LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Sean Finney and Mia Lipman are the editors of Canteen magazine, “the literary magazine that comes with instructions.” They met nearly a decade ago while working as tech reporters in San Francisco. They celebrated Canteen’s launch earlier this year and already have more to celebrate: the journal was named “Best New Local Publication About the Arts” by San Francisco magazine, and it has been covered in The San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, ArtBusiness.com and Design Arts Daily.

Canteen, according to its mission statement, “aims to engage readers with both the arts and the creative process.” We sat down with Sean and Mia recently to talk about a range of topics, from Canteen’s birth from New York gambling money (really), to what it’s like to run a literary journal, to why there are so many fistfights in the San Francisco poetry scene (again, really).

Tell us a little about the origins of the magazine.

SEAN: Canteen has the perhaps unique distinction of being named after a San Francisco restaurant, but being backed by New York gambling money. 

How did that happen? Those seem like two disparate entities.

SEAN: Well, they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. No, basically my friend Dennis Leary, who was the chef of Rubicon, started a small but well-reviewed restaurant called Canteen, and wanted that restaurant to be more than just a foodie pilgrimage site. So he has shelves of books in there – and he’s quite a good writer himself, and he has an article in this first issue.  

And I put together these literary banquets, where what we wanted to do was have the feel of the back room in a Parisian restaurant. We would lure these famous writers to give what we called intercourse readings, and we’d have two people read in the middle of the meals, like Andy Greer, Simone Ali, Joyce Maynard. That’s how we started to build up a stable of writers. And Stephen Pierson, our publisher, was one of the guests, and he said, “Sean, do you want to start a magazine?” And I said yes.

Just like that? 

SEAN: Well, some time passed. (Laughter) And Mia came in and saved us from just talking about it, transformed talk into action.

Will Canteen the restaurant ever have a poker night? A casino night, maybe? 

SEAN: We haven’t approached them about that yet. But they’re selling the magazine.

You mentioned that you lured all of these writers to the literary banquets. How did you lure them?  

SEAN: Food!

Did you cold-call people? Or did you have contacts? 

SEAN: Basically, you have a friend of a friend who’s a famous writer, and once you get one big name you use that name to attract other names. And I think people like the idea of this private literary banquet.

MIA: And Dennis has gotten a great deal of press also, so people would have known who he was and wanted to eat there.

How long have these dinners have been going on? 

SEAN: We did about three or four, and then we switched to cocktail parties. And some of those were readings, too. We had Peter Orner and Joyce Maynard…

MIA: The woman who did the memoir about her father, Rachel Howard… 

SEAN: But we never got, like, Coetzee to come down from Stanford. But we’ll see! No Nobel Prize winners yet.

But after this interview… 

SEAN: Oh, yes. (Laughter)

MIA: But it was very much the same thing with Canteen [magazine]. Once Sean had secured pieces from Andy [Andrew Sean Greer] and Po [Bronson], getting other writers and telling them, “This is the company you’ll be in,” was considerably easier.

Let’s talk about the angle of the magazine. Why exactly did you choose this angle? And also, why do you think it’s so important? 

SEAN: The tagline for the magazine is “the state of creation,” and that refers to how the magazine has new work, but we also try to get pieces that reveal something of the creative process. It seems like people aren’t content to merely be in the audience. Most people who come to readings, whether it’s fiction, or especially poetry, are writers themselves, so they’re all waiting their turn. And people often have an incredible willingness to pay tens of thousand of dollars for master of fine arts degrees from every single obscure college under the sun, yet they have trouble buying books sometimes. So we figured, heck – we’ll give them an MFA between covers.

MIA: And also there’s the element of that slightly voyeuristic preference on the part of the American public now. They’re less likely to pick up a work of fiction than to read an article about the author in Vanity Fair or a People cover story. In some ways, while you could call that a sad or downward trend, it also becomes necessary to – for lack of a better word – to capitalize on that. If people are so fascinated by that behind-the-scenes look, then if we can do that in a way that also encourages them to read fiction and to read poetry and to read the results of that process, then we’re doing good work.  

