first problem that I had to come in as a digital director, and I've been told, you're responsible for $20 million of revenue for all of our subscribers every year. We call it rollover in April when renewals come up. And someone was really smart enough at the time to hire a revenue director, and this revenue director did a lot of mapping, came back and said, your problem isn't the product itself. It's not the pipeline itself. It's how are we connecting this pipeline with a public. Because it's very easy to say classical music is not doing well, but it's not that it's not doing well, it's just the world for it shrunk. And so for us, the gap, my big gap is not, it is a lot of the infrastructure pieces. Nonprofits in the United States, especially arts orgs in the United States, suffer from a massive infrastructure problem. And it's also money as well as internal process, internal structure. There are not a lot of people that want to be administrators. And because of that, we're dealing with a lot of people that are highly specialized in the world of art itself. But we also have to remember that there is a public that desperately wants what we have, but how do we have the conversation in a way that invites them into that space? How do we access them in a way that invites them into our space? So it's a mix of both the top end, who's up here and who's doing this work, but also where is this public? How do we talk to this public? How do we navigate this public? How do we reach this public? And I think that we talk about art writing being a crisis a lot, but I think the real crisis in art writing is a shared crisis among publications and institutions in which we are losing audience. It is happening in real time. How do we capture who we can and increase that number? And that to me is the gap.

Jameson Johnson: I think it's tied to the newspapers. If a public is not used to reading about contemporary visual art, which is what we all cover, in the publication that is most visible or accessible to them, getting them to the more niche platform is difficult. But then on the flip side of that, I think about who we serve, and it's artists. At the end of the day, our most important person to serve is the artist whose work we are covering. And that is to me, the person who is our authority in any given moment, who we are responsible to and whose work we are preserving, situating, putting in conversation with other spaces, work, artists. And because of these fewer publications, existing Boston Art Review might be the only print feature that an artist in our city will have in a five to 10-year period. And we publish in print twice per year, which means we can cover an artist in print once every five to 10 years. And there are hundreds of artists that we have literally on a spreadsheet that we want to write about. And it is always a matter of capacity and how can we do this work well? And so I think this is always a tricky thing. It's like, okay, do we go after this mass marketing campaign to get people to care about art criticism, or do we do this important work to write about this artist's insert blank important thing here. And with limited staff, team, resources, it is always a decision. For me, sometimes it's like, am I getting the newsletter out today, or am I submitting this grant? And that is the reality of all of the work that we do.

Brandon Sheats: And I think it's one of those situations of, the other thing that we think about a lot is, are we writing for the archive or are we writing for right now? Because there are a lot of instances of publications, especially in the US, that when they started they were like, oh no, we're writing for right now. We are the pulse of what is happening. And then you see this switch happen and suddenly they're writing in a more archival sense. And you can tell the disconnect between those two spaces. And it gets harder and harder for us because we do have small staffs. We do have, you were talking about covering a region that is a quarter of the landmass of this country, and there are only three of us working full time out of an office in Atlanta, Georgia on a budget of less than 300,000 US dollars. That would be laughable at an art magazine. And that would be a laughable of a general interest publication

Jameson Johnson: Or at any arts organization that serves that number of people.

Brandon Sheats: That serves one city,

Jameson Johnson: Right?

Brandon Sheats: Yeah. But that is the reality that we talk about all the time about, oh yeah, I have 18 things I need to do right now. At the same time we're building, we're trying to build infrastructure for ourselves. So there's that dissonance that we're always having to navigate between those two spaces.

Brandon Zech: To end this section on a positive note, because all of us are very positive about our own work and about what the future of this can hold. I feel like I haven't asked you all this, but I feel like I could speak for the group when I say I haven't ever told anybody about Glasstire or I imagine you in your respective publications and had someone say, oh, I don't need that, or I am not curious, or the response is always, oh, great. Or Oh, I already read, or, oh, I didn't know you exist and I'm glad to know it now. So in terms of the audience, the audience might be shrinking, or at least there might be a really strong appearance that the audience is shrinking. But I think once you get at least on that personal appeal, people are interested and people have a craving. And part of it's because art can be hard to understand sometimes, or people think that they don't understand art. And all of us write, all of our publications write, in a sense of, we're not heady in the way that we're writing. We're writing for an audience that isn't just an art audience or an audience of artists, but for general people who might find our publications so that they can learn about the art in their region.

