Bookmarked: Cleaver Magazine

Rile and her daughters Lauren, a poet and founder of the circus arts company Tangle Movement Arts, Madeline, a glass artist at Tyler School of Art, Caeli, a violinist at Juilliard, and Pascale, a playwright and actor at Fordham Lincoln Center, often find themselves collaborating on projects and performances. Now, Karen and Lauren have launched Cleaver Magazine, a sharp, carefully honed collection of poetry, fiction, flash, essay, dramatic writing, and art. They published an all flash Cleaver preview in February and the first full issue three weeks ago, with the incantatory tag line chop! chop!.

A cleaver, of course, has the sharpest edge. The editors’ hope is to present cutting edge work from a mix of established and emerging writers and artists. But, says Lauren Rile Smith, “the joke behind the joke is that there’s no edge anymore; you can push the edge of writing and poetry ceaselessly, but there’s really no point to it.”

Perhaps for emphasis, on the March issue’s cover the Riles placed an image by sculptor and rather cutting edge 3-D artist William Sullit of a fully formed chicken sitting contentedly in its egg. “There’s no edge on an egg,” says Karen Rile.

What interests them foremost, says Lauren, is work that connects people. “You always have to ask yourself, does the world need another literary magazine? But we think of this as building community.”

Karen notes that this is one of the benefits of publishing on-line instead of in print. “With a print magazine,” she says, “there is the sense of intimacy for the reader having a book in your hand, but with Internet we can actually know who is reading and what and for how long. This we feel is a different kind of intimacy.”

But Cleaver also lives in the real world, feeding off the energy of Philadelphia writers and artists, who contribute about 30 percent of the content. The Riles want to retain a Philly flavor, incidentally a theme of the short story “Perfect Companion” by writer Rebecca Entel in the March issue, which also includes locally produced work by Sullit, the Inquirer’s John Timpane, Deborah Burnham, Kelly McQuain, Lise Funderburg, Angel Hogan, Rachel Taube, and Max McKenna.

Here’s an anachronistic Philadelphia as a kind of healing antidote in Entel’s story about a couple’s adjustment after the husband is paralyzed in a car accident on the Schuylkill Expressway:

It felt good to sidle off the sidewalk and onto cobblestone, into the past, with its places taken care of for centuries. As the wheelchair bumped along in front of her, Hollie figured this was OK:  it was good for Dana to feel the ground, where he was going.

Readers seem to have a good sense of where Cleaver is going; readership has surpassed the Riles’ expectations—and the industry average for clicks and page views. “The conventional wisdom is that no one reads poetry. Who reads literature? Flash: what’s that?” says Lauren Rile. “But we’re able to connect with a new cache of readers, and it’s not necessarily small.” This is likely to do with the participation of local writers, many of whom identify as being part of a Philly writers’ community, and the focus on work that, as Karen Rile says, “breaks through.” After all, she notes, to cleave is both to “stick together and pull apart.”