Matthew, Elena, Mel, and new intern Cerid talk about how they fell in love with reading, then move into a history lesson about how The Metaworker got started, and how Mel and Cerid joined the team.
Referenced in this episode:
Treesong by Melissa Reynolds on The Metaworker website
Cerid’s photo featured in A Fair Deal by Jon Kemsley on The Metaworker website
A translated poem, A Passage by Irsa Ruçi, on The Metaworker website
Episode Transcript:
Matthew Maichen (00:01):
Hello, we are doing our first editors only podcast recording because we have some new people here. Well, one specific new person and we just figured it would be interesting to touch base. So, let’s start just by formally introducing ourselves again, just in case. My name is Matthew Maichen. I’m the editor-in-chief of The Metaworker.
Elena L. Perez (00:32):
I’m Elena Perez. I’m the managing editor of The Metaworker.
Melissa Reynolds (00:38):
I’m Melissa Reynolds. I am an editor here as well—I should say intern-turned-editor—and I’m very happy to be here.
Cerid Jones (00:49):
I’m Cerid Jones. I’m the newbie intern and very, very excited to be here today.
Matthew Maichen (00:56):
Yeah, so we are here with Cerid. We’ll do an explanation of Cerid and how she came to join up with us. But I wanted to start with an opening question for everyone and whoever wants to go first with this one can just jump in. Since we do a lot of reading here, how did you first fall in love with reading?
Melissa Reynolds (01:23):
I have a good story for this one, so I’m gonna jump in. It’s because of my mom. She is a huge reader and we lived in a very small town. It was half an hour drive just to get to a grocery store. So, it was a big deal—every week we would drive into Oakland, Maryland, and we would go to the public library and she would encourage me to get a book. By the time I was in high school, I was reading two to three novels a week. So, again, it’s mainly my mom that really got me into reading.
Elena L. Perez (02:05):
Aw, I love that. That’s kind of like it was for me, too. My mom always made sure that she read to me and my siblings when we were little. We’d always go to the library and she’d let us pick out picture books or, you know, as we got older, different age-appropriate books. I always looked forward to going to the library. It was so much fun to choose whatever book I wanted. And then my grandma would take me sometimes to choose books. That’s really how it started for me, too, was with my mom. [laughs]
Cerid Jones (02:39):
I love that there’s such a wonderful backstory of the family influence. So, both you guys have your mother as an influence. Mine is actually my father. My father was a literary dream to grow up with in many ways. I grew up [and] literally my own house was a library. There were more books than there was wall space. So, from a really young age, I had bedtime stories read to me by my dad. We would read them together. Poetry collections…everything, which was just phenomenal. It was a magical, magical way to grow up. So, I always had [an] excess amount of books on hand. Even now as a grown up, I often say to my friends, ‘oh, I’ve gotta go to the library’, which is my dad’s house, to be able to get more books.
Elena L. Perez (03:25):
[laughs].
Cerid Jones (03:25):
Actually we get earthquakes here in New Zealand quite a bit and my fear is that my father is going to have a big earthquake and he’s gonna get smothered under a pile of books. ‘Cause that’s literally what he sleeps under, is a whole wall filled floor-to-ceiling with books. So, reading’s always been a part of my life and…yeah.
Elena L. Perez (03:46):
Oh, that’s amazing
Matthew Maichen (03:47):
For a moment there, I actually imagined that…when you said he sleeps under a pile of books, I actually imagined that it’s his blanket and he’s got books piled up on top of him while he sleeps. Um…
Cerid Jones (04:03):
That’s not totally inaccurate, to be fair. He usually has four or five books on the go. He falls asleep reading. So, you will often find him asleep on his bed with books on top of him. So…[laughs]
Matthew Maichen (04:17):
That has been happening to me lately. And what’s funny is I’ve been reading eBooks, so I’m reading on my phone, and then all of a sudden I drift off enough that my phone just smacks me in the face and I’m like, ‘well, I’m not falling asleep anymore’.
All (04:33):
[laugh].
