Jen Angel and Jason Kucsma are the editors and founders of Clamor Magazine: New Perspectives On Politics, Culture, Media and Life. The independent magazine is published bi monthly and is based out of Toledo, Ohio.  Clamor Magazine's mission is to provide a media outlet that reflects the reality of alternative politics and culture in a format that is accessible to people from a variety of backgrounds. Clamor exists to fill the voids left by mainstream media. We recognize and celebrate the fact that each of us can and should participate in media, politics and culture. We publish writing and art that exemplifies the value we place on autonomy, creativity, exploration, and cooperation. Clamor is an advocate of progressive social change through active creation of political and cultural alternatives. For more information on Clamor visit: www.clamormagazine.org

 

Jen Angel
Founder and Co-Editor                                                                                      

Jen Angel has been involved in alternative media and independent publishing for over 10 years. She began by publishing her own small zine, Fucktooth, in 1991. In 1996 she began publishing the Zine Yearbook, a perfect-bound book which collects excerpts from small press publications and puts them in an accessible format, a kind of "best of" the small press. Currently, there are six editions of the Zine Yearbook. In 1997, she relocated to San Francisco and worked as co-editor for Maximum Rock N Roll, the largest and longest running punk-music publication in the world. Jen is a graduate of the Ohio State University and currently works full time at Planned Parenthood of Northwest Ohio.

Jason Kucsma
Founder and Co-Editor

Jason Kucsma has been publishing small press zines since 1992, and more recently has been the primary organizer for the annual Allied Media Conference. Jason graduated from Bowling Green State University with a Master's degree in American Culture Studies. As partial fulfillment of his master's degree, Jason also wrote a thesis examining the ways in which the independent press, specifically zines, can be viewed as crucial to reaffirming democratic ideals and confronting social inequality.

 

Interview with  Jen Angel and Jason Kucsma by Nicolas Lampert via email. 7/03

 

Could you both give a brief history of your previous projects in self publishing before Clamor?

Jen: Well, I started publishing zines around 1991 - I did a zine call Fucktooth for about 10 years. Then i worked at Maximum Rock N Roll - a big punk zine - for about a year in the mid/late '90s. Along the way, I became a real champion of independent press, and did a lot of writing for other zines, distributed a lot of zines, and in 1996 started an anthology called The Zine Yearbook. The purpose of the Yearbook is to get some much needed publicity for projects, and to help create a more permanent record of the really amazing writing that's going on out there.

Jason: I got involved in zines around 1992 when I was graduating from high school. I did a couple one-off zines focusing mostly on punk music and drinking – pretty silly stuff, but that’s all I was into for a couple years. I was reading and learning more about radical politics and social inequality and eventually started doing a zine called praxis, which was mostly about how people become radicalized and then take that radical world view into the everyday working world. It was sort of a way to explore how I was making the transition from being in the fairly exclusive university and punk communities to a larger community where we interact daily with people who don’t all come into discussions with similar assumptions about how the world is or should be.

How would you describe Clamor to a person unfamiliar with the magazine?

Jen: I guess I would say that Clamor is a magazine about how real people live. We don't print stories about celebrities, we don't use professional writers, we print what readers want to talk about. So each issue we have an amazing variety of stories and perspectives, usually progressive, usually first person. We don't really print stories about how the Bush administration sucks, for example, but we would print a story from an individual about how new administration policies have affected him/her personally. We encourage people to talk about what's important in their lives, instead of telling readers what should be important in their lives.

Jason: When I try to explain to the mail carrier or the delivery guy, I tell them that the magazine is a lifestyle magazine for real people – something more relevant to everyday lives than the garbage we read when we’re checking out at the grocery store. It obviously downplays the progressive element of the magazine, but I think a lot of people can find something in Clamor that resonates with them even if they don’t identify as "progressive" or "radical."

Clamor is unlike many magazines that I know because it truly encourages its readers and the D.I.Y. community to participate in the magazine. Many other publications seem impenetrable, they will accept submissions, but unless you are a well known established writer/artist or friends with the editor- you work will rarely be accepted.

What were some of the main reasons behind making the magazine so inclusive?

