At some point every bibliophile dreams of making their own magazine, and in 2011 two Trinity alumni decided to make the leap of faith with The White Review. Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, the friends behind the quarterly magazine, essentially winged it, employing their own brief experience as interns and journalists to start and edit one of their own. Now The White Review is a little magazine in a grand tradition, using exquisite design to bring the work of new artists and writers to the fore, alongside interviews with and essays on some of the arts world’s behemoths. The current issue features interviews with Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle, poems by John Ashbery and fiction by China Miéville and Claire-Louise Bennett.
To start at quite an obvious place, tell me the story of how you brought The White Review to life.
JT: Well, it starts in Dublin.
BE: We were at university together in Dublin and I left six years ago. And then we didn’t see much of each other for a couple of years, but I was working for a gallery in London and went to New York to interview some artists, 3 and a half years ago. Jacques was there interning at the Paris Review so we hung out over the course of that week in New York. We both had been thinking about going into magazine publishing and so the idea was born there in New York. Then Jacques moved back and we spent time fundraising and creating the infrastructure of the magazine before we launched in February 2011.
Have you ever considered embellishing that into a more ‘literary’ creation myth, or are you happy as it is?
BE: I thought it was actually quite a good literary creation myth! No, we’ve had to de-embellish it a bit, actually, for fear of sounding…
JT: It was Valentine’s Day weekend when we met in New York.
BE: Maybe we should embellish it more. But I think it’s quite a good one.
So since 2011, how has The White Review grown?
BE: One of our intentions when we started was to use it as a platform, for things beyond just publication. So we have a website and a programme of events, a radio show, a film series. We’ve got an exhibition coming up soon, of artists who have been featured in The White Review. So now it’s using the magazine as a focal point around which other things can exist.
JT: We’ve had charity status since last August, with the express aim of promoting new writers and artists. And now we have a short story prize: we were granted £2,500 from the Jerwood Foundation to sponsor a prize for new writers for short fiction. And we awarded that earlier this year to a writer based in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett.
You’ve moved very quickly over the last few years. Do you still feel like a literary start-up, or are you more established now?
BE: Actually, I don’t know. Our ambitions extend beyond what is implied by that phrase: we wanted, in addition to the magazine, to build up a community of writers/artists; to create an organisation in which there was the opportunity to expand into different fields – exhibitions, or radio shows, or whatever. So I don’t feel like “literary start-up” covers what we’re trying to do. But on the other hand, it still feels like a “start-up” as we haven’t yet realised those ambitions, and because we’re trying to achieve them on a very limited budget.
JT: But I do think that we have reached a level where people know us and agents send us stories, which they didn’t before. And we’re selling more copies – with the last issue, we sold out the whole print run within two months.
If your charity status is to aim to promote new artists and writers, is it difficult to strike a balance between new writers and established ones?
BE: That is something that we try to avoid. Because the better-known you become, the greater the temptation to publish writers who are already well-known because you are offered them [by agents]. But we are really careful about striking a balance. A young writer wants to be published alongside established writers, they want to be put into context. I hope we can continue to do that.
JT: I guess we want to avoid at all costs what Granta has become. Granta’s tagline is ‘The Home of New Writing’, which means new writing by established writers.
How much has this all been a learning process for you?
JT: We learned a lot of it on the hoof. We have a streamlined process now. But for the first issue it took a long time to create a design from scratch – Ben had done it, at the gallery, and I’d seen it happen as an intern at publishing houses and at the Paris Review, but you only learn from doing it. We have learned a lot.
BE: But it’s like starting any project. You take a risk and hope that you learn quickly enough. You can’t die wondering.
The White Review are currently eager to organise an event with an Irish bookshop, so do get in touch with them at editors@thewhitereview.org if you can help.