I felt like that was a niche that hadn’t been filled, or at least was only being filled minimally. There’s also the trend of do-it-yourself household magazines, so this is our literary take on that, in a way. Sean came up with the first line of our mission statement, of Canteen being a literary magazine that comes with instructions.

Tell us about that. What does that mean? 

SEAN: We mean that in featuring essays that reveal something about how known writers have completed their own work, it’s akin to getting a set of instructions for your own practice. There aren’t any literal instructions in there – though maybe in the Julie Orringer piece, where she dissects with her husband, Ryan Harty, their refrigerator magnet poem.

SEAN: That’s the closest to actual instruction that we have. But we hope that there’s an instructive but not pedantic spirit in the magazine.  

So you hope to inspire people to write more – you’ve mentioned not only a voyeuristic impulse –

SEAN: We’re amoral. We’re very amoral. (Laughter) I mean, there’s enough people writing as is, so…

MIA: Well, I hope we do. And I want people to send us their stuff. Everyone that I’ve talked to out here that’s part of the young writing community – and lord knows that’s enormous in the Bay Area – and the people from whom I’ve seen the most enthusiastic response for this, have been artists and writers themselves. Because they think not only that [Canteen] is an interesting object and beautiful object – and it’s a small venture, so they want to support that – but it’s also the idea of, “Hey, I could be in there.” Because it’s accessible enough to them. 

We wanted to make something that was aesthetically beautiful and felt a little more expensive and more valuable, so people not only would want to pick it up and read it, but also aspire to be inside it. At least I know that’s one of my hopes when people pick it up, especially the writing community.

Mia, you mentioned earlier the art portfolios that are included in the magazine. How do you feel like that ties in with the writing that’s in there, and why did you want that to be such a strong component?

MIA: Well, in terms of approaching both the creative process and the results of that process, we wanted to include essays in here that not only describe what people did in terms of coming to their writing or their art – and we hope to get painters, musicians, other types of art forms…for future issues – we also wanted to showcase the results of that process. 

SEAN: And the reason the magazine looks the way it does is because the four of us at Canteen thought that most literary magazines looked really boring. And that they weren’t very sexy. So we tried to make it more appealing and thus the square format, the deluxe paper, the fancy binding, the two-page gutter-jumping spreads that introduce each piece, even if it’s just a poem. We wanted it to be something that you would read, and also an object that you would desire, and you might want to put on your coffee table. Or wherever you keep your desirable objects.

So what’s the business model? There’s no advertising in the magazine, correct? And we also saw on your website that you’re set up as a not-for-profit. Is Stephen doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Putting his gambling money to good use?  

MIA: No, there’s no ads, and we’d love to keep it that way. It certainly was a discussion. Stephen can’t fund it until the end of time, but we’re hoping to keep it ad-free. And Stephen is doing this in part out of the goodness of his heart –

SEAN: But we’re still amoral. I insist upon that! 

MIA: I think that Stephen came to this from the perspective of a businessman with origins in writing. He was a journalist with us, he has written short stories of his own, he came to us with that background. So I think it’s a combination of not expecting it to be a huge moneymaking venture, but at least expecting it to be a sustainable business that he could be a part of, that also fulfilled his own artistic and literary leanings, as opposed to being a purely philanthropic thing. I think he’s got a personal connection to it. He’s certainly invested in what’s in here and how it looks, very much.

SEAN: We’re going to be the next McSweeney’s, but with more irony. 

We would love to give our readers the same kind of insight into your creative process that you’re trying to give your readers into the creative process of other writers. So – tell us about your day-to-day jobs. It sounds like a pretty cool thing, to run your own literary magazine. What do you actually do?

MIA: Well, there being only four of us, we do have pretty defined roles. Sean’s officially, as editor-in-chief, the acquirer of work. My role is officially as the setter of the schedule and the production and logistics person – so I’m responsible for nagging Sean about getting those pieces in, so we can launch them. I’m also the main liaison with our designer in terms of copyediting the pieces and getting them into production.  