Jen: My main reason is that for me, what is important in life is getting to know other individuals who have similar problems, goals, priorities, and visions as I do. Life is about connecting to others in and out of my community. How can I do that if I don't know what other people think? It seems that most magazines are so much about telling us what we should think/feel/wear/buy, instead of talking about real issues. Even some good progressive magazines don't really address what individuals are dealing with every day, and that's what we are trying to talk about.

Talking about real issues from everyday people seems to separate Clamor from a lot of other magazines. Clamor seems to me to be a magazine that is the opposite of slick - representing the un-cut version of life that can be rocky, terrifying and a ugly at times, but also incredibly inspiring and beautiful the next. Clamor reminds me of the Salt of the Earth movie, a film without Hollywood actors and actresses. Instead working class people were filmed in the roles that they lived on a daily basis. What would be lost if Clamor focused or sought out more well known people or celebrities? Has the thought ever crossed your mind?

Jason: Wow. I’m totally flattered that you would draw a connection between Clamor’s approach and Salt of the Earth, a film that I think is so inspiring on a number of levels. But yeah, I think the comparison works. We have the occasional feature on people who might have some name recognition in certain circles, but for the most part our writers are everyday folks who have something to say about the world. Most wouldn’t even consider themselves to be writers, but we try to give them the space to have their perspectives amplified. There was a discussion amongst some independent titles recently about contacting publicists and managers to get in touch with celebrities to line up shoots an interviews. Jen told me about it, and my reaction was, "what for?" There are SO many people out there that are infinitely more interesting and compelling than celebrities, so why spend time talking with the people that have been (fairly arbitrarily) thrust into the positions of being public celebrities? The answer is obviously that celebrities sell magazines, especially when you put their name in bold type or their picture on the cover. And that means it’s hard for magazines that want to sidestep that trap to succeed financially. That’s why it’s up to readers to support the magazines that they think are doing a good job of representing the real world. Media that doesn’t cater to industry standards, no matter how great it is, will have a hard time surviving on their own terms.

In many established progressive magazines, well-known and commendable writers and thinkers, are featured. People like Zinn, Chomsky, Roy are vital but is there a negative side to only showcasing the so-to-speak giants of the left. Do we, as the public, depend too much on a handful of people and does this approach allow a new generation of activists and writers to develop their voice? What are your thoughts on this?

Jason: It’s amazing that we can regularly turn to those magazines for an authoritative voice on current events and other socio-political issues. At the same time, I think it’s always crucial to recognize that for every one Noam Chomsky, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other individuals out there who are doing crucial work in their communities to educate people and move them to action. I like to think that Clamor is doing a good job of giving these people a platform that they can use even though they don’t have three PhDs or are the director of an international NGO.

And even though I think there are a lot of these writers that I respect and sharpened my critical thinking skills on in the last ten years, I also think that it’s important that these "authoritative" voices be challenged. I think at certain points in their careers, we can see where some of them may become less likely to challenge certain issues or push our way of thinking into a different direction.

When I first became exposed to the underground music scene in the Bay Area in the early 90’s, my initial reaction was that it was so talented and vital that one could completely bypass the mainstream corporate scene as a fan of music. Of course many great underground bands tried to use the underground as a stepping stone to the majors, losing there fan base in the underground and at the same time failing to have any commercial success in the mainstream. My reaction was that these bands had made a mistake. I could see why some bands would leave the underground scenes because some of the shortcomings, but I also felt that those problems could be fixed. My take was that the underground - the D.I.Y. music scene could remain vital if it was done with passion, was open to being inclusive to different people and ideas and if bands created quality music. The scene would also thrive if people supported it, which meant financially as well.  How does this take of underground music relate to the independent press culture and Clamor?

Jen: This is so right on. This take is relevant to magazines/publishing in a lot of ways. There are all these publications out there that are amazing and vital, and they are often caught in limbo - do I stay amazing and vital and struggle/fail financially or do I try to go for the big time and maybe alienate some readers but at least keep publishing? The financial burden on publishers is really a barrier, yet communities and individuals don't realize the inherent and necessary value of media (music as well) to the health and progress of a given scene or community. Media could help all of our communities grow and progress, but since media is often not fulfilling an immediate need, it's not considered a priority. But it should be. Of course I also agree that there are bands and publishers who are in the scenes as a stepping stone, but wouldn't it be great if the tables were turned and we made it so there was no reason they would want to leave?