Elena L. Perez (04:35):
That’s great. Instead of a book, it’s a phone. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (04:40):
Yeah. It’s harder. It’s not paper, it’s plastic. It’s a solid material [that] whacks me. Anyway…
Elena L. Perez (04:49):
You know, that happened to me the other day. I have a pop socket on my phone and when I was reading my ebook, it fell off my phone. So, yeah, that does hurt if it falls on your head.
Matthew Maichen (05:03):
Okay. So, for me, I guess I always had a literary aptitude—maybe it’s genetic. I mean, we’ve talked about family influences, but my grandfather was an English professor and was actually my dad’s English professor and did not consider my dad to be a very good student. I should specify, my grandfather on my mom’s side was an English professor. My mom got from him the habit of always reading. That was predominantly the thing that she did for entertainment. Then when I was three, I decided that I would run away because that’s what three-year-olds do. So, I got a piece of paper and I wrote the word ‘zoo’ on it because it was the only thing I knew how to write. I’m just like, ‘I’m gonna run away to the zoo’ and then I drew a picture of myself with a zebra to make things really clear, even though the zebra itself was not a very clear zebra. I went to my mom and I showed her the note that I was running away to the zoo and she looked at it and she was like, ‘you know how to write zoo’. I’m like, ‘Mommy, I’m running away’ and she’s like, ‘you know how to write zoo’. She was blown away and she put it on the fridge and magnetized it there. I was very upset because I wasn’t being taken seriously. Ever since then—I don’t know, I just always found better stories that I was more interested in, in books. I would fall out of reading books for periods of time, but then I’d always come back. When I was in fifth grade, I developed a completely unhealthy obsession with Animorphs. I was absolutely obsessed.
Elena L. Perez (07:04):
Yes, Animorphs.
Matthew Maichen (07:04):
Yeah. I don’t know why I read Animorphs fan fiction because there were 55, 56—something like that—Animorphs books. There was more than enough Animorphs reading material, but I still read Animorphs fan fiction. I don’t know. I just got obsessed with Animorphs. Anyway, one of my fringe weird podcast ideas that I’ll never do is to run a podcast where, week-by-week, we read an Animorphs book and talk about it. But, I don’t know, probably not. [laughs]
Elena L. Perez (07:45):
Animorphs are great. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (07:47):
It is. It’s great. Sorry, that’s my long windedness catching up with me again. I just, I don’t know. I just keep falling back into reading and I love the adventure of it.
Elena L. Perez (08:03):
That’s really interesting. I think I’ve always been…I mean, [I] too, had periods of reading and maybe not reading so much. I’ve always been a reader and devoured books. Like I said, I’d go to the library before and [laughs] and check out a bunch of books and then the next week be back for more. People were just amazed that I read so much. So, that’s interesting that you had periods [of reading and not reading].
Melissa Reynolds (08:32):
I actually didn’t do so well in school. I would bring my library books with me and read through math class. So, I ended up needing to retake algebra, I believe it was, because I was too busy reading instead. I guess it makes sense that that’s why I ended up being an English major. So…
All (08:54):
[laugh].
Cerid Jones (08:56):
I can actually relate to Matthew and having periods of being a reader and binge-reading like crazy and then having a break for a little while. For me, I think reading is an addiction, but it’s an addiction that I keep coming back to. It’s like almost being remission from it at some point in time or something like that. But I think it’s also ’cause I have a tendency similar to what Matthew was saying. When I read books, I’m so consumed in that universe. I think I very easily forget about the real world when that’s happening. So, it’s important to have some balance, to be able to binge-read like crazy and then go, ‘oh, hang on. There’s a real walking life. I might need to do a thing or two, maybe some washing or something’. You know.
Matthew Maichen (09:43):
I think this is a good message, what I’m about to say, hopefully, for some people. For me, it’s not as much that as it is…if you talk to a lot of people, you will hear this really common story of, ‘I used to read when I was a kid all the time and then I stopped and I haven’t read a book since then. And I’m probably not gonna read again. It’s weird, ’cause I used to read all the time when I was a kid. Now I can’t do it anymore’. For me, it was like that, actually. After I got past that initial Animorphs and young adult/middle-grade addiction, I did stop reading. It was really hard for me to make the transition to adult reading and I didn’t read for a few years. And then I did again, but it took a lot of effort to get myself back into it, I guess. I think that, unfortunately, we live in a society that is so constantly barraging you with crap that is loud and aggressive in the way that books can’t be. You know, a book will never contain the same amount of sensory data as a TikTok video. It just won’t. A single six second TikTok video is loud and aggressively pursuing your attention in a way that a book just won’t. Honestly, you have to get used to controlling and applying your own focus because that’s what books ask you to do that no other entertainment—or whatever medium ’cause there are a lot of books that are good for reasons other than entertainment—but what no other artistic medium asks you to do is apply your focus like that.
