Interview: Emily Present and Peter Cole Freidman, Editors of glitterMOB Magazine

Celebrating Glitterature

By Ryan Brunt

We’re living in a golden age of the literary magazine.  The internet has broken down a lot of the barriers to putting together a publication, and as a result, there are countless new magazines with unique aesthetics and identities.   One of the standouts of this new generation of publications is glitterMOB, whose latest issue was released in March.  I reached out to editors Emily Present and Peter Cole Freidman to discuss their inspirations and what’s in store for glitterMOB.    
​​

How did glitterMOB get started? And where does the name come from?

Emily: We met in 2014 in Monica McClure’s Brooklyn Poet’s workshop. We became friends  and admirers of each other’s work — we had similar taste. I then approached peter about wanting to start something because I was feeling frustrated at not being “in” the poetry community and was facing the early days of getting rejected by magazines. I figured if I couldn’t get published just yet, I’d form a platform to help publish other people. As for the name, it just came from an experiment of fun brainstorming.                    

Peter: I remember somebody — maybe Matt Nelson? — misheard it as glitter mom and we floated the idea of having a second website called glittermom for things that didn't make it to glittermob.                                                    

Emily: I don’t remember that! But I do know that everyone thinks it’s called glitter MOM. 

Peter: I think we also agreed that literary/art platforms had a tendency to take themselves too seriously. We wanted the platform to be a little more playful than what we'd seen. We didn't want to eschew seriousness but felt that sometimes serious things could be treated playfully and playful things could be treated seriously. 

The earlier issues all have fairly eclectic art, but starting from issue 5, the illustrations have a much more unified aesthetic.  What was the catalyst for that change, if anything?

Emily: In the beginning, we wanted to showcase a lot of different art and hunt around for it— we don’t get too many art submissions (it’s always been heavy on the poetry). After a while, we wanted to have a paired down issue with a unifying visual aesthetic. We decided to focus on one artist per issue and would think even more deliberately on what type of art we wanted for that issue.  

Peter: Emily and I also made a lot of the art for the early issues partly by necessity and partly because we wanted to set the tone. I think our ideal has always been for glitterMOB to have as many kinds of media as possible, but it's hard to do in practice.

What were/are the biggest inspirations for glitterMOB (other magazines, art, literature, music, etc.)?

Emily: We wanted to aim for an aesthetic we had not really come across in other magazines. We felt like we had this kitschy pop vibe that we hadn’t really seen in other online journals.  We were heavily influenced by the guurlesque movement. 

Peter: I think I described it as "a Claire's on fire" to one of our readers.

Emily: What was our original motto pitch again??! 

Peter: Where surface gets deep? Where beauty and anarchy meet? Something like that. We ended up being able to publish a lot of the poets that inspired us. Monica McClure, Sasha Fletcher, Tracy diamond, Morgan Parker, Melissa Broder 

Emily: I found it -- “We're really interested in culture, surface, excess: where beauty and anarchy meet, where artifice gets deep.”

Quite a bit of the poetry published in glitterMOB deals with some heavy social and political issues.  Was that something that was part of the plan from the beginning or did it just happen?

Emily: That was always the plan but definitely became more important to us as time went on, especially with the 2016 election etc. We purposely don’t read blindly and believe in having a diverse set of strong voices. 

Peter: I guess all poetry/art is political, or makes choices that have political implications; but we're all for anger being anger and not necessarily a tree or something, you know? I don't know any angry trees.

What’s next for glitterMOB?

Emily: Honestly, we’re very up in the air all the time. Sometimes we want to fold, and other times we have grand plans. We’re both very busy with our lives and jobs and we actually just finished co-writing a novella. But glitterMOB is a love of ours that we are not gonna let die just yet. Maybe we’ll do another reading again soon!

Peter: First, we have submissions to catch up on! Every issue, I think, Should we stop doing this? Lol. So far we haven't, which is remarkable, since we're pretty busy people. We keep getting amazing submissions and we don't want to let those people down. We've had lots of ideas for how the platform could expand/change, including starting a press, but we both have full time jobs and what we're doing now seems impossible enough. So maybe someday!