Interview by Joe Emanski
What is Quark Park?
If you know the answer to that question, you might have found out about it in the Wild River Review, an online magazine whose editors have a knack for finding out about the interesting things going on both in the area and around the world.
In the case of Quark Park — “Princeton’s provocative collaboration of science, art and architecture” — the attraction was right here in town. But the Stockton-based Web-only publication is just as likely to publish stories about the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain or torture in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Wild River Review published its first issue in March 2006 and is the heir of the print literary magazine, The Bucks County Writer, where many members of Wild River Review’s editorial team were on staff.
As the Web blossomed and grew, the WRR staff, led by Joy Stocke and Kimberly Nagy, embraced the opportunity to reach a wider audience.
“From our first issue, we set out to honor the highest principles of storytelling, research, editing and design,” Nagy said.
Wild River Review is named in honor of the Delaware River, one of 19 “Great Waters” recognized by the America’s Great Waters Coalition.
Stocke, founder and editor in chief, has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and has written about and lectured widely on her travels in Greece and Turkey, as well as religion, ancient and modern. Her memoir, Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses & Saints, was based on more than 10 years of travel through Turkey. Co-written with Angie Brenner, it was published in March 2012.
She serves on the boards of the Princeton Middle East Society and the Center for Emergent Diplomacy, and is a member of the Turkish Women’s International Network. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a Bachelor of Science in Broadcast Journalism, she participated in the Lindisfarne Symposium on The Evolution of Consciousness with cultural philosopher, poet and historian William Irwin Thompson. In 2009, she became a Lindisfarne Fellow.
Nagy received a bachelor degree in history from Rider University and continued her graduate studies at University of Connecticut. After graduate school, Nagy applied her academic expertise to a career in publishing, working for Princeton University Press and W.W. Norton as well as at Thomson, Institutional Investor Magazine, Routledge UK, and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.
Because the interview was conducted via email, the editors’ voices here are presented as one.
Princeton Echo: As we exchange emails for this interview, you are in the Bahamas for the launch of Marina Gottlieb Sarles’s book, The Last Daughter of Prussia, which is being published by Wild River Review Books. Sounds like a tough assignment!
Joy Stocke and Kim Nagy: Can you see us smiling? We spend much of our year traveling on behalf of our authors. The Last Daughter of Prussia is unique in that the story itself hinges on Marina Gottlieb Sarles’s life in the Bahamas and it was the appropriate place to begin the launch of her book. But we also published Joy’s memoir, Anatolian Days & Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses & Saints in March 2012, and that has led her on a book tour across the country as well as to Istanbul and London. We go where the stories direct us.
PE: Of course, book publishing, even if it involves Caribbean junkets, is no day at the beach. What made you decide to launch Wild River Books in the current difficult publishing climate, and why do you think you will be able to succeed in the long term?
JS & KN: We confess to a half-glass full philosophy of life and business. And we love storytelling and books. With the rise of the Internet, publishing is no longer a straightforward business. Opportunity does not always mean instant success for an author. In fact, because there are so many outlets and none of them centralized, the amount of opportunity can diffuse an author.
But opportunity does mean that there are far more chances to reach your niche audience with greater exactitude. And that’s how Wild River Books is building its brand. We have benefited from solidly building our audience, reputation and brand for seven years—and stuck to our core mission, which supports and connects artists, writers and creative thinkers all over the world.
Indeed, ambitious authors must (and can!) create a constellation of their presence in order to solidify their platform (thus blogs, peripheral articles, tweets, Youtube videos and Facebook posts are mandatory, but these all can be opportunities to think about one’s craft — and network with likeminded souls).
More good news is that there are so many more opportunities to reach your audience on an international level. The important point to remember is that you won’t reach everyone, so we spend a lot of time defining the appropriate audience.
PE: Making well-written and edited stories stand out among all the information out there is no mean feat either.
JS & KN: Though it has taken time and great effort to build, we’ve witnessed an international craving for content, which honors nuance and complexity in human beings and circumstances. We have a loyal following on Facebook and other social networking forums.
Despite chatter to the contrary, in our view people still care so deeply about the potential of the published word and its role in maintaining a healthy thoughtful democracy and world community. We want to take an active role in guarding and expanding the quality of this vital conversation.
Our community of committed artists includes writers and readers and contributors from all over the world. Our audience of kindred spirits: poetry and story lovers, might happen to be novelists, journalists, writers, travelers, foodies, readers, artists and activists — most of all literary souls —who crave intellectually and soul satisfying content written with a poetic twist that we like to call “Wild River Style.”
We respect but push the creative center of every piece that appears on our pages, but we also work closely with our authors so that pieces are edited and fact-checked to the highest standards.
PE: You may have one of the most eclectic collections of stories on the Web. One story may be about a 100-year-old farmer from Moose Jaw, another an interview with French-Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi. How do you decide what you will publish?
JS & KN: We seek content, whether it’s photography, art, an interview, or poetry or fiction, that is deeply creative, alive, and expansive, that can lead us to a larger more universal discussion about every subject —whether that’s pop music, politics, psychology or science. See our work by founding executive director of the Geraldine Dodge Foundation, Scott McVay; Pakistani poet and editor Waqas Khwaja; Renee Ashley; Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef; and Palestinian-born poet Nathalie Handal, among many others.
PE: The stated mission of The Wild River Review is to raise awareness and compassion as well as inspire engagement through the power of stories. Your 2008 story on the Abu Ghraib scandal seems to be a good example of this. How did that come about?
JS & KN: One of Joy’s writing students, Jennifer Schelter, also is a highly regarded yoga teacher in the Philadelphia area. One of Jennifer’s students, lawyer Susan Burke, was collecting testimony in Istanbul and Jordan from Abu Ghraib detainees who had been tortured and released.
Schelter had been invited to travel to Istanbul to transcribe testimony and to provide therapeutic yoga for the detainees. We asked to cover the story and believe it’s one of the best series we’ve written. Innocent detainees were demonized as terrorists and we sought to share a larger story.
PE: In a recent interview Kim did with Pakistani poet and translator Waqas Khwaja, he said, “If I am going to translate somebody else’s words, then I have to be faithful to the mind, to the perspective, and the feelings and emotions of that person.” If you substitute “edit” for “translate” in that sentence, you have a fairly good description of your jobs, wouldn’t you say?
JS & KN: Yes, and what a wise question. We take great pains to remain faithful to the minds and perspectives of whomever we cover, for there is danger in spreading stories that might be misunderstood if they are presented without appropriate context. When Kim interviewed author and philosopher Alain de Botton, (wildriverreview.com/interview/pen/art-of-connection-alain-de-botton/nagy) we liked what he said about the role of literature: “One of the things that literature is particularly good at is pinning down more elusive, finely grained truths that tend not to be discussed by the mass media.” We aim to dig into those elusive, finely grained truths and in so doing, reveal deeper more complex stories. PE: There is often an international flavor to the stories in Wild River Review. In another story on the website, writer Paulina Reso writes a first person story about running with the bulls in Pamplona. Even though you are a small nonprofit organization, you are taking advantage of the Internet to maximize your scope.
JS & KN: We are committed to our mission of connecting people places and stories in ways that promote true understanding and compassion, but we are also moving away from our non-profit status and will be accepting advertising for our long-term sustainability. We also want to offer our community of international artists a trustworthy marketplace that honors the story behind the story. Social media has been key to our monumental growth. Sometimes we pinch ourselves at how rapidly this growth has taken place. Some of our articles have reached millions of readers around the world so we welcome and continue to evolve with the changing media landscape.
The Wild River Review website is wildriverreview.com.