Cerid Jones (11:44):
I’d say that books are seductive in that sense rather than being, you know, straight in your face and saying ‘me me, me, me’. There’s a subtle art of seduction that happens with a book. It hooks you in the first couple of pages and then you can’t get out. That first page is never…um…yeah, never loud, never deafening for you. It lets us ease its way into it, which I really love about it.
Matthew Maichen (12:06):
Yeah. Wow. So, it was brought up that we would probably have a conversation that kind of got away from itself and we would have more than enough to fill this. I think we are proving that point. Let’s actually move on because for the first part of this, we were going to really focus on a history lesson. Hopefully, this will be helpful for a wide variety of people, for people who wanna start a lit mag, right? For people who want to get into writing, for people who wanna do writing-related stuff. I guess out of this group of people who are here, Elena and I were in that situation in 2015 and…Man, I just realized…okay, so out of the initial group of people—and Marina is still with us, Marina’s just not here right now—but out of the group of people who met in Orange and talked about The Metaworker and came up with the name, I am the one person currently in this meeting who was in that group. It’s just a weird thought.
Elena L. Perez (13:28):
Yeah.
Matthew Maichen (13:28):
I’ll just go chronologically in order. We were the editors of an on-campus literary magazine at Chapman, the editor-in-chief of that lit mag was like, ‘oh, let’s keep doing it after we graduate’. Then it turned out that she didn’t really have time. There were a lot of other concerns—you know, adult post-college concerns—but a few of us still wanted to do it. So, I stepped up. Then it was Darin, Marina, and I [who] were the ones left. And then Elena…I don’t even remember how…
Elena L. Perez (14:05):
Well, so…[laughs]… actually, my story starts before that.
Matthew Maichen (14:11):
Yeah.
Elena L. Perez (14:11):
I graduated from Chapman in 2014, so I wasn’t even part of that year of the literary magazine that you all were. I was in the year before. But I knew the girl who wanted to start this. She mentioned at some point to me that she was interested in starting a lit mag. And I said, ‘yes, I want to be a part of that’ because I had applied to a bunch of other lit mags at the time and nobody accepted me to be part of their staff. I was, like, ‘okay, well I really wanna do something with a lit mag and nobody’s willing to take a chance on me. So I wanna be a part of this new one that this group of people is starting’. [laughs] So, she kind of brought me in that way. That’s how I got involved. I don’t even think, Matthew, I’ve ever actually met you in person [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (15:14):
No, you have.
Elena L. Perez (15:15):
Or Marina either.
Elena L. Perez (15:15):
Oh, I have?
Matthew Maichen (15:16):
Yes, you have. So, I remember I was walking around Chapman one day and I had published a story in the Calliope and…
Elena L. Perez (15:26):
Which is the lit mag for Chapman.
Matthew Maichen (15:29):
Yeah. And you said to me, “oh, that was really good”. That was our one in-person interaction. You complimented me on the story.
Elena L. Perez (15:38):
Oh, at one of the publishing parties or something, was it? [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (15:43):
Yeah. But…so, here’s the thing. I will admit the other irony here is that you were way more involved in the publishing at Chapman than I was, because the truth is, despite me being the editor-in-chief of this lit mag, I was only on the Calliope staff in my last semester of Chapman. I wasn’t there [prior to that].
Elena L. Perez (16:13):
Ah.
Matthew Maichen (16:13):
I was writing stories and submitting them to the Calliope, but I didn’t think of myself as an editor. I just thought of myself as a writer. That obviously changed. That’s the other kind of funny irony, ’cause from my perspective, what happened was there were the three of us and then you came on and you were more motivated than anyone else.
Elena L. Perez (16:39):
[laughs].
