Mike Young is the editor of NOÖ Journal , a free political and literary journal based in southern Oregon. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including SmokeLong Quarterly, FRiGG, Pindeldyboz, juked, elimae, and 3:AM Magazine. His story “Ten Gallon Bucket of Fries,” published by Word Riot in September of 2005, earned him a spot on storySouth’s Notable Story list. Visit Mike’s blog and his website.

Let’s talk NOÖ for a minute. What made you venture into the editing and publishing world? And why a literary/political journal, instead of one or the other?

I never had any elaborate dreams of magazine publishing. I mean, I imagined other things. Like my ascent to twang singer infamy: start out hopping trains, sleep in the shopping carts behind Albertson’s, get discovered on a street corner in Kentucky by John Jacob Niles’ long-lost granddaughter, etc. But I never thought “well, gee, if I had a small press literary magazine, here is what I would do.” That helped. When the magazine arose, the fever of conception was fresh. Right before Kyle and I started NOÖ, I had just tripped into the whole indie lit world, e-zines and all that. NOÖ was a leap from the blimp. It’s exciting, and that has kept us going.

As far as politics, we wanted (and want) to encourage dialogue rather than lecture reception. In NOÖ [two], a Mt. Shasta local talks about sustainable food choices. She read Wendell Barry and wanted to get families talking about their notion of food. There you go. People talking to people, an outlet for that, based locally. We have expanded, of course, so we’ve had to refine and rethink, but we want to keep that person-to-person tone. Not like a lecture from on high. Is that a unique idea? Not really, but if somebody reads something in NOÖ and feels like it’s approachable, like they can talk to their sister about it during American Idol commercials, not just say “I read this interesting tidbit” but really talk about it—that’s helpful, I hope.

Really, ideas have developed out of the process. We want to put stories and poems—free, good, like you’d find on FRiGG, SmokeLong, and juked—into small-town coffeshops, where many people like to read but may think juked is what Barry Sanders did before he retired. We never really thought of that “mission” to begin with. We never had a “mission statement,” I don’t think. Maybe Kyle would disagree. I’m not sure. A mission statement would have meant a prescribed aesthetic, a governed aesthetic, and I think “governed” is probably too generous a label for how we decide how the magazine will look or what we’ll publish. We like things. I like black and white accent scribbles and artists who show up on places like tinyshowcase.com. I like Sean Kilpatrick’s poems, which I realized when he submitted one.

We just like things and give them away and hope others will like them too. We haven’t figured out how to make it sound more significant.

I admire the fact that you distribute NOÖ Journal for free. Plus, the political articles coupled with the fiction and poetry, make NOÖ, in my opinion, an important publication, or “tool,” if I may use that term. But how hard is it to garner funding for the journal?

Funding is hard. We subsist off our paychecks and the bountiful grace of donors. We are working on an unobtrusive advertisement system, one that promotes both literary ventures and local businesses.

Our ongoing fundraiser is called BAD PYetry. You know those booths at county fairs where you get your face painted? Well, in Writing Down the Bones Natalie Goldberg says poets should do tables, on-the-spot poem tables. I just thought it would be funny to promise bad poetry on-the-spot—you know, what other kind is there, har har har.

Here’s how it works: you donate $2 to our PayPal account, and one of our crack bad poets (Tao Lin, Kasey Mohammad, Bryan Coffelt, sometimes me) writes you a bad poem (usually by hand!) and we send you a fancy PDF. It’s less than a floofy mocha drink. Way less than a row of whiskey Cokes and a Friday night that will end like a funny and sad Mary Miller story. In fact, bad poetry sparks excellent conversations. Wait, I just lied. Good poetry sparks excellent conversations. Bad poetry just gets you laid.

Speaking of Bad Poetry, I purchased a poem for this profile, which asked Mike to write a poem about himself or NOÖ Journal. Here’s what he came up with:

THOUGHTS ON NOÖ, THE UNIVERSE, AND TUNIC FABRIC

A magazine we did both think to start.
We thought and thought and thought with all our heart.

Kyle read a little Tellihard
and then when it was raining really hard

he was like “let’s name it after this dude!”
Um, Tellihard Magazine is sort of obtuse.

He was all no no no: name it for the noösphere,
which humans will ascend to in a couple thousand years.

I said hellz yeah dude right on sucka-fish hella hawt!
Then I said sorry: that was a little over-the-top.

Anyway, we thought originally we rhymed with new.
Which is pretty clever, right? Yeah, we thought so too.

Then someone explained what an ö linguistically meant.
But we still call it “new journal.” Playa don’t care! Reprezent!

This has been a poem about rebellion, love and eternal mystery.
I like that shirt you’re wearing. Is it vintage? I bet it’s really velvety.

Purchase Bad Poetry

You were recently accepted into the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA program. Congratulations! Who is on faculty there? Is there anyone you’re particularly looking forward to working with?

Thanks! Chris Bachelder is the new fiction guy, and he wrote this really cool novel called Bear v. Shark. James Tate is there, one of my favorite poets. I met another poetry prof, Peter Gizzi, here in Oregon. He is a kind and genuine guy. Also, he seemed to enjoy the concept of saunas, which means he is a warm-blooded human being and not a seal or lizard.

