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By Simmons Buntin, November 19, 2010 10:50 pm

Recently Iowa State University creative writing and environment MFA student Melissa L. Lamberton interviewed Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin about the journal. We thought we’d post the interview here, in addition to Melissa’s use in the classroom:

Melissa L. Lamberton Interviews Terrain.org Editor-in-Chief Simmons B. Buntin

Melissa L. Lamberton: What’s the history of Terrain.org? Where did the idea come from and when did it get started?

Simmons B. Buntin: Terrain.org was founded as Terrain: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments by Todd Ziebarth and me in 1997. We had both recently graduated with our master of urban and regional planning (MURP) degrees from the University of Colorado at Denver, and wanted to start a magazine that focused in large part on land-use issues but also included literary work. Our models were magazines such as Orion, Audubon, and Planning, and we were both influenced by the “New Urbanism” architectural movement, which presented to me at least a kind of poetry of place. When we quickly realized we had neither the experience nor the funding to publish a print magazine, however, we decided to create an online journal.

I had a little web development experience, and that was pretty much all one needed back then to begin an online publication. Our original website address was www.bod.net/terrain but we quickly picked up www.terrain.org. We changed our name a couple years later to lessen confusion between our online journal and the print magazine titled Terrain, published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley. We didn’t know when we founded Terrain.org that there was another environmental magazine of the same name. We selected the title “Terrain” based on an A.R. Ammons poem of the same name. I’ve long been a big Ammons fan; required reading I’d say!

Since our first issue in summer 1998, we’ve published on average two issues per year, and we’ve expanded in scope and size, as well. Initially we included the main content areas of editorials (or columns), poetry, essays, fiction, articles, the UnSprawl case study, and the ARTerrain gallery. Since then we’ve added reviews, an interview, and — with the launch of the current issue — To Know a Place, which features a story, essay, or poem(s) selected by the editors that demonstrates an eloquent intimacy between the author and the author’s place. We’ve also expanded to include a blog, Facebook page, Twitter site, issues in PDF format, and events section. We tried a discussion forum for a while but had to moderate it too closely due to spammers and ultimately gave up. Now, though, we have the capacity to accommodate comments on our contributions and that’s a real plus, as it expands the conversation of the piece well beyond issue launch.

As we’ve grown our editorial board and editorial staff have grown, as well. I’ve always served as the editor-in-chief, web producer, and publisher, while Todd (like myself) was a columnist and reviewer. In the last two years I’ve brought genre editors on board in fiction, nonfiction, and reviews (Patrick Burns, Joshua Foster, Jennifer McStotts, and Stephanie Eve Boone, respectively), and we now also have an assistant editor (Rafael Otto) who primarily maintains our blog. I’ve expanded the role of editors both because our submissions have increased substantially over the last several years and because it doesn’t make sense for a journal that is as established as Terrain.org to rely solely on one person. My hope would be that if the proverbial bus was to run over me tomorrow, Terrain.org could live on. We still need more of a self-automated process (or a backup web producer, perhaps) for that to be guaranteed, but with genre editors, at least the lineage is in place.

The editorial board serves really as an advisory board, though several of our board members — David Rothenberg, Deborah Fries, and Lauret Savoy — also write regular columns. Todd wrote a column for several years but a couple years ago decided to withdraw so is now only an editorial board member. The same is true for Catherine Cunningham, who joined our editorial team primarily as a columnist in 1999 and now serves on the editorial board. The board itself is expanding, as well — something I see continuing with the expanding Terrain.org network.

MLL: What do you mean by “built and natural environments?” What are the types of themes Terrain.org authors tend to explore?

SBB: The term “built & natural environments” is intended to be provocative; that is, we want readers to think about the context of the built to the natural environments. Are they the same? Are they different? “Environment” is such a general word that we wanted to pull it apart a bit. So we say:

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is a twice yearly online journal searching for that interface—the integration—among the built and natural environments, that might be called the soul of place. It is not definitely about urban form, nor solely about natural landscapes. It is not precisely about human culture, nor necessarily about ecology. It is, rather, a celebration of the symbiosis between the built and natural environments where it exists, and an examination and discourse where it does not.