Matthew Maichen (16:39):
You were just, like, ‘okay, we are…I’m just gonna do this. I’m gonna do all this stuff. What do we need to do to set up this literary magazine? I’m gonna do it right now. Tell me what I need to do. It’s gonna happen’. And I was just like, ‘whoa, okay’.
Elena L. Perez (16:54):
I’m telling you, I was so excited. I wanted to be on some magazine and I’d applied and everybody was like, ‘no, you don’t have enough experience’. I’m like, okay. I ran the Calliope for two semesters at Chapman. We went through the whole…you know, we made print books and had to advertise and get people to submit. I really, really loved doing that and so I just had to find a way. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (17:21):
Well, thank you because you have honestly done so much. I feel like the one thing that I have contributed—I’m not tooting my own horn, I’m just saying. I don’t think this is a small thing, but I also don’t think it’s everything. When the pressures of adult life come in after college and it’s like, ‘oh, I really wanna do this thing, but I wanna do a lot of stuff. I mean, it’d be cool, but I have all these other things that I could be doing with my adult life’. I was very, very aggressively championing and shouting from the rooftops, ‘no, let’s still do this’. Trying to inspire people. That’s what my role was. But you did almost everything that was actually logistical. It really can’t be understated, the amount of objective planning, business-esque…it’s not really a business, but business-esque stuff that you did and continue to do even to this day. When we’re at the meeting and I say, ‘okay, is there anything that we need to talk about’? I won’t know what it is. Then Elena will have five or six different things that we actually totally need to discuss that I didn’t think of.
Elena L. Perez (18:58):
I appreciate that. I love doing that stuff. So, I’m so glad that I can do that for this magazine. Like you’re saying, what you do is…I can’t do that. [laughs] That’s not my strength, so I appreciate having you there to do that part of it, being the voice and all that. I mean, that’s what a team is for, right? I’m really happy to be able to do that kind of work with you and with Cerid and Mel and Marina and all our past editors, as well.
Matthew Maichen (19:34):
If we’re gonna generalize it, if you want to do something like this, you do need to do both, especially with the fact that, you know, to be totally honest, this is not a day job. This isn’t something that you’re gonna make a living doing. You’re doing it because you really want to, you’re doing it out of passion. So, you need to have that passion and then you also need to be able to run it, right? You have to be able to, even if you’re not raking in a lot of money, there’s other books to check, you know? There’s other things like: is the website working, did we respond to that email? Um…
Elena L. Perez (20:23):
If you don’t know these things, you have to learn. A lot of what I’ve done is research and figure out, like, how does one run a website? How does one do whatever else we need to do to keep this going? But yeah. It’s…
Matthew Maichen (20:41):
And that passion. I was just gonna mention this very, very briefly, ’cause I don’t wanna list people.I just wanna say we have brought on multiple people over the years and a lot of them…they’ve stayed for a few months and they’ve kind of dipped out after a while and I don’t blame anyone for that, it’s just the only resource you’re running on is that passion. If you don’t have enough of it—and there’s nothing wrong with you for not having enough of it, it’s just a fact of life—you’re not gonna end up staying. That’s just reality.
Elena L. Perez (21:20):
It’s great, too, to have different people dip in and out and experience how a magazine is run. We get different perspectives from our past editors, our past interns. Their ideas were valuable and things that we took into account to make our magazine better. So, even if somebody is just able to give a little bit of time to our magazine, I still think that’s valuable because it’s a different perspective and it’s cool to have…to work with different people.
Matthew Maichen (21:55):
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (21:55):
If I could jump in for just a second.
Matthew Maichen (21:57):
Go ahead.
Elena L. Perez (21:58):
Go for it, Mel.
Melissa Reynolds (21:59):
Yeah, I wanna compliment you all because that was part of what kept me was just how open you all are to new ideas and to trying things and saying, ‘Hey, it might not work, but if it does, cool’. As you two are talking, it just felt like a confirmation of why I’m still here, because of how great we all work together. Also, both of you never fail to give compliments when they’re due or offer encouragement. I gotta say, the staff here, they’re just wonderful.
