Origin Story
I’d never claim that a literary magazine is an original idea. The first literary magazine I ever heard of was Seven-Eighths Under Water which was run as an extracurricular club at Chico High School in my hometown. I was a freshman at the time and followed a crush, with her celebratory homemade cake, to the club’s end of year party. I was drawn to the little classroom by equal interest in this mysterious girl with a pixie cut, and the mystery of poetry.
I spent my sophomore year of high school in Willard, Missouri and while I was there, in something of a creative void, I started a poetry club, which put together an award winning literary magazine at the end of the school year, inspired by my little knowledge of Seven-Eighths Under Water at my former high school. On Tumblr I followed poetry blogs, usually over-saturated with the angst and drama of adolescents, but inspiring to me all the same. In college, I worked on the Berkeley Fiction Review and started paying attention to similar small journals and publications. One publication that comes immediately to my mind is Two Peach, whose fruit theme I admired and have clearly drawn inspiration from.
But before The Mandarin was created in September 2020, I sat with my friends, one cold Christmas Eve morning in 2019, in a crisp living room sipping on cups of black coffee made lovingly by my dear friend Maira Iqbal, and together we envisioned a similar, more extensive publication which we thought we’d call “The Demarconian” in remembrance of a complicated and loved friend who passed away the summer before. Encouraged by the buzz of caffeine, the hopeful morning light, our ideas and our sincere enthusiasm, we imagined a multimedia platform featuring art, illustrations and cartoons, creative writing and articles, videos and a podcast, from ourselves and from our extended creative community. We’d start in Chico, we decided, and work our way out. We discussed the possibilities of a hardcopy periodical which could be distributed at local coffee shops, first in Chico and the Bay Area where we lived, and then in Sacramento, Santa Barbara, L.A. We talked about these possibilities for our collective creative project with the eagerness of children undeterred by the sort of practical problems that might weigh down people older and perhaps wiser than us.
Cooper Grosscup, an accomplished musician and my boyfriend at the time, would man the audio aspect of the concept, working on the production of music, podcasts and videos, and writing and editing reviews of local musicians. Quinn Greenwood would do a little of everything, lending his artistic eye (and hands) to images, poetry, and video production. Joseph Demarco (whose art is now featured on The Mandarin) would head the visual arts side of things: the first thing I asked him to start work on was a logo for The Demarconian, and then he would paint or draw portraits of the writers and contributors for our bio sections. Maira Iqbal offered to lend her degree in Computer Science to the project, offering to do any coding work we needed.
Almost 9 months later, many things had changed. Enthusiasm fell off, as enthusiasm often does.
Only a few months after the Christmas Eve conversation, the Corona Virus infiltrated our lives in full swing. My relationship ended with Cooper, my primary partner in the idea for The Demarconian. I moved back to my hometown, happy to be around friends but feeling a general lack of direction and a huge distance between my current life and the more creative and literary life I felt I’d lost when I left Berkeley. I was interested in working for the Chico News & Review, but as far as I knew they were closing for good. Sitting around in my attic bedroom, trying to imagine a shape for my life, I looked at all my books stacked up lonely in one corner, and felt again that haunting void of creativity. I sulked within that void for weeks. Even as Lola Yang (painter of The Mandarin logo) began work on her mural in my living room, I felt the sense that I would never escape the capitalist spiral, that I would never emerge into a vibrant and glittering literary world.
I expressed these sorrows, and my friends suggested solutions: one must create unique and imaginative experiences for oneself; one cannot wait to be hired for a job, accepted to a program, affirmed absolutely in some nebulous (and probably unattainable) way. Each night I waited for the Fairy Godmother of Art to come through my window and bless me with some beautiful feeling, or purpose, or opportunity. And when she didn’t, my eyes wandered back to the books in the corner.
I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Mandarins, which followed a group of French intellectuals as they wrestled with politics and art. I liked the way these companions were described in the beginning of the novel, reminding me of the best parts of my own creative community: the sincere friendships, the inspiration, the understanding looks, the knowing… and their later separation seemed to reflect something that was going on in my own heart. I thought “The Mandarin” made a perfect name for a literary magazine, playing off the fruit theme I liked so much, represented by Two Peach and Peach Pit Press and carrying (in my mind) the blessings of the bohemian French existentialist movement Simone de Beauvoir was a part of.