“Examination and discourse” is at the heart of what we’re about, in any genre, because aren’t we as readers, as artists, as humans always impacting and being impacted by place? How, and why — and why does that matter?

Each issue of Terrain.org is theme-based, and these themes are one contextual way to explore the above questions. The current theme, for example, is “The Signal in the Noise,” and upcoming themes include “Entropy,” “Image,” and “Migration.” All of the issues, in the context of their themes, are archived indefinitely at www.terrain.org/archives. Our first theme was “The Urban Neighborhood.” Some of my favorite themes through the years have been “The City Wild,” “The Dark and the Light,” “Understory / Overgrowth,” “Islands & Archipelagos,” and “Symbiosis.” Oh, who am I kidding? I love all the themes because Terrain.org is ultimately about context — the relationship of human to nonhuman environment, the relationship of contribution to contribution within each issue.

It’s not possible to further define the specific themes that authors and other contributors tend to explore because that varies so much based on issue theme, genre, and the piece itself. I can say, however, that for a while and perhaps still, I suppose, we received a lot of submissions about how bad suburbs are, and alienation in suburban settings. That’s a true theme in America, too, though for our journal the submission had better approach that in a truly unique, surprising, and compelling way because otherwise it feels cliched by now.

MLL: What are the unique challenges and/or benefits of having an entirely online journal? I notice you really take advantage of technology with audio poetry, images, etc. Could you talk a bit about the rationale for this, and perhaps what you think about the future of online journals in general?

SBB: I believe the benefits far outweigh the challenges when it comes to online publications. Major benefits include low cost of publication (web hosting is about $160 per year), high visibility (we receive more than 100,000 visits per issue with an achievable goal of multiplying that number by ten in the next few years; most literary print journals are lucky to receive 4,000 or 5,000 “views”), indefinite archiving, easy and real-time accessibility, and the opportunity to include interactive multimedia that print generally doesn’t accommodate.

The challenges include a stigma that online publications still aren’t as high-quality as print publications, competition for readers from other websites (not just journals, but the crazy and I think exciting mix of environmental and cultural sites out there that may cover some of the same topics, literary and otherwise), and the need to constantly accommodate and plan for technology evolution. But with these challenges come good opportunities: more and more online publications are landing contributions in the Pushcart Prize anthology, for example; less and less is “online” a qualifier for publication quality. With linking and especially social networking — Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. — so-called competition can actually benefit all of the websites as they share site visitors and create, potentially, a discourse that goes beyond any single journal, spanning several websites. And with rapid changes in technology we find that the website becomes easier to maintain and share, that we can draw more visitors to the site by offering more dynamic features, and that visitors can access the site in multiple ways (traditional computer, smart phone, Kindle, etc.).

To me it seems a shame not to take advantage of multimedia in an online publication. Little disappoints me as much as going to a new online journal only to discover it’s simply a PDF prepared for print that’s served up online. Big deal. Okay, it may have fantastic literary content, true. But what else? So with Terrain.org, our goal is to include as much (reasonable and elegantly presented) interactive multimedia as possible: audio with poetry and lyrical essays and short stories, video essays and interviews, interactive photo essays and narrative slideshows, commenting on contributions, searchable contributor index, image galleries, and more. That is truly what brings an online journal beyond the realm of the print — and is pretty standard now on most informational websites, anyway. The opportunity, then, isn’t so much having that interactive content, but presenting it to readers in such a way that it really pulls them in.

I am biased, of course, but that’s one of the ways I believe that Terrain.org excels: design. There are some online journals with very good poetry and the like, but the work is presented in such a way as to be almost painful to look at or browse through. When people come to Terrain.org, my hope is that one of the first things they do is say, “Wow! What a beautifully presented journal with fantastic content.” I often hear what great images we have, and that’s not accidental: it all ties in. Simply, our goal is to be the most functionally beautiful environmental journal, if not journal overall, online. I’m not saying that we are there now, but we continue to strive.