Amelia Rina: And that's one of the reasons why it is sometimes difficult to find the audience, is because the larger publications who might come up first in a Google search result, if you search for a particular artist, so say like Art Forum. Art Forum has a history of being really dense and having writing that isn't accessible. And so for years and years and years, when people wanted to find art writing, they might find something that's really jargon-heavy or really academic and that doesn't really have an entry point for the average reader.

Brandon Zech: And really boring.

Amelia Rina: And really boring, let's be real. And now we're dealing also with, there's a boycott of Penske publications, which includes Art Forum. And so now there are fewer opportunities for writers to pitch to, and that's one of the gaps that we're working to fill, where you can't have any of this happen if there aren't paying opportunities for writers. There's a legacy publication in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Rail, which I think pays like $50 for a review, and it's an increase from paying nothing, but it's one of the most prestigious places that you could publish, but they pay nothing.

Jameson Johnson: And sometimes they don't edit your piece. We love them, we love the Brooklyn Rail, but they are also a team of one or 1.5 or two on a good day. And it's just the reality. I do think we should shift the tone because we all really love this work.

Brandon Sheats: To me, shrinking is not necessarily a negative thing. It is an error addiction. I think we're in the middle of a massive realignment, and that provides a lot of opportunities if you're paying attention to how that realignment is happening.

Jameson Johnson: And all of our work, I was kind of mentioning with doing the newsletters or having mentorship programs, we are operating more like full-service arts organizations that serve many different types of audiences and constituents than just a magazine. And I've run into this conversation with funders before. They're like, well, are you an arts organization or are you a magazine? Well, we're an arts organization that has a magazine. A magazine is part of our mission to produce discourse, dialogue, et cetera. I'm curious if in the past two years we could all share something that has been like a win or something that has been a heartening moment in our work.

Amelia Rina: We have gotten increasing funding from this organization called Critical Minded, and that has been a game changer. They gave us a $5,000 grant our first year, and that let Variable West be possible. Without Critical Minded, Variable West wouldn't exist. And they've been increasingly supportive over the years, and I think that I contribute Variable West's existence to the support from Critical Minded and getting the vote of confidence of them giving us more and more money each year. It just makes me immensely proud. And yeah, I think that's our biggest success. And also becoming a nonprofit. 

Jameson Johnson: Hard to do. 

Amelia Rina: Yeah, hire a lawyer. 

Brandon Zech: I feel like Glasstire is so tied to the identity and the ecosystem of Texas that I just kind of consider the wider art community of Texas a part of Glasstire's work, in a way, because we've become very ingrained. So the wider exposure of Texas's art community and consideration of Texas's art community by people elsewhere has been very heartening. There was a recent art fair, the ADAA art show in New York,  spot Lit Houston Galleries, which it seemed like they were looking for a city to spotlight. They're not going to do New York or LA, Chicago already has an art fair. So then Houston was the next choice, which was interesting, that that would be a serious enough place in their eyes to be considered. We have the Untitled Art Fair coming to Houston, which is going to be very interesting to see what happens there. Their first outing outside of Miami. We had the Friends Art Fair just happened in Austin, which was a very small hotel art fair, akin to this, many fewer exhibitors, but similarly successful, well put together. All of the booths were fantastic. It's hard to find an outing like that, especially one locally that's supported that also considers itself successful at the end of the day. So Glasstire’s tide rises with the tide of other Texas artists and organizations, and just the sentiment of Texas, because so much of the press about Texas being written about Texas by elsewhere is negative press. Again, it's all politics or things happening at the border or all of these things which don't necessarily represent the majority of Texas or especially our major cities where a lot of our artists and art institutions are. So that sentiment, being uplifted a little bit, has been a big success in my eyes just for the scene.

Brandon Sheats: For us, it's been a lot of internal work. We were really fortunate to have the support, also Critical Minded, but another foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Most of you contributed to that because you all have sinks and toilets. Ruth DeYoung Kohler left her entire estate to advancing contemporary art in the United States, and particularly offbeat contemporary art. So that was a really big win for us to be in that network now. But the other area for us is being able to sit down and really get at the question of what is the south at a time where a lot of people were looking our way and being able to show them, to begin to show them this is a very large region, region, a very diverse region, a very exciting region if you want to be there. And we're seeing increased southern exposure on the coast and at all the other major centers for art and fairs and whatnot. And it's really great to see that kind of growth. And that was the impetus for us expanding to the Caribbean because it's the same, similar scenario and we get to actually put people on the ground and work with people on the ground in the Caribbean to show the world that there is art here as well. And we can keep doing that work.

