Yet our naiveté gave our magazine a certain
boldness and freshness that I still appreciate. The quality was often
uneven (not every risk we took was effective, and our literary and
artistic tastes were still developing), yet the quality was also
sometimes surprisingly high.
We
had the good fortune in commissioning striking covers by well-known (or
soon to be well-known) artists. Paul drew the cover to issue no. 2 himself.
Who could have guessed then that he would go on to become a world-famous
comic book writer and artist, that in 2002 GEAR
Magazine would include him 11th in their annual Top 100 list
of “the most exciting people, places, and things on the planet,”
calling him “one of the most consistently inventive comics artists of
his generation”?
Adrian
Tio—then an art professor at Bowling Green State University, now dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth—drew the
cover to issue no. 3. The cover to issue
no. 5, centered around an illustration by Lawrence Oberc, caught the attention of the editors at the Novel and Short Story
Writer’s Market. A photo of our magazine was included
alongside our listing in the 1990 edition of that indispensable
writers’ guide.
Other
highlights included artwork by Tim Johnson, fiction by Ricardo Armijo
and Gerard Smith, and poetry by Eric Lyden (one of the editors of the
hip West Coast ’zine The Moment) and Mark Andrew Nowak.
Still,
after nearly three years of struggle—of paying for everything
ourselves, of driving around Northwest Ohio and Southern Michigan with
stacks of magazines in the trunk of my little ’81 Ford Escort,
dropping off copies on commission in paltry twos ands threes—we found
ourselves tired, broke, and ready to move on to other projects.
Ironically, this is when Gestalt took off—or attempted to.
Our
listing and photo in the Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market,
one of only eight so highlighted in the 204-page “Literary and Small
Circulation Magazines” chapter, sparked a flood of mail from every
U.S. state and around the world. My job at that point was patiently to
return every submission with an explanation of our small-circulation
magazine’s demise. I have no regrets. Yet I can see that we left Gestalt
right when it had broken free of the inertia inherent in the beginning
of any project.
More
than fifteen years later, Gestalt remains a lesson to me
about energy: how it’s created, how it grows, and its relation to the
importance of sticking to a project.