How in this case does one best support Clamor? I imagine the answer is simple-by subscribing-or does it go beyond that?

Jason: It’s true. Subscriptions are the easiest way for individuals to support Clamor and similar independent magazines. A lot of folks think that they’re doing small bookstores a favor by continuing to buy the magazine from them. But in the money they save by subscribing, they could by a book from said store, and there would hopefully be another new reader who would pick up Clamor off the newsstand in their place. In addition to that, the bookstore is only getting a percentage of the sale and Clamor only gets about a dollar from each copy sold on the newsstand (after returns and other costs big distributors factor in).

In addition to people buying subscriptions for themselves, we ask folks to purchase gift subscriptions for friends and their local libraries. We also welcome donations from individuals, and rely on them (much like other independent media projects) to exist. It’s really about individuals recognizing the importance of independent media that bucks commercially conventions and taking an active role in making sure that media is around for a long time.

What does the future of Clamor hold? Can one expect that the magazine is here to stay for the long haul?

Jason: I’d love for it to be a thorn in the side to mainstream media as well as the more well-known progressive magazines — challenging them ALL to constantly evaluate how they are filling their role as influential informers of the public. However, each issue is a struggle with lack of financial resources and burnout – both of which are intimately connected to each other.

What do you hope to improve upon in the future with Clamor?

Jason: Increasing the diversity of our contributors and consequently our readership is always at the forefront of discussions we have about the future of the magazine. We think Clamor has the potential to connect a lot of different communities working toward self-determination and self-realization in a way that a lot of magazines have done before. This isn’t necessarily the fault of independent magazines. They exist in a market that demands they appeal to a well-defined niche of readers, and that, by default, excludes diversity in readers and contributors. It may seem lofty to consider that a magazine can connect different communities, but I think we’ve seen it happen already in the first couple years of publishing Clamor. We’ve had communities of folks identify Clamor as an anarchist magazine, while others have identified it as a magazine representing artists with a conscience. The fact that we’re able to amplify

The do-it-yourself ethics of zine culture encourages anyone to self-publish, but at the same time many people are skeptical of zines due to the overall lack of self editing and marginal writing skills. I am curious if you think this is a fair assessment and what you believe are the positive contributions of zine culture, for the maker and the audience.

Jen: I can go both ways on this one. I think that the writing/editing/grammar isn't as important as the ideas are, and the fact that someone is putting themselves out there is amazing and should be rewarded. Why does it matter how they are saying it if the ideas are important? We need to look past these shortcomings to the real root of what individuals are trying to say with these efforts.

That said, I think that bad grammar and inaccessible formats are a barrier to reaching new people, or at least to reaching some common allies who are not able to look past those shortcomings. When I write, edit, and design, I often think to myself, "Would my mom understand this?" That is a sort of benchmark I use to tell whether an article I'm writing or editing is too academic, to grammatically incorrect, so clique-ish, or even if the type is too small. So this means that the PURPOSE of your project is equally as important - and if you're trying to reach a lot of people, a diverse group of people, then it's important that use a common language. And that's what having good grammar is about - it's about being able to communicate effectively with other individuals, and that is important.

What is the climate for zine’s today? I remember in the mid 90’s it was thriving. Is this still the case?

Jen: A lot has changed. The number of nominations we get for the Zine Yearbook each year is evidence that the scene is still thriving and there is a lot of good stuff being produced out there.

I think one of the biggest thing to impact the zine scene is the Internet. When I first began doing zines in the early '90s, there was no world wide web. There wasn't even Netscape or Internet Explorer. That all came later. I think that the Internet has made it even easier for individuals to get their ideas out, like the advent of the self-serve copy machine and desk-top publishing did in the late '80s. People are able to communicate in new and more immediate and more far-reaching ways.

There are a lot of differences with communicating on the Internet and doing zines though. However fleeting and ephemeral zines are, Internet communication is twice as much so. There's also the idea of the "digital divide" -- you have to remember that the majority of people in the US (not to mention the rest of the world) do not access the Internet regularly if at all. So it's important to know that who you are reaching through the Internet is a limited subsection of individuals in the world, and if that's who you want to reach, then that's a good thing. If you're going for a more general audience, it's not.