Elena L. Perez (22:40):
Aw, you included. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (22:42):
Marina actually said, in a really interesting aside, [that] this is some of the best communication that she has in any situation. I was thinking about that ’cause it was a really interesting thing to hear. I realized that when you’re talking about art, you end up talking about all of these really, really important things that end up featured in art. When you disagree on those things, it can be really, really…schisms can form. So, you need to be very respectful, honestly, which is funny. When you’re critiquing art, this is what I’ve learned: you need to be really, really respectful to the people you’re critiquing art with because there are ideas in art and people can get offended. People can get…all kinds of things. I think I remember, at least one point, there was a piece where I didn’t think it was terrible, but I remember that Elena was just like, ‘this makes me uncomfortable. The messages in this make me uncomfortable and what’s going on in it makes me uncomfortable’. We had to just take a step back and be, like, ‘maybe there’s a reason for that and it’s valid’. We need to actually take that seriously and not publish it.
Elena L. Perez (24:20):
Yeah. It’s definitely important to be aware of those kind of things and be open to not only discussing, but open to changing your path, I guess, in light of that. So, I guess not being afraid to be wrong or not being afraid to be contradicted. I feel like none of us here have that issue. We all are open to having these difficult conversations and being sensitive to each other’s opinions and perspectives, which…I really love this. It’s always refreshing to have conversations with all of you and Marina and…yeah, it’s fun. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (25:09):
I was also going to say in response to that, this is something that we can’t underemphasize in the history. One of the big things we were talking about earlier on was what kind of literary magazine we wanted The Metaworker to be, because everybody has a theme now, right? Everyone…it gets very specific now. Sometimes there are even calls for: ‘we want specifically LGBT ghost pirate stories’. And that’s fine. That is for a group of people who are writing a very specific thing.
Elena L. Perez (25:49):
Send us that. We would love to read that. [Laughs]
Matthew Maichen (25:51):
Yeah, I don’t know, that was just the first thing that jumped into my head, but that would actually be a really, really cool lit mag. I mean, there’s another one, it’s about mermaid stories, but it’s specifically horror mermaid stories. Mermaids that are dangerous, you know? That’s a real one. I’ll throw out a real one in addition to the [first one], ’cause I feel like I actually might have disappointed some people with the LGBT ghost pirate thing. The fact that I did just come up with that off the top of my head and it’s not real. Anyway, The Metaworker has never had that really strong theme, but that does mean that we’re open to a lot of stuff. We’ve gotten some really, really good stuff over the years, I think precisely because there are a lot of really good writers who don’t write to the market and they don’t write according to anyone else’s demands, but they have these really, really good poems and stories that they’ve written. I know that’s true of some people from personal experience. I really wanted to create a space for that. Like, what is your idea that no one is asking for, but you absolutely love it and you wrote it from your heart? That is what we want.
Elena L. Perez (27:31):
Yeah. That doesn’t quite fit into any genre or that…because I love to read science fiction and fantasy, but I also like to read non-fiction or fiction or…there’s so many…I have so many different interests. There’s just so many good stories out there that I don’t feel like we need to be limiting—for this magazine anyway—we don’t need to limit what genre or what kind of story we are asking for, because it can come from anywhere. That’s what I love so much, is that there’s so many surprising stories out there, or stories that make you think, and it could be a combination of genres or no clear genre at all. And it’s still a good story. That’s what I love, too, about our vibe. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (28:25):
Yeah. When we open up that Duosuma box to read the pieces for each week, we just have no idea what we’re gonna run into. It’s gonna be an adventure every single time. And it continues to be years into doing this. I keep being surprised by the things that people are writing, you know? I’m amazed and surprised every single time. There’s something that’s just, like, ‘this is so different’. I’m blown away by it.
Elena L. Perez (29:01):
Yeah.
Matthew Maichen (29:02):
I did wanna call out one particular emeritus member. Since we mentioned staff emeritus, I do wanna say: Darin, if you are listening to this, we miss you and we appreciate you. We are so happy that you were with us for all those years. You definitely are not forgotten. You have been here the majority of the time that we were a literary magazine and we are really happy that you were with us for that time. So, thank you so much for all that you contributed. Because Darin contributed quite a lot before he unfortunately had to go.
Elena L. Perez (29:41):
Yes. Thank you, Darin. Yeah. We miss you and hope you’re doing well.
