Sarah Sturzel co-edits Profiles, a Dublin-based literary and visual arts journal focusing on character studies and portraiture, with her friend Claire Healy. Another positive initiative to have been born out of pandemic lock-down, and published annually, the magazine is now accepting submissions for Issue iv. Having received 1,000+ submissions for last year’s third issue, they are hoping to expand their team. Funded initially by Dublin City Council and UNESCO City of Literature, the journal offers artists fees, and has managed to break even.
In his recent Irish Times round up of the thriving Irish literary magazine scene, novelist Kevin Power wrote that ‘On the evidence of issue iii, Profiles is the real deal: the art and design are spectacular, and the fiction is unusually good,’ a recommendation which indicates you should be paying attention.
When Totally Dublin met up with her recently, on a sunny Spring afternoon, we discussed Sarah’s background in French and English literature, her Master’s in literary translation from Trinity, and her interest in translation as a form of (re)writing.
She emphasised the journal’s unique interdisciplinary approach, combining writing and visual arts, and their efforts to support emerging talent through commissioning collaborative work between writers and visual artists.
So tell me about your background?
I studied French and English literature in Trinity, as did my co-editor, Claire, there’s two of us that run the show, and she did the exact same course, so that was how we met. And then I went on to do a Masters in literary translation after that. I’m not a writer myself, but I’m very interested in translation as a form of writing, and I really enjoy working with people’s original texts, making them my own. But then, of course, there’s always a loyalty to the original text.
So I felt an editorial position kind of gave you that extra bit of freedom to improve the text, where you see room for improvement. For example, there’s Alice Lyons, an experimental writer based in Sligo, I translated her novel Oona, which is written entirely without the letter o, which when translating that into a new language, keeping that constraint in place is a whole other challenge.
How did you set up Profiles, how did you go about looking for funding?
We got Dublin City Council’s project award for the first time for the forthcoming issue. Prior to that, we were getting support from them and UNESCO City of Literature. It’s a very small grant, we’re stretching it as far as we can.
Is there a deficit? Or are you able to fund yourself? You don’t have advertising.
No, we’re able to fund ourselves. We placed the priority on our artist fees. Our very first issue was just a stab in the dark. There was no payment. There was just figuring out if we could do this, if there was an appetite for people to submit, and we were very surprised by the quality of submissions we got when not being able to offer artists fees. But from our second issue onwards, we had support from UNESCO, so we offered fees from there, and footed the kind of admin costs, the printing costs, entirely ourselves, and broke even when it came to making sales.
So that’s how we’ve kept afloat. But we’re still volunteers. It really is a passion project, which I think is not entirely the norm, but certainly when you’re starting out as a journal, that seems to be the case. But it feels like we’re inching closer, building momentum to make it more sustainable.
What are sales and subscriptions like?
Well, our last issue was unique in that we paired with Stack Magazines. Do you know them? They’re an independent magazine subscription. People sign up and they don’t know what they’re gonna get, and Steve, who’s wonderful, curates it. So instead of printing the 350 odd copies, we printed an additional 3000 which went over to Steve in the UK. So we are in a bigger market, and they sell out automatically.
What inspired you in the first place, was it the already existing journal culture?
Well, it was COVID. It was my co-editor, Claire’s idea. She approached me. We had worked together in college on JOLT, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. She was the editor, I was the art editor. I also contributed translations and did the cover designs. She was stuck living at home, working, saving as a result of not being able to do anything. She jokes she wanted, like, a girl boss moment, you know. Tongue-in-cheek, of course. And already, straight away, she had the concept, Profiles, the name, focusing on character-driven writing and portraiture specifically.
And where did that come from? The visual arts element?
The visual arts element kind of came from JOLT. I was the art editor, which they hadn’t had before, and they’ve since kept it on, which is nice to see. And I think adding that visual element, it’s just beautiful, you know? It’s a unique selling point to the issue. It’s something that I think sets us apart from the other journals. Obviously, you have Holy Show, which are more of an arts magazine. We’re more spare, I suppose, with the artwork and design, but we are very intentional with the placement for both open submissions and then our collaborative commissions, which is a whole new thing we’re trying out.