Jason: One of the things I’ve been noticing now, is that a lot of folks are foregoing the smaller zine format and going straight to a glossy magazine format. This is what we did with Clamor, but we had already spent a good amount of time working within the zine community and wanted to push past that. It seems like some folks are just as content to spend all their money on the first issue of a "magazine" instead of spreading those financial resources over a couple years to publish something that’s a little less slick or printed on a smaller scale than 15,000 copies. I’m not saying there’s some pre-determined amount of time someone has to spend in the underground before breaking out, but I do think it’s a useful period to figure out exactly what you’re trying to say with your work.


Clamor seems to embrace everything that is underground culture. It is not strictly a music magazine, or a political magazine or any other type of sub category. It seems to celebrate the diversity of life and the full range of a persons interests. In a society that likes to classify things and place everything in compartments, I imagine there are certain risks in going against the grain. What has been the positives and negatives of not pin pointing a specific audience.

Jen: Yeah, it's hard to be bucking convention when you can't pay your bills. The accepted publishing-world wisdom says that to be successful you have to find your niche. You have to be specialized. You have to identify your audience, your advertisers, your content. This is how you survive financially.

I guess I've always taken the perspective that people are not niche people. Individuals who like to read model railroading magazines like more stuff than just model railroading. People who read music magazines are also interested in politics and culture. It makes people comfortable to categorize things, it makes them easier to handle and digest. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm an easily categorized person - I know that sounds trite, but are any of us?

Jason: Plain and simple, Clamor is a marketing nightmare. On the newsstand, it’s hard to decide if it should be in the punk/music section or in the politics section. Similarly, advertisers don’t want to take a chance on funds that are already scarce by advertising in a magazine that isn’t geared 100% toward their demographic. But like Jen said, we don’t think this is a bad thing. It just means that we have to rely on readers to step up and subscribe or donate money to the Clamor to voice their support for media that doesn’t talk down to the lowest common denominator.

Clamor is one of the few magazines on the radical left that has a good mixture of written and visual work. What is the importance of using artwork and graphic design in the magazine?

Jason: Well, I learned whatever I know about graphic design through trial, error and lots of self-education in the last ten years. We basically try to come up with a style that is clean, accessible and still visually interesting. I have yet to find someone who hasn’t said Z Magazine is painful to look at. Of course they’re publishing some of the most essential in-depth analyses of domestic and international politics, but how effective is it to do it in a format that alienates everyone except folks who are looking for 10 page articles with all text and no pull-quotes or pictures. It’s almost like we feel like we have to struggle through reading it because we know it’s good for us, but I think there are a lot of people out there who would agree that progressive culture and politics could certainly use an aesthetic makeover.

Clamor has been fortunate enough to be locked into a large community of photographers and illustrators who contributor their work to us for far less money than they deserve. They believe in the project and want to be a part of what we’re creating, and we’re forever indebted to them for that. They make the magazine look great with a good mix of illustrations, photos, and as little fucking clip-art as possible!

What are other independent magazines that inspire you?

Jen: Well, this is a hard question, partly because I'm an ultra competitive person. All kidding aside, there are LOADS of amazing magazines out there. Some of my personal favorites include Wild Matters for its wittiness, Mother Jones for it's investigative journalism, old punk zines like Slug and Lettuce and Slave, and occasionally Bitch, though I often find myself disagreeing with them. WHY?

Jason: I’m constantly inspired by the number of indpendent magazines out there. Instead of feeling competitive with them, I feel like they inspire me to make Clamor that much better — to be another positive contribution to the independent publishing community that I think is thriving. I look at them and think we have a lot of work to do to keep up with our peer publications. Magazines like Youth Outlook!, Teen Voices, Venus, Left Turn, Kitchen Sink, and Lumpen are just a few of the magazines out there that

Unfortunately, because independent publishers have to compete for scarce resources (mainly money), I feel like there are a lot of independent publishers out there who feel reluctant to establish relationships with their "competitors." We’ve been fortunate to be able to work with magazines like Youth Outlook!, Left Turn, Tikkun, The Progressive, and Bitch. At the same time, there are magazines like The Nation and Mother Jones that I think aren’t doing their part to foster the younger generation of new progressive media. They’re certainly facing the same financial challenges that we all are, but they also have much more resources at their fingertips that could be used to help out the newer magazines.