I know a few students in the program through NOÖ and poetry and other such anti-social ventures. Plus David Berman from the Silver Jews went to Amherst! How can I go wrong? Singer-songwriter infamy, remember?

What will happen to NOÖ Journal once you move to Boston?

It will get cooler and cooler, I hope, until it explodes into an Antarctica-sized shower of clever, artistic, socially conscious confetti (looks a little like Corn Pops), a confetti that once harvested will fuel SUVs and air conditioners. In this manner, NOÖ will bring about the end of oil dependency and global warming. People will keep their scarves.

What is this poem game you debuted on your blog?

In the ’70s, poet Robert Greneir composed a project of 500 index cards in a box, all cards featuring different flecks of poetry. He called it Sentences. You open the box and assemble your own unique book of poetry. I wanted to copy that, so I wrote a poem game/machine that sorts an array of lines into random stanzas. I worked on the lines from August ‘05 to about Feburary ‘07. Then I programmed the game. I threw it on my blog like “here, try this,” and then I cleaned it up when BlazeVOX featured/published it in their Spring ‘07 issue.

You get weird results and connections. Sometimes it’s nonsense, but sometimes a string of lines will fit perfectly and wow: that’s all yours, a whole new poem.

Think also of the iPod’s “randomizer” feature, which always aligns songs with your mood. Unlike my poem machine, however, the iPod uses magic.

I chose your story “Underwater Hands,” published in the fall 2006 issue of FRiGG, for the very first Picks of the Week thread (now called The Showcase) here on my website. I immediately fell for the narrator’s voice in this story. In fact, the voice in all your work is pretty riveting. Does it come naturally to you?

Thanks! I don’t know. I guess I sometimes talk in a way calculated to entertain. I like such talk. I think the way people talk or think is most interesting when their quirks, colloquialisms, and phatic slush stray toward a fun stew of hidden rhyme and meter, an eerie underlying structure that makes language seem less like an arbitrary matrix of signs and more like, well, music. Twang! Infamy! Trains! Kentucky! John Jacob Niles!

Sorry. That wasn’t music. That was just me referencing an earlier answer to make the “thread” seem important, thereby broadcasting the notion that I am not full of shit. Hint: I am.

While browsing your website, I noticed that you are also into photography. You do it all, don’t you?! Do you have aspirations of seeing your photographs “published”? Or is it just a hobby?

Jim Gilmore, a photographer in Siskiyou County, told me that Allen Ginsberg took amazing photos. Most of the time, my days consist of wondering how certain situations would change if I had Allen Ginsberg’s Uncle Sam hat and/or beard.

I don’t know if I would try to submit my photography or anything. Submitting poems and stories is bold and scary and tedious enough. But I love to make pictures. Right now, I’m thinking about the cell phone camera as a way to define a photographic aesthetic, a style where you pretend that you’re a British subway camera, an art via Big Brother sort of thing. But I’ve never been good at street photography. I don’t like to seem creepy. That’s why I write, maybe? I can use all the strangers I want, and they will probably never know. If they find out, they are good detectives and not strangers. I don’t consider any good detective a stranger. I am a friend to all good detectives. Let it be known. This detective friendship—it’s part of my ancient destiny.

So you’re pretty young, under 21, right? What was it like growing up in the nineties? How do you think your age group differs from the previous generation?

I will be 21 on April 28th, two days after this interview. The Nineties: hmm. Saved by the Bell, soccer camp, Fruit Roll-Ups, Ricky Martin, the internet, MySpace, 9-11. Probably a few other things. Seriously though, I’m not sure about generational generalities. This seems like a “generation” of splinter groups, special interests, not unified identity. Obviously, many young people “IM.” This resembles what experts call “talking.” Some treat MySpace pages like bedrooms: posters on the wall, stereos playing. People try to accuse us all of ADD, I suppose, especially people terrified at the synchronous multiplicity of modern life. Sorry. I just wanted to say synchronous multiplicity. Many of us tend toward loud public self-performance, online especially, an attitude that resists traditional notions of “privacy.” Thanks to the internet, I had friends in Belgium, Britain and Brooklyn when I was fourteen, good friends. This never blew my mind because I didn’t know any better. I get the feeling that I treat identity, communication, stuff like that, in fairly odd or radical ways—but it’s hard to tell from the inside-out. Many of my attitudes derive from a certain exposure to education, maybe, not my age. I don’t know.

Tell us something crazy you’ve done.

One time I said it wasn’t love. But it was. Maybe. Who knows? All I know is that everything stopped, like when you drop a harmonica into a river.

Contact Mike

Read:

“Ten Gallon Bucket of Fries”
published by Word Riot

“My Four Best Friends”
published by Pindeldyboz

“Summer Peaches Versus Pocket Holes”
published by StoryGlossia

“This You as a Wolf with Wings”
published by juked

“Nothing is Interminable Right Now” and other poems
published by elimae

“Zoinks” and other poems
published by MiPOesias

“And the Shoes on the Cables Are There for the Angels”
published by juked