I think the future of online journals is tied directly to devices we’ll use to access “the web” in the future. I’ve mentioned smart phones and Kindle — digital readers. The latter poses the most interesting challenge for a traditionally HTML journal like Terrain.org, because the digital readers are not HTML and so (right now) cannot accommodate the interactive features. I can’t imagine that won’t change in some capacity, though. Think about the newspaper subscriber who reads the “traditional” newspaper on her Kindle but wants more information, say audio and an image gallery, housed on the newspaper’s website. Perhaps these digital readers already do support that linkage, but if not it must just be a matter of time before the Kindle tool links to additional online content and has the capacity to eloquently serve that content. From a production perspective, however, digital editions for Kindle follow in style and actual assembly from a PDF based on a publication designed for print. We go back and convert our HTML to print for our PDF edition, but that’s not adequate for getting it onto Kindle. And then there’s the additional challenge (and cost?) of actually getting Terrain.org picked up by Kindle. We don’t charge for access, there’s no subscription rate and I don’t ever intend there to be. So if Kindle charges a fee to “host” issues of Terrain.org, could we afford to do that? Not right now…

Though I don’t have a lot of capacity to convert Terrain.org to all of these platforms, I think about how the journal can fit — what’s coming up next — all the time. And the challenge is as exciting as it is daunting.

MLL: What’s going on behind the scenes? Who are your slush readers, how many do you have, and how do you keep the website up and running?

SBB: As the editor-in-chief, I’m responsible for final say on all contributions, and serve as the genre editor for poetry. I also solicit (and/or respond to and often write) interview, ARTerrain, UnSprawl, and other contributions and sections of the site. We have dedicated editors for fiction, nonfiction (one editor each for essays and articles), and reviews, and they work through the slush pile (which is easy to manage thanks to our online submission manager, which many print and online journals use now for the submission process) and forward their recommendations to me. Terrain.org is an on-the-side love affair for all of us, so we get to contributions and other editorial matters as we can, from our own locales, and do not have editorial meetings. Our editors are in Tucson, San Francisco, and Buffalo. So location isn’t as important as, say, dedication.

I’ll often review work on a Sunday afternoon, or on an evening that isn’t too late. If I like it right away we’ll accept it right away, but more often we want to live with it for a while and then will accept it. We may lightly or sometimes heavily edit pieces we accept (this is especially the case for nonfiction and articles), or suggest completely new ways to approach a piece, especially if it’s multimedia. That can get pretty exciting. A recent example is Aisha Sloan’s wonderful photo essay on Los Angeles, “How to Draw a Glass Mountain: Los Angeles and the Architecture of Segregation” (http://www.terrain.org/essays/25/sloan.htm) which she submitted as a fairly different essay with a couple photograph possibilities. I met with her (turns out she’s in Tucson) after reviewing the piece and we reconstructed it together before she went back and really overhauled it, much to the piece’s benefit. There was no guarantee we would accept it, but I felt like with the new structure it had a great chance of really working, and it does. Now that level of collaboration and editing is not standard, but we will work closely with the author if we think that will do the trick.

I maintain the website — it helps that I’ve been a professional website developer and designer. Building out the site takes a very long time; I often have to take several days from my full-time job plus work on it hours every night for a month and a half before issue launch to get it ready for contributor review. That’s just the web component, on top of all the work in reviewing and editing. As I like to say, besides my babies (I have two daughters), Terrain.org is my baby.

MLL: How do you measure “circulation” — number of web hits? Twitter followers?

SBB: We use Google Analytics to track traffic. The most important statistic is website visits: dedicated time on the site by single visitors. Page views and percentage of new versus returning visitors are also important. Then we have the capability of tracking search terms that bring visitors to the site, visitor paths through the site, primary entrance and exit pages, time on site, browser and platforms, and the like. We also track visits to the blog, using the same tool.

While I look at Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” or fans, I’m less concerned about those numbers, though always want to help increase them because they’re good tools for getting announcements and other information out there. We also send the Terrain.org e-News to an email distribution list we’ve been accumulating since we started; I’d really like to grow that list, as well.