Clamor seems to have a global reach and outlook, but I also feel it is very regional. As someone from Milwaukee, Wisconsin - Clamor feels very Midwest to me. Would Clamor be different if it was not rooted out of the Midwest?

Jen: We probably couldn't afford to do it if we didn't live in the Midwest. I'm probably biased because I've lived in the Midwest most of my life, so I'm not really sure what to say here that won't sound super-corny. Partly I think it feels very Midwestern because it's important to us to talk about middle America. Most American's don't live on the coasts, most Americans live between the coasts. So why do we spend so much time talking about New York and LA (or in radical terms San Francisco or DC), and so little time talking about everything else?

Jason: That we’ve been able to maintain a global reach and a Midwest feel is, in my opinion, a testament to the that people in the Midwest are creating really vital political and cultural alternatives. We’re just as involved as the folks on the coasts, but we’re a little less concentrated in a given area. We also have more time to work on these alternatives, since we don’t have to work 70 hours a week to pay ridiculous rent.

What are the positives (and negatives) of working out of a small Midwestern city?

Jen: Like I said, it's cheap to live here. We're also within a few hours drive of really cool cities like Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, etc. Not like in California where you have to drive 10 hrs to get from SF to Portland.

Some of the downsides are that we're not overwhelmed with radical/progressive individuals like some other cities/areas. Our area is very conservative so it's sometimes difficult for us to find local volunteers or just people to work with. But, there are a lot of cool people, they're just spread out and sometimes difficult to find.

Jason: One of the biggest downsides for me is not being able to see firsthand the impact that our work with Clamor has on the people who are reading it. Sometimes it feels like we create the magazine in a vacuum. We know people are reading Clamor, but we don’t really know what impact it’s having on individuals and their communities. It’s not until we get out and travel a bit and hear folks tell us about how their local study group is using articles from the magazine as the basis for a discussion on the politics of food or how a teacher is using the magazine to introduce their students to gender issues.

What is the history behind the Allied Media Conference?

Jason: The conference started in 1999 as a small zine conference with about 250 zine makers and readers gathering to talk about what impact zines have on themselves and the people who read them. Much like our work with Clamor, we thought it was great to be a part of that community, but we also wanted the conference to reach out to other communities. We changed the name to the Underground Publishing Conference and began to incorporate a variety of different independent media like books, the web, film, and radio. This year we changed the name to the Allied Media Conference to more directly link it to the non-profit organization that we founded to put on the conference and work on other participatory media projects. This year we included 28 sessions over two days that included workshops, panel discussions, film screenings, and caucuses for specific projects like independent media centers and microcinema projects. We also added a day to the conference this year to present media literacy issues to NW Ohio teachers while also teaching them to ways to incorporate independent media into their classrooms.

Structurally, the conference basically sets up a framework that allows individuals and organizations to plug in and discuss the most pressing issues facing independent media makers today. It also serves as a sort of regeneration space where folks can come in, share resources and leave with new ideas and a renewed sense of purpose — something that can be invaluable for people who are overworked and in need of some recharging.


A recent Clamor tour of the Midwest was dubbed "The We Are Winning" Tour. This reminded me of the now-famous slogan spray painted in the streets of Seattle during the shut down of the WTO in 1999. Hearing the slogan in 2003 and the sense of optimism again was refreshing. A skeptic would say the mass media is owned by a handful of powerful corporations, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield-Ashcroft gang is gutting the constitution, increasing the wage gap and waging wars against World opinion. What would you say to people to convince (or remind) them that "We (everyday people) Are Winning"?

Jason: It certainly seems presumptuous to suggest that independent art and media makers and supporters are winning in the face of what the Bush administration and the FCC is up to. At the same time, our tour throughout the Midwest (which included 18 cities, I believe), illustrated how people all over the Midwest are creating spaces for people to explore alternatives — whether those spaces are metaphorical in the case of magazines or newspapers or literal in the case of microcinema theaters like RagTag in Columbia, MO or Public Space 1 in Iowa City. And that’s just in a random sample of the Midwest. The biggest struggle we face in realizing that we are winning is making the connections between communities across the country so we don’t feel like we’re working on these projects in a vacuum. When we start to make these connections, it becomes really obvious that there is a web of support for each other that we can use to our advantage — to effectively counter corporate consolidation of media and cultural homogenization.