8/14/2019 Interview with Dawn Corrigan for Associate Editorship at Girls with Insurance

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The followinginterview wasconducted on 5 July 2009 via Gmail Chatfor the purpose of giving potentialcontributors toGirls with Insurancesome idea of where Associate EditorDawn Corriganstands on letters.

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8/14/2019 Interview with Dawn Corrigan for Associate Editorship at Girls with Insurance

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P. H. M ADORE : Helo Dawn Corrigan. You want tobe a GwI Associate, I guess?

D AWN C ORRIGAN : I do.PHM: Who do you think you're foo ing? Nobodyants to work at an obscure magazine that's fai ed once a ready!

DC: Heh. I'm a sucker for underdogs, impossibleodds, and lost causes. PHM: That's going to be a good qua ity for this job.What have you been reading ate y?

DC: I've been reading some [Young Adult] stu ,as I was recently informed that, in completing my

rst novel, I wrote a YA book--a little to my surprise. So, I've been reading John Green. Alsojust nished my rst Fante novel--I started with Ask the Dus . And I read Mr. Bridg --I've reread Mrs. Bridg several times, and all of a sudden itoccurred to me that I wanted to see the yang tothat yin. Online, I've been visiting my usual

suspects--Monkeybicycle , Dogzplot , Wigleaf ,etc. I just went and checked out the rst issue of Stymie Magazine the other day, as well.

PHM: What is the best contemporary magazine, iterary or otherwise?

DC: Oh golly. I can't even begin to answer thatquestion. Seriously--I'm trying to think of something clever, and drawing a complete blank. Then I try to simply answer the question

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seriously, and I draw a blank again. I think thishas to do with my tendency to avoid "best" kindof thinking. I will say that I often nd S at useful. I have a tendency to be a bit of a hermit,so a magazine like Slate teaches me not just whatpeople are talking about but how they're talking about it. You know, how a certain semi-educateddemographic is talking about Sarah Palin, etc.

PHM: Slate is admirab e, realy it is. I think if w can achieve ten percent of their readership in the nex ha f-decade, we'l be doing good.

DC: Agreed.

PHM: When did you decide you wanted to geinvo ved with the on ine iterary thinger?

DC: Heh. I actually dipped my toes in that poolaround 1999-2000 or so, then took a hiatus for six years. In '99 my friend Tim Ferine, a poet, wasrunning an online journal calledGim et Ey . We'djust gotten in touch again after a break of several years and he took a few of my poems for it. But

when they went up, there were typos, whichannoyed me. So I asked him if I could guest-editthe next issue, which allowed me both to exert my editorial being and to learn a bit about HTML,etc. I enjoyed that, and decided to launch my ownmagazine, but I wound up in a stalemate with the web designer I hired, and it never got o the ground.

Then, as I said, I took a break, but by 2006or so I realized the writing was on the wall. Imyself was doing a lot of my reading online by

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then, and I realized there was something aboutthe accessibility and ... I don't know ...egalitarianism of writing online that I loved. Plus,I was doing things like writing prose-poems andinserting hyperlinks and images into them, thensending them to American Poetry Review[laughs] ...I wanted to be an online writer before I realizedit.

Then I saw an ad Brad Listi posted onCraigslist when he was launching (writing website)The Nervous Breakdown . I responded to thatand then started poking around at the onlineliterary magazines, and I realized this really robust scene/community had developed in theinterim since I'd worked on Gim et Ey .

PHM : I didn't know Listi was behind TNB ! I was a

na ist in his Riot Lit nove contest some years ago.DC : Get out! Awesome. Oh yeah, TNB is totally Brad's baby.

PHM : So, are you b ind to the various camps and c iques that have popped up since 99/2000?

DC : You know, I did a long stint in academic writing programs, so I have a pretty tough skin when it comes to camps and cliques. I'm sort of aware that they're there in the online world as well, but I still try to ignore them, just as I alwayshave. Not that such a strategy necessarily pays o ,since to the people who think in terms of thoseboxes, if you're not in one, you're nowhere. But Istand by my decision.

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PHM: This wil be very bene cia toGwI . DC : Thanks. I hope so. This sort of thing is partof the reason I'm interested in editorial work.PHM : I don't think I have any other concerns.

DC : Great. Groovy. I'm very excited about working with you and seeing what we can make via GwI. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.