Veneer Magazine recently hosted its first event: a Very Good Challenge, the official magazine release party. It took place at Portland Paintball, the site of an impressive geologic buildup of adolescent fury and leaked paint caplets.
Was it a success? It's difficult to say. The original intent was to posit a physical manifestation of the hardship of magazine publishing by showering authors and editors in 200 MPH bullets from our readership. The authors were to read the articles through a megaphone while being physically assaulted by a gang of "readers," while the editors, immortal, tried to protect them. It was perhaps a wryly self-conscious stab at Veneer's veneer of "difficult writing." Someone once wrote to me that the idea was "a little smirky." We imagined it conceptually, delighting in the diagrams of shelter. I don't think anyone anticipated the actual reality of paintball: how thin the layer of structure coats the sheer violence of the thing, its immediacy, the way that the paintball arena smells, thick with water-soluble ink and the sweat of earnest aggression, how heavy the guns are, how much the pellets hurt when they shower down on you.
I'm honestly still coming to terms with the fear, the hopelessness. Full disclosure: I was out within four minutes, sweaty and blubbering in the lobby. Others thrived inside of the paintball arena, creating strategies, sharpening their aim; at first I was shocked that anyone might enjoy this game, but now I can see that the pressure of immediacy and the truth of experience mold us all differently, which is perhaps true for literature, too.
It was a real thing. I don't think I am alone in feeling as though it gave me a more profound appreciation for the relative calm of my own "real" life, as well as a hardened stance on what we are doing here at Veneer. What we try to do. The war of communication that we are quietly involved in.
Writing is violent; this isn't news. Publishing, too, is a system of soft blows. The American poet Ben Lerner once said in an interview something which has stuck with me for years:
Violence is, after all, our global condition. I have a tendency to write in and about the violence of language, the language of violence. I don't just mean that when bodies appear in my poems they tend to come to blows. I mean that I consider the poem a space in which rhetorical forms can be opposed or juxtaposed in a manner that makes their violence manifest.
In kindergarten we memorized: Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. The need for the saying disproves it.