By placing a piece of artwork next to a story, you’re kind of creating a story between the two, a conversation. That’s a new thing. We’ve done that since our first issue, one or two per issue. We’re still open for submissions for artwork and writing, but we have two paired collaborative commissions. So we have for our next issue, a non-fiction piece and a photographer, they’re going to take the portrait of the subject, and then we also have a fiction piece that will be informed by an artwork by an artist, and they’re actually two past contributors that we’ve paired together.
What are your criteria when choosing?
Really, it’s whether something resonates with us and feels like the right fit. It’s easy to tell when a submitter hasn’t encountered Profiles before and it’s just a stab in the dark for them, they’re submitting to numerous places. We allow simultaneous submissions because we don’t want a writer to put all their eggs in our basket.
Sometimes writers are waiting a long time for a reply.
Yeah, well, we do try to get back to people within a set period within which they can expect a response. We have a very intense spreadsheet that makes sense to us and us alone, a spreadsheet that we use for going through all the submissions, with a colour-coded system. We make comments to each other, and we divvy it up. The spreadsheet is tied to our submission form, so Claire will start from the top, I’ll start from the bottom. Then, because more submissions come in, the bottom is always moving. So we’ll eventually swap at some point and then, with our colour-coded system, we mark what we think we want the other person to read.
You know, if it’s under consideration, we trust each other’s reds – a red is a rejection. There’s no point in investing more time because we are so stretched, stretched thin. That’s the system, really. As we went on, we had a simple kind of traffic light system, and more colours have introduced themselves over time, like a kind of aquamarine blue is a must, you know, like indisputable.
Do you try to have a theme for each issue, or just choose the best pieces?
It’s just the best pieces and also how they complement each other. It can mean, unfortunately, that certain pieces are in direct competition with each other, despite how wonderful they may be.
Would you hold a piece over for a following issue?
It’s not something we’ve done yet. It’s certainly something we’ve considered. We can’t guarantee feedback to contributors, but we do, on occasion, give feedback where we think it’s relevant and often suggest that they make some changes and come back to us, you know. Actually, I would say that’s the most demanding work that we do, just getting back to everyone and giving them our thoughts. But we try, because we’re spending the time reading them, so we might as well give our two cents while we’re at it. It is very time consuming.
Do you think there’s any reason for the strong journal culture in Ireland now, apart from the fact that everybody’s writing?
I suppose part of it is that the journals that do exist are so supportive of up and comers. We actually had a journal fleadh up in Donegal. The Pig’s Back and The Holy Show are the ones running it, but the hope is to keep it a rotating thing. Then also just the wealth of writers in Ireland, Irish talent, and specifically the short story tradition, it seems to be huge here, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.
For example, as a translator, I’ve looked around for French stories to potentially translate into English, pitch to journals and vice versa, stories I’ve translated into French, and there’s no one to pitch to in France. The tradition doesn’t exist in the same way. What we have is incredibly rich. So I think it kind of feeds itself. There’s writers who are looking for somewhere to place work, and then we’re there to platform them.
There’s still a lot of rejection.
There is, and that’s a part of it. Unfortunately, we only published six pieces in our last issue, and we got over 1000 submissions. We really do stress: submit again, please. It is so competitive, it can come down to the tiniest thing.
What are your plans for the future? Would you like to be able to do it full time?
I would love to. But I don’t know that full time is realistic, even in a world where we do get to work on a non-volunteer basis, it would only be a few grand max, and it is such an undertaking that I don’t know that I’d be willing – for my sanity – to do it more than once a year. Also the commissioned collaborations that we’re doing now require a significant amount of time in that we have to work with a writer, edit their piece and deliver that to an artist who has to create their piece, and that takes the guts of the year.
Although it has been better this year, because we opened our submissions earlier than ever before because we got word of funding earlier than ever before. So hopefully we’ll be able to spread the work out more, and our stress levels will be lower this year.
Words: Des Traynor