Matthew Maichen (29:44):
Aside from that, we do have other people with us now. I do wanna, since we’re still doing the history thing, and we’re still talking about what we are, I wanna talk about Mel because we had a really interesting…I don’t know whether to call it like a run…it was something. Mel, we published her before we brought her on. She contacted us. I guess, maybe tell us the story from your perspective, Mel. What drew you to The Metaworker?
Melissa Reynolds (30:23):
Well, I have been a writer for quite a while and I kind of came late to that path, in a way. I’ve always written, but I never thought I was capable of being published. So, when I finally figured it out, I went back to school to get my English degree. I started out in the school of nursing and then I dropped out of school to have my family, all that good stuff, but then I came back. It took me a while ’cause I went part-time. While my kids were at school, I was in school, too. I would constantly be writing for my English classes and if I had a story that I thought was worthwhile, I would look for places that might be interested. And I came across The Metaworker. I think I found it… I don’t know why it came up as local because I’m in West Virginia and you guys are all in California, but it came up under that and I checked you all out and I loved your guidelines. And I thought, ‘you know what, I’m going to give it a shot’. I submitted two stories. There was one that I already had, but then I saw your wishlist was you wanted a story told from the perspective of an object or an animal or something unexpected. I wrote a story specifically for Metaworker about a tree in a park near where I grew up and you guys liked it and accepted it. I thought that was awesome. Fast-forward to the next semester and I’m doing my capstone to graduate and I have to find an internship. I need to work at least…I think it was a hundred hours over the semester. The teacher suggested a few and I thought, ‘you know what? Way back when I was actually an editor for Every Day Fiction and I had found them just by reaching out and saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to read for you’. I thought, ‘I’m gonna give The Metaworker a shot. I really like the poetry and the stories that they put out. I like the vibe. I’m gonna take a shot’. I emailed, I believe, Marina, and I said, ‘Hey, um, crazy thing, but would you guys want an intern’? [laughs] My teacher was like, ‘well, you know, do this way in advance just in case they say no, so we can line something else up for you’. But thankfully they said yes and I loved it. I was actually…I didn’t see the notes that you all sent to my teacher right away, talking about how you would like me to stay on. So, I was pretty bummed towards the end of the semester because I thought I was gonna be done and that you guys weren’t gonna have me back. My teacher…I had mentioned something and my teacher said, ‘well, maybe you should read this’. Then when you guys asked, I was over the moon. I was so happy. Yeah, I’ve been here ever since.
Matthew Maichen (33:38):
I had no idea…
Elena L. Perez (33:39):
We’ve loved having you here. [laughs]
Matthew Maichen (33:41):
I had no idea that you wrote “Tree Song” for The Metaworker.
Melissa Reynolds (33:47):
Yeah, I did.
Matthew Maichen (33:47):
That actually really surprises me. Oh. Well…
Melissa Reynolds (33:50):
I had a phase there where I was writing more about West Virginia and my roots there. I think I wrote a newsletter for my internship about Cathedral Park, which…I grew up right next to it. Yeah, it was based on that park. So, the mom character in that is actually my mom. So, you know, a lot more truth to it than I would’ve admitted to before this.
Matthew Maichen (34:19):
Awesome.
Elena L. Perez (34:21):
Oh, and that’s such a great story, too.
Melissa Reynolds (34:22):
Well, thank you.
Matthew Maichen (34:24):
I didn’t wanna…well, yeah, we wouldn’t have published it if [wasn’t] It is. So, I also didn’t want to interrupt you when you said roots, but there was a small part of me that just wanted to go, like, ‘ha—roots’ because of the tree story. I controlled myself and I didn’t do that.
Melissa Reynolds (34:50):
Very admirable.
Elena L. Perez (34:52):
[laughs] We love puns here, especially me.
Matthew Maichen (34:56):
Yeah. I think we have published things because of puns before. That’s a really educational statement. Whoever’s hearing that is like, ‘oh, wait, they’ve published things because of puns before’. Oh no. I probably just inflicted us with things that only Elena is going to like.
Elena L. Perez (35:18):
I will fight really hard for them, but there’s no guarantee. [laughs].