The challenge that I haven’t mentioned earlier, but which relates to growing the email list and increasing site traffic, is marketing, and the funding for said marketing. We’re nonprofit but not legally so; therefore, we cannot receive tax-free donations. That’s something we plan to address over the next eighteen months, but until then Terrain.org is a wholly self-funded endeavor. Paying for web hosting and such isn’t too bad, but marketing in magazines like Poets & Writers, and then exhibiting at conferences such as AWP and ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) isn’t cheap, though essential. Additionally, at some point down the road I’d like to be able to pay for contributions, especially articles. We’ll need a revenue source in one capacity or another for that, and it seems to me that incorporating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is about the only way to open ourselves up to large and regular funding sources; it’s certainly the only way to be eligible for the majority of organizational grants and fellowships. That leads to the challenge and resource constraints of grant writing, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, as they say…

MLL: Any thoughts you have on where you’d like to see Terrain.org go in the future, or the role it plays in making a space to talk about environmental issues?

SBB: This is a good and loaded question, one I feel like I’m constantly considering. Of course I’d like to see Terrain.org expand in quantity and quality: more readers, more submitters, more outstanding contributions, more visibility, more discussion sparked by the contributions, more awards and recognition, more changing the world for the better.

Specifically, though, I’d like to secure enough funding to spend more of my time on the journal and move it from a twice-yearly to a quarterly format. I think we have enough submissions to do that at this point, at least in the creative genres. But I don’t have the capacity — even with the addition of genre editors — to put the issue together four times a year, to write the UnSprawl case studies and conduct the interviews four times a year as I often do. I would need more than extracurricular time to make that jump (and perhaps the genre editors would, as well), but it is a goal.

Additionally, I want to continue to build networks and collaborations with other journals and organizations. It may sound strange, since I used the c-word before (competition), but there can be real synergies between even similar journals that make them both better. For example, the editor of Unity College’s beautiful print journal Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, Kathryn Miles, is on our editorial board. Beyond that, though, we haven’t collaborated and yet we have the opportunity to do just that. Where Terrain.org has formed expanding partnerships, though, is with book publishers such as Milkweed Editions and Trinity University Press, in which we include excerpts from new books. That ensures we get good content (we review and select or decline as with any submission) and the publisher gets more exposure. One of Terrain.org’s first partnerships was with the now-defunct journal Terra Nova: Nature & Culture, published in the 1990s by MIT Press. David Rothenberg was the editor and is on our editorial board. He also writes a regular column for Terrain.org. The cornerstone of the partnership, though, is that Terrain.org includes contributions from Terra Nova in the journal on occasion, extending the life of that essay, story, or poem. Who knows what other partnerships and collaborations are out there, but I’m certain there are many more opportunities.