What was a mandarin? Something small and sweet, to be tucked in a backpack before school, or found in a Christmas stocking next to gold-wrapped chocolate and candied walnuts, or perhaps peeled in a perfect spiral, pulled apart and savored piece by piece. A mandarin looks erotic without its skin, and when halved, it looks more provocative still. Mandarins, like all fruits, come from flowers, and to eat them is to consume the products of a tree, an environment. Mandarins are filled with all the little particles and minerals which the soils of their home contain.
Creativity works like this too; writers and artists grow up out of their environments, saturated in the elements around them. Like fruit, the work these writers produce is drier or juicier, bitter or sweet, depending on the environmental conditions in which they were formed. And for readers, work appears on The Mandarin fully formed. They don’t see the messy notebooks of our writers in which the fruits of their labor ripen, just as one doesn’t usually see the dirty gardens and verdant orchards where workers cultivate their harvest. We experience the mandarin, as we experience all art, as a miniature world, self-contained. It seems to come from nowhere, but for careful readers, it reveals the secrets of its conception and of its birth.
This comparison between natural processes and literary processes reflects my education and continued interest in Green Romanticism, a form of Romanticism particularly concerned with nature, which is an especially apt topic during this time of environmental crisis. A professor at Berkeley once posited the question, “How is a poem like a bird’s nest?” while discussing the work of John Clare. We discussed the way that poems were made of collected pieces, brought together, composed, much in the way that Orpheus composes in a circle, creating a world of his own through imaginative power, precious and contained.
In our About section, we describe The Mandarin as“interested in recording and showcasing the textures and tremors of our shifting landscapes (environmental, political, and psychological), through the richness and diversity of our literary products: poetry, essays, fictional and nonfictional stories.” This last line was inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Notes from a Native Daughter” (a work I referenced in my previous post) which discusses the Sacramento Valley as a kind of Eden. She notes that in her Sunday school class, teachers made this point continually; the Central Valley is like the holy land “in the richness and diversity of its agricultural products." The Mandarin magazine also comes from this valley. All my life I have been surrounded by the orchards of this area, which I found first fantastical as a child tromping through an enchanted forest running from wild beasts, and then rather provincial, frustrated by the same adolescent cynicism of the titular character in Lady Bird. But as I explored Romanticism further, I returned to a love for the orchards of my childhood; even in suburban homes around my home town, we can pick fruit from the trees left over from the vast orchards that previously occupied the landscape. When the trees hang heavy with the fruits or nuts of a new season, I find myself enchanted by the generosity of nature’s creativity. I think of Dean Young’s poem “Scarecrow on Fire”: “We all think about suddenly disappearing,” he writes, “but first I want to put something small in your hand.” I feel that Mother Earth is whispering this to me all the time, as she slouches toward apocalypse and yet continues to bless us with fruit, and air, and enchanting slants of light. I hope that The Mandarin can perform the same magic act for you, placing into your hand a little piece of art, sweet or bitter, hopefully beautiful, springing from this environment we share.
Ultimately I started The Mandarin alone. Joseph Demarco continues to contribute art. And my friend Fiona Murphy has also become a contributor. Maira Iqbal expressed great enthusiasm in helping with the website, but ultimately realized that I would need a more simple platform (and probably less sophisticated coding) if I wanted to be able to edit the project easily as it developed. So currently The Mandarin uses Squarespace for our content. The Mandarin in its current form lacks many of the elements my friends suggested so many months ago: we don’t have a podcast or music section, at least for the moment. There is not as much art as we imagined back then. I’ve been tinkering around with Photoshop and learning as I go, but mainly the art on The Mandarin comes from other contributors, artists, friends, and writers. I hope that one day we will get to experience The Mandarin in paper form, but for now, I hope you enjoy (and contribute to!) this collage of art and writing from this creative community.