Matthew Maichen (35:21):
I was also going to ask Cerid, who is our current intern, how did you originally find us? What drew your interest and what is the story of you, I guess, joining The Metaworker?
Cerid Jones (35:44):
Well, first of all, I’m gonna say it’s been really interesting listening to the backstory and hearing it in the full dialogue that we’ve got going today. Actually, everything you guys talked about is really what drew me. That’s the impression that I got from looking around the website and The Metaworker and looking at what you guys had published. For me, I’m really into diversity. Diversity with basically everything. I have a really wide appreciation of tastes and I’m especially interested in things that are experimental and metaphorical. I love my fables my speculative fiction and retellings and things like that. I really felt like you guys all had a really diverse background in the works that you were selecting and composing together. I had this sense that this looks like a group of people where ink runs in their veins. Having listened to everyone talk today, I think that’s 100% true. And the time that I’ve spent communicating with you guys and hearing how you do your review process and how things even get published into The Metaworker. I got the sense from the first communication with you guys that you were about building a community of creatives and that you are a group of people who really understand what the creative struggle is, and that we are in the arts because of the passion and because it’s almost impossible to do anything else when you get that creative bug. It sits there, you can’t ignore it. I really liked that and I felt like there would be some kind of synergy into where my mind-state is and what I’m interested in doing and what you guys are actually doing. I mean, I come all the way from little Aotearoa—New Zealand. At the time when I first submitted a letter of interest to you guys, there was not much going on in New Zealand. To be fair, I live in a really small town. I’m about an hour away from the capital. We do have a lot here, but there’s not really a lot of bookish stuff that goes on in my immediate area. It’s about one book festival that happens a year. Fnding other literary interest people can be kind of tricky. I just really had the sensation that these guys get it, they just get it and they’re passionate people. I took a punt, I mean, much like Mel. It was really nerve wracking applying to intern for an American journal all the way from teeny, tiny little Aotearoa. I really didn’t think you guys would be interested at all. It has just been such a huge little ego boost for me to be saying that I’m interning with you guys. I’m absolutely loving it here. It’s incredible. I just think Metaworker is magic on so many levels. It is so humbling to be here. It’s inspiring. It feels really affirming for the creative process in general, to be alongside people who get it and are willing to communicate about getting that. Um, yeah, so it’s just magic.
Elena L. Perez (39:10):
Oh, that is so awesome.
Melissa Reynolds (39:12):
Well, speaking of that, we are gonna have one of your photos on our site, right? You were inspired by one of the stories. It’s so cool.
Cerid Jones (39:21):
[laughs] Yeah. Well, being an art school graduate, one of the many things I’ve twittered with. Having a theatrical mindset, man—reading stories, you get inspired so easily. This particular story, I just had a burning image in my head, so did a quick little photo shoot. I’m really stoked that you guys liked it. That’s awesome. [laughs]
Elena L. Perez (39:45):
Oh, my gosh. It’s great.
Matthew Maichen (39:47):
I was gonna say preview for upcoming story, but then I realized that by the time this is up, the story itself will also probably be up. You’ll know it, because it will say that the photo credit is to Cerid. That’s how you’ll know it, it will already be up. You will be able to see it right now. I also wanna say, we definitely did not feed any of those lines to Cerid and I don’t mean that sarcastically. Really we didn’t. I was not expecting this to be a horn-tooting meeting, but I guess it’s turning into that. Thank you so much. I appreciate that so much. You just said the absolute…one ridiculously nice thing after another. I do want to jump off of that a little bit, because one of the things that I realized—this is a big surprise to me and it might be a big surprise to other people—is the globalism of it, I guess. We started and we were very ‘California’, right? We were people who were specifically from a private college in Orange, California. That’s how we all knew each other and that’s where we initially recruited everyone from. But then we went onto the internet and we started asking for submissions from people on the internet and it is fascinating how global that has become over the years. We get so many submissions from South Asia…
Elena L. Perez (41:28):
And London.
Matthew Maichen (41:29):
…oddly enough. And yeah, London.
Elena L. Perez (41:31):
All over the United States. Everywhere. It’s awesome.