SEAN: For issue two, we have Joyce Maynard writing an essay. So I’ll get it, do a once-over – what we call developmental editing. Maybe I’ll have some questions for her, I’ll say, “This is great, but you’re hinting at something here…even more intriguing, so can I bug you to push on that?” And even very busy writers are open to that. They want to be pushed a little. And then I send it to Mia.

MIA: Sean’s the big-picture read. 

SEAN: Does that mean you’re the little-picture read?

MIA: I’m the granular read. I’m the red-pen read. Grammar, house style. 

SEAN: Sometimes I mess up the grammar.

MIA: That’s where I come in! I’ve got your back, man. So we do bring different skills to the table in terms of the editorial process, which I think is why we work well together. We’ve worked together in various companies and capacities over the years. That’s a good partnership…. I was never a fiction writer or a poet, so Sean brings that perspective to it, which I appreciate a lot.

SEAN: And Stephen’s kind of the overseer – he likes to think he has veto power. We’ll see if he actually does. (Laughter)

What would success look like for Canteen? 

SEAN: To have a subscriber base…

MIA: To have it be self-sustaining, at the very least.  

SEAN: Having a subscriber base of what – thousands and thousands?

MIA: Probably thousands and thousands. For financial viability, and because of the paper we’re using. It’s very expensive to produce the magazine, we’re not making a big profit. Our margin’s very slim – and close to nonexistent, when it comes to being able to discount it [for bookstores] – the idea would be to get us to a strong enough subscriber base…  

SEAN: How many, Mia?

MIA: Well, 10 to 15 thousand – but that would be a pittance. Something like Maxim has a million.

You’re not Maxim, though, are you? 

MIA: Right. So success would not have to be that. But we’d like our fair share – for it to be able to pay for itself. And then if we got a profit someday, that would be fantastic.

SEAN: And we want to be mentioned in the New York Times, because we’ve read that forever.  

MIA: What would be ideal in my mind would be to get to the point of being able to be quarterly, which would mean pieces coming in and being offered to us. My ideal would be that people would be coming to us, and not just Joe Schmoe writer on the street who just got his MFA – although we love to read that stuff – but to have more established writers coming to us and saying, “I love this idea, I want to write a piece for you guys.”

SEAN: To discover the next Rimbaud.  

MIA: Exactly. The next Benjamin Kunkel. So that level of financial viability and interest from the writing community would be success in my eyes.

Where do you see literary magazines in terms of the literary world – what’s their position? Is it a really niche readership? 

SEAN: Maybe they should be incubators for talent, so the people higher up in the food chain should support them in some way.

You mean aside from reading them and offering novel contracts to the writers whose work they like? 

SEAN: Maybe that’s enough, but maybe their role is as an incubator. Now that you can get an endless flow of new work online, their traditional role as a way of reading something that’s newer than a book – I don’t know if that exists in the same way. You have to think about how the object functions. We tried to make a beautiful object that people would want to share and keep and show to their friends.

MIA: But it is certainly a niche; as Sean touched on earlier, it’s often a niche for other writers. The people I see most carrying literary magazines and reading them and talking about them are the people who want to be in them. It’s this somewhat self-serving but also symbiotic world where the people who are producing the magazine aren’t necessarily producing it to publish their own stuff, but are hoping that their peers are going to buy [it] and think, “I want to be in this, I’ll show it to my friends who also would want to be in this.” And the crowd who’s out there buying more than just four or five bestsellers every year – people who seek out independent booksellers and a new store or a new writer. 

SEAN: We’re hoping to get educated general-interest readers who aren’t in the closed-loop system of most literary magazines. We’re taking a little gamble there, and we’ll see how it pans out.