Jameson Johnson: For Boston Art Review. And Karen's walking away, but I'm going to give her a shout-out, our Director of Public Art in the City of Boston. Collaboration has been the key to any success we've had in the past two years. We are a partner with the City of Boston on the Un-Monument Initiative, where we're getting to write about art that's happening in our city with conversations around monuments. We also got to be a partner with the Boston Public Art Triennial, produce a guide to the Triennial. We have them out at our table over there, so come on by. Oh, we have one there. Thank you, Jess. And it's edifying, this publication, our writers, our perspective, our storytelling capabilities are being taken seriously. And that's one prong. And then the other is we have young people that want to be a part of what we're doing. And that is so cool to me because like I said, I started this publication when I was a college student, and I mean, for the first couple years I didn't even want people to know I was that young. And now I'm thrilled when we have college students that want to work with us, learn from us, and eventually publish their work with us. We started an emerging art writing fellowship program with Praise Shadows, Yng, who you all know, and it's now in its third year. And consistently over the past three years, we've gotten over 40 applicants every year from students from the Greater Boston area between the ages of 18 to 21. And I'm not lying when I say this, that all 40 of these students every year, so 120 kids have been phenomenal. And I wish we could offer every single one of them this fellowship. And they have all submitted applications that are so thoughtful about why they want to write about contemporary art, and it's so encouraging to me that they want to be a part of this conversation, and they see themselves as part of it because Boston is a college city. I think we actually all operate in places where there is some degree of transience with young people coming and going, and we want them to stay in Boston. We want them to stay in these cities and to see themselves there, to be a part of the conversation and eventually to grow and have a career in these places. So anyways, young people and collaboration may be the key to the future for anything. I don't know.

Amelia Rina: Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's a good segue into why we're doing what we're doing. Is that we have been independent and working independently for years, Variable West the fewest years, but we talk about how the tides rise with all ships. No, all ships rise to the tide?

Audience Member: Rising tides raise all ships.

Amelia Rina: There you go. Yes, thank you. There's the actual–

Brandon Zech: We're all writers.

Amelia Rina: And collaborating between our organizations is going to make all of us stronger. It's going to make us tap into nuance and to different types of things that we can do programming-wise together. And that's one of the really exciting things about being part of regional art publishers.

Jameson Johnson: Yes, so that is the official launch of our name and our new entity that we are forming together. So everyone here is a part of the very soft launch of our collective effort to elevate the work that regional art publications around the United States are doing. It has been a conversation among the four of us, plus Lindsay Preston Zappas, who runs Contemporary Art Review in Los Angeles, and we will be extending the invitation conversation to other regional or public chairs. There's only a couple more in the country, but they're going to be joining us soon. And this is the result of, like I said, several months of being in conversation with one another about what can we do. And I think the very first conversation we all had, we were like, well, what do we need? And we said, we need to exist. So what can we do to support one another in this pursuit of existing? And I think all of the issues that have been raised up here, a writer pipeline, a funding pipeline, we support one another in doing, we create a validity for one another in the places that we all operate in, but also for each other. 

Brandon Zech: May I just say also the fact that none of us have peers in our respective regions or cities. If you think of, again, of art spaces or of galleries, you kind of have little cohorts of organizations or businesses that are going through the same thing. All of us stand alone in our regions, so I don't have anybody to talk to about being a publisher and just the fact of us being able to be in conversation with us and building trust amongst one another and being able to bounce ideas off of each other is a sort of network that doesn't exist because all of us have been little islands just out of necessity and out of the fact that that's how this works.

Jameson Johnson: So looking ahead, we're going to be entering into a discovery here for all of us where we are going to be working together and with other writers and editors and leaders from among the field to figure out what exactly we can do together. And I think it feels, we've been having all these conversations of like, well, what exactly are we doing? And I think the thing that we figured out is like, well, we need to figure out what we all need and what writers need and what editors need and how we can be stronger together by sharing resources. And even just the conversations we've had about, well, how do you handle this sort of thing with your advertising, or how do you handle this sort of thing with your whatever? Like Brandon was saying, it's not something that we have previously had access to, and it's not something that anybody has given us access to. Similarly to associations for art dealers, these associations exist and you can tap into them and the structures and resources are there. We're creating our own plane as we're flying it.