Matthew Maichen (41:36):
Mm-hmm. I never anticipated that. I never thought, ‘oh, The Metaworker is going to be a global literary magazine that publishes stuff from people from countries all over the world’. You know, we’ve published poems where…well, okay. I think one poem. Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too much, but there is a poem we published where it’s the original language on one side and the English translation on the other side. That was something that I never anticipated. I think that’s kind of what happens when you go onto the internet and you get any kind of reasonable clout. You just start drawing in people from everywhere because there aren’t the same kind of geographical boundaries online.
Elena L. Perez (42:38):
Yeah. Well, that’s something I wanted to mention, too. Cerid, you said you were nervous applying to be an intern with us, but when we got your application, we were so excited that someone from another country would know about our tiny little magazine. That was…we were just so excited to meet you and hear your perspective and having you here and hearing your perspective and learning from you and vice-versa has just been so much fun and such an awesome experience. Like Matthew was saying, the global aspect of this has been something that I didn’t expect either, but I’m really glad that it has happened the way it has.
Cerid Jones (43:29):
I’m kind of quite glad at this point that this is a podcast recording ’cause I’m definitely blushing. Thank you. That means…The other thing, actually, I wanna say [is] you mentioned the poem that you published in two different languages. When I was looking through the website, that’s actually one of the things I did see. Because I’ve got a background in anthropology, that made me really excited that. You know, here’s an online journal that’s culturally aware of itself, which…I mean, I hope I’m not gonna put my foot in my mouth in any way, shape, or form here, but, I mean, America doesn’t necessarily always have the best viewpoint of having that, right? A lot of American journals are very ‘American’, you know? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m not trying to be culturally insensitive in any way, shape, or form. It’s just like our New Zealand journals. A lot of our Aotearoa journals are very New Zealand journals.
Elena L. Perez (44:28):
Mm-hmm.
Cerid Jones (44:28):
And things outside of that are just things that they’re not really too interested [in]. So, that element of having that self cultural awareness and global cultural awareness is really exciting. Really exciting. I love being able to talk about that with you guys in our meetings as well. It’s wicked.
Matthew Maichen (44:49):
Yeah. The American literary journal scene is really interesting in that way, right? Because, in some ways, you can’t throw a stick without hitting someone who’s talking about diversity. Also, don’t throw sticks at those people because they’re nice people. It is so captivated by diversity and raising diverse voices right now. But it is true that, even then in those diverse voices, a lot of it is American diversity. America is a very, very diverse country, but you can tell that they are talking about, you know, United States and Canada diversity. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, in the way that you say there’s nothing wrong with a New Zealand literary journal being a New Zealand literary journal. It is worth noting, I think…I’ve talked to my friend who’s a British writer about this extensively. There is no culture that is as influential as US culture right now. It just kind of goes everywhere. I think I’m a little bit proud that we try to take a back seat sometimes. If someone from South Asia submits a very South Asian story to us, we accept that and we publish it and we know it’s not Americanized and that’s…
Elena L. Perez (46:45):
Yeah. Agreed.
Cerid Jones (46:46):
Yeah, I think that’s awesome. Definitely. I would just add one thing in terms of what I said before about that. I mean, when I was at university, I did a university paper on American literature. It has its own entire category. Whereas, here in this country, we are still struggling on what the New Zealand literary novel is or anything like that, which I find really interesting. ‘Cause you guys have such a long-standing history of literature that it has its whole own category. Working for a magazine that’s trying to push out of that and become more globalized is really cool.
Elena L. Perez (47:28):
Thank you.
Matthew Maichen (47:29):
I think that we have been talking about our history and about The Metaworker in general for a while. Those of us who predicted that this alone would be enough to fill the time for an entire podcast episode, I salute you. You are correct. There is going to be a part two of this that is going to be just a round-table discussion in which we ask each other various questions and we answer them…
Elena L. Perez (48:04):
About writing.
Matthew Maichen (48:05):
Yeah, about writing. About a lot of stuff—writing, editing, Metaworker, all the stuff. That will be the next episode. Who knows what after that. Maybe something else. Thank you so much for tuning in. I know it’s been a while. We really appreciate you. Keep reading, keep writing, keep being creative in whatever way you are creative and keep being passionate. Thank you so much for your help and support over these years.
Cerid Jones (48:39):
Forge ahead.