MIA: That’s where the creative process aspect comes in. If we were just publishing fiction and poetry in here, it wouldn’t be less worthy, and we’re happy to have that side-by-side with the creative process essays. But there’s the idea that people who wouldn’t buy a literary magazine or a poetry magazine might buy a magazine about how poets write or think, or that poet’s interesting life – like Po’s story about the suicidal reader. It wasn’t just a story about “This is how I write, this is what I do”; it hinged on [a] narrative and an intriguing thing that happened to him. So someone who wouldn’t necessarily pick up a piece of fiction by our writers might pick up an essay by [them] about how they work and what they’re thinking. It goes back to that voyeuristic element we talked about. 

SEAN: But – amoral voyeurism.

MIA: Actually, it seems like an exceptionally moral way to approach voyeurism. We’re not putting a houseful of teenage girls in the shower online, we’re peeking into people’s minds in a very different way, but hoping it will appeal in a similar way to a mass of people.

Isn’t there also something about time here? As people have less and less time to sit down and read, just due to the speed of things, couldn’t this idea of anthologies and short stories and literary magazines be marketed to a broader audience as a way to get your dose of quality thinking and writing? 

MIA: I’d say the success of the Best American series speaks directly to that.

SEAN: We do want to make [Canteen] browseable – there’s a lot of visuals, and we try to keep the articles fairly short, so maybe we’ll catch this trend, though maybe we’re running the risk of missing some profound new writer who writes in a thorny, recondite, difficult way. But you can’t have everything, right? 

SEAN: But the choice to make it more selective, smaller, to give people the best of what we’ve got – those were conscious choices. We want to highlight each piece as a special piece we’ve chosen for you, that’s part of this bigger literary work. Another thing for us is encouraging people to write outside of their genre. We think it’s really interesting when that happens.

MIA: That’s the other great thing about doing a publication this small and this personal. We figured that if what we were introducing was broad enough, we could say or decide how anything we thought was interesting could fit under that umbrella.  

SEAN: Like poetry – it’s still a rock-star idea, but it’s an uptight librarian reality. It’s painful to go to poetry readings. Its like you can hear a pin drop; it’s like church. One way to try and make poetry interesting, to get back its rock ’n’ roll spirit, is that I’m going to write an article about fights in the San Francisco poetry scene.

You mean feuds?

SEAN: Physical, bloody fights! There was a huge brawl at a reading series out in the Avenues, a place where these people also had their own home yoga studio – a very peaceful, dull place – there was a knock-down, drag-out brawl. People just punched each other in the face. And then I was involved in a poetry fight –

Over what? Line breaks?

SEAN: Over enjambment! (Laughs) This guy sucker-punched me in my own house! Luckily, I have a picture of it. So you’ll see lots of creative articles from Canteen. 

Fill in the blank: Readers everywhere should rush out and get a copy of Canteen because _____?

MIA: Take it, sound bite man. And don’t just say it’s amoral! 

(Contemplative silence)

MIA: Should I try it? Because what we’re doing is at the intersection of a variety of literary genres, which we think will appeal to a wider base than ordinary literary magazines. It’s full of content that you want to read, and it’s a beautiful object. I love the way it smells – it smells fantastic. It’s got that printed new paper, with the matte feel and smell to it. So it’s something you want to hold and touch and read and learn from and give your work to. 

SEAN: Because you’re going to learn about the beauty and madness of art, and you can keep it on your coffee table for anyone to see.

MIA: And smell. 

What type of writers or pieces are you looking to include in future issues of Canteen?

SEAN: Smart, but not boring.

You have a lot of big-name writers in there. Is that all you’re looking for?

MIA: Not at all. We do want those folks in there, but we also want new writers.

SEAN: We’re looking for work that relates to the creative process specifically, but we’re also looking for poetry, short stories, and other written formats which will impress us. We don’t know what will spark our interest – so send us your best stuff. Send us what you love.

You can read Sean’s LitMinds profile here and Mia’s LitMinds profile here. For more information on Canteen magazine and its submission requirements, click here. To purchase or subscribe to Canteen magazine, click here.