Indeed, opportunities would appear to be the optimal word — for technology, for collaborative efforts, for making a space to talk about environmental issues. And opportunities for considering the context of the built and natural environments in literary and technical mediums are what I hope we present in a lovely and important online format.

~~~

Melissa L. Lamberton is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. A native Tucsonan, she worked as a science writer for the Water Resources Research Center and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and her articles have appeared in the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen.

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By Simmons Buntin, September 29, 2009 5:26 am

By Jennifer McStotts

When the draft for Vietnam was in full swing, my father volunteered not because he believed in the war or lusted for battle, but because he couldn’t avoid the draft. He knew if he volunteered, he would get a better assignment, and if he survived, his life afterward would be more stable. A risky reason to enlist, but it is also common thinking among women who serve: the desire for training, for education, for opportunity and stability. Much like many women who serve today, his enlistment launched three decades of silence in his family. The first time I remember him mentioning Vietnam was in my late teens. We were in twining lines waiting for flu shots, staying together until we were divided, men to the left, women to the right. He stood just off my shoulder, and as we neared the split, he asked, “Are you squeamish about needles?”

I chuckled. “No, are you?”

To my surprise he gave the smallest shudder and said, as our lines split apart, “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person, but for some reason needles still give me the creeps.”

He didn’t speak of his service even as I considered joining myself, except to say that a commission was better than enlistment and that serving as a woman was not easy. Choosing to remain a civilian isn’t something I regret; in fact, it is a luxury for which I am thankful, but it was pressing on my mind as I sat down, Saturday evening in Tucson, Ariz., for the performance of Coming in Hot.

The stageplay is an adaptation of selections from the Kore Press anthology, Powder: Writing by Women in the Military, from Vietnam to Iraq, which collects the work of nineteen women who served in the U.S. military in a variety of roles. Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain, the co-editors, admit that they “went into the project with the idea that this work would contribute to the chorus of opposition to the war in Iraq . . . We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any bias and agenda.” It was, nonetheless, this agenda, bias, and perspective that made me wonder if the adapted work would be solely anti-war, primarily a piece of activism, especially given that the work was produced by Kore Press and directed by Bowden.

What the audience witnessed was a well-balanced collection of monologues composed into a one-woman show featuring Jeanmarie Simpson (original score by accompanist Vicki Brown on strings and pedals, with recorded voice talents of Donald Paul Stockton and Kaylene Torregrossa). Before I go any further, I would like to applaud Simpson. While her performance wasn’t flawless, she was also presented with a nearly impossible task in portraying 14 distinct characters in 80 minutes, without costume change; she did so successfully — laudably — using her voice, her mannerisms, and her versatility as an actress, but at times the variety of accents necessary to distinguish so many women became less convincing.

It is troubling that the adaption and direction called for Simpson to do so in the first place. The message or point of the play could have been narrowed, refined, or, in the alternative, the number of monologues could have been reduced (19 contributions became 14 characters, and an even greater number of segments given the recurring appearance of Charlotte Brock’s character in Mortuary Affairs). Characters could have been conflated without much loss of narrative effect and without forcing Simpson to stretch to distinguish them; as one audience member said immediately after the performance, “There were too many stories. It was too much, and it didn’t say enough.”

That said, despite missed light cues, despite a few stuttered lines and awkward moments involving her blocking, Simpson brought life to characters within the simplicity of an otherwise stark production. The set consisted only of one chair and one table — more of an operating table, clinical and spare — which was primarily used for the Mortuary Affairs scenes in which Brock’s character stood over it as if looking down on a body. The lighting consisted of only a few overhead fixtures at various angles with the exception of one water effect and one flashlight held by a crew member. What felt strange, to me, was the balance the director struck between the one-woman show format — meant to emphasize character and message — and the use of recorded voice segments to supplement Simpson’s work. In addition, it was confusing that at first the recorded voices were only used for the male voice of a boot camp instructor, then a female voice for the character Simpson was portraying silently on stage, and finally that same female voice switched to a male role. While I don’t agree with one audience member’s assessment that it would have been better to focus on a very small number of stories — four being the number she mentioned — it did feel inconsistent to rely on the one-actor model while supplementing and distracting from her performance in a variety of ways.

The original score by Vicki Brown was a perfect accompaniment to the monologues. Brown used the same themes and structure each time Simpson returned to the recurring character of Charlotte Brock in the mortuary. At other times, her music set the heartbeat of the scene, calling its pace; at every moment, she took the pain and the challenge of Brock’s writing (and Simpson’s portrayal) to a higher level.

These recurring scenes pulled me in the most and made me think — again, as I often have before — of my father’s offhand comment. “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person.” Brock says something very similar about “the contents of the bags” that Mortuary Affairs handled, especially in one harrowing scene in which the deceased is little more than “a head, a hand, and an arm.”

What Simpson, Bowden, and Cain attempted to do in the adaptation and performance was no easy task — to tell these stories and to grant these women their individual voices when their silence has been so pervasive. What perhaps made the sections by Brock so powerful was that she, too, was trying to give someone a voice, both herself in the world in which she found herself surrounded, but also the dead who lay upon that table.

About the Blogger

Jennifer McStotts is the daughter, niece, and ex-wife of United States Marines, as well as a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in Future Anterior, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, and by Preservation Books.