College sophomore Nolan Boomer worked this Winter Term on a literary and art magazine called The Juvenilia, to be published this week. The Juvenalia started as a blog at www.thejuvenilia.com when Nolan was in high school, and this issue will be the first in print. I sat down with him in Azariah’s Café to discuss the relationship between the printed word, collaboration from afar, the internet, and visual art. 

Can you tell me a little bit about how your literary magazine got started?

I think it was junior year of high school. I went on a summer trip through Brown [University] to Greece for a month. I met a girl there named Kolleen [Ku] who grew up in Hong Kong. We became really, really good friends on that trip … As a way to sort of keep in touch we decided to start an online art-lit publication together … It was cool because it sort of bridged a gap between us and had us working on a project every day together … So we did that for a year and a half or so, and then once we were both in college and we got sort of busy, we wanted to do something that was more infrequent but still as thoughtful.

So you’re working with her from afar on the print thing?

Yeah, she was less involved with this past issue, but yeah, [it was me] and a lot of editors. A lot of people I worked with at McSweeney’s [Publishing] last summer were helping me with it as well, to manage individual pieces.

Like Dave Eggers?

Not quite. My friend [at McSweeney’s], who’s like a receptionist lady who also does a bunch of stuff with poetry, contributed some really, really cool poems, which I’m excited about … We sort of also switched gears with this one and wanted to have it sort of be about showing the work of younger contributors. It’s called The Juvenilia. [We wanted] it to be accessible to a lot of different kinds of contributors. We found with our … website that people from Africa were submitting things, and people from Australia, and people from all over the U.S., who were pretty young, and it was cool they could find it because it was online. … We want all our content to be focused on place, because we — Kolleen and I — both find that really important [to the relevance of art and literature].

What were your intentions when you started working on this issue, and how did those plans change as the project developed?

I had less funding for it than I thought I would initially, so we’re doing a very small run of 100 or so copies. Some will be in bookstores, some we’ll sell online. But … I think I would have rather been able to sell more of them for cheaper because I want it to be as accessible as possible and I think in the future I want that to be thought about better.

Do you think anything is lost in transferring physical art to print? How did you try to overcome that?

When we were working with all of the artists we … [let them] know that we, in the end, wanted it scanned and sent to us. But with the art spreads we have, one is a collage. … I don’t even know if the physical form of it exists anywhere, because a lot of it was elements put together and stuff. … I think it would be cool to not have it be in like a constrained 6 x 9 form because that’s also kind of small, but I think the artists going into it knew what it would be and provided art accordingly.

The Juvenalia is very aesthetic in terms of the way it’s laid out. Did you have any specific directions you wanted to go in with respects to the relationship between the visual art and the printed word?

Yeah, definitely. Thinking about it, I really wanted it to be as cohesive as possible. When we’d finish a written piece we’d contact an artist with the finished article and ask them to make art based on it. … So we sort of wanted [the writers and artists] to be in conversation with one another, and hopefully that comes across.

What did you learn from this kind of project about the creative process in general?

I think, especially going to a very small school in the middle of Ohio, it’s important to also have other projects going on … And these are a lot of people that I’ve worked with either past summers or people I’ve met random places and I think it’s cool to keep some sort of tether to those people and sort of collaborate on something because that’s possible now. So I think I sort of want to continue in the future to do some sort of thing like this. I also learned that publishing is very expensive. It’s just a very, very expensive industry.

I guess everything’s on the internet now. Do you have any future plans for this project?

I think we’ll see how the first issue goes and then do another one after that if there’s enough interest. … Because we sort of dramatically switched formats we’re just hoping to see what happens. It’s pretty fun and I’ve worked with a lot of magazines but never done one by myself, so I think it’s cool to know I can do that. And hopefully we’ll continue to do that in some form.

Where can Oberlin students get the magazine?

I’m going to try to sell some here. My friend [College sophomore] Molly Lieberman made a bunch of zines over Winter Term that she wants to sell as well, so we’re going to try and have some sort of event here. But if not, it’ll be accessible online [at www.thejuvenilia.com].