Re-Releasing The Valve.

The launch event for Valve Issue 2 proper will be on the 11^th October, in The Berkeley Suite, in Charing Cross, Glasgow. But Valve have already staged a pre-launch showcase of some of the writing talent involved in this new issue back in June, which I attended to get some idea of how things have changed.

Naturally, the staff isn’t identical. Editor Catherine Baird explains “We had about 25 people on the first one and we had everybody giving 100% time and effort, and it was really popular. The second time around people are away doing different things, quite a few are away in South Korea working, and all over the place. So there was a bunch of us that went in to talk to the new class in Strathclyde Uni about their journal, and then we met and were talking about that.”

The new class wanted to make their own journal though. “We’d thought at the time we’d leave Valve for the new class to carry on if they wanted,” Catherine says, “but they decided to go and do their own thing, so then we thought, right, we’ll do something with Valve, then.” The numbers have decreased though. “To be honest,” Catherine says “it’s been really about a maximum of five of us that have pulled this all together in about six months since we decided to go for it.”

Catherine directs me towards the two well-organised main content editors, Gabriella Bennett for Fiction, and Katrina Patrick for Poetry. “The fiction submissions came in to my email address,” Gabriella says “and I sorted them into my Valve Yes, Valve No, Valve Maybe piles in my email, and after the deadline passed I went through all of them. I double checked my Maybes made sure they definitely weren’t Yes’s, made sure the No’s were all No’s – essentially decided on all the fiction we took on to Valve 2.”

Similarly, Katrina says her role was “collating all the emails that come in, all the submissions, just sorting them out, and it’s basically myself, Catherine and Gabriella with a few loyal helpers, who helped organise this launch night as well”. Gabriella says the most difficult part was “Determining how experimental to go, because we want to be an experimental journal, but it’s difficult to balance that against giving people what they want.”

So what should we expect? Gabriella Bennett mentions “Scott Morris’s The New Animal” as a favourite, “a really beautiful prose poem, and there aren’t nearly enough prose poems these days.” Catherine Baird singles out a piece by Sophie Mackintosh, called “Darling, which is a very short piece, and it’s just got a really ethereal quality to it and the imagery in it is gorgeous.”

Katrina Patrick, taking a different tack, gets bogged down in discussing favourites that didn’t quite make it. “We had this wonderful poem about grapes which almost made the final cut, and it caused quite an argument because most of us loved it but we weren’t entirely sure what it meant. It was about the similarity between grapes and other grapes and so on until the final line was ‘All will be crushed!’ We thought that was absolutely hilarious but we weren’t entirely sure how the author meant it.” Valve’s web editor Chris Beattie chimes in “I just want to say that I was a very vocal proponent of the grape poem, but unfortunately it wasn’t put in.” I have to ask if he wrote the thing, but he just says: “I wish I had.”

Chris contributed to Valve as a writer last year, and is another who’s glad to be continuing. “I just hope that it goes as well as the last edition did, which was fantastically well. We had a lot of people interested in it, and I think this year is a continuation, but also a breaking free from the fact that last year this was a University project, but this year we’ve all graduated from university and we still want to keep it going.” It’s promising that he says “my long-term hopes for it… are that the year after this we’ll have a third edition, a fourth edition, and so on, so we’ll have something sustainable that continues.”

One of this year’s contributors is Alan Gillespie, who read his highly entertaining piece at the taster event. Gillespie has a slightly different angle on Valve. “I actually had a slight rivalry with them last year – if they even noticed - because they were the creative writing magazine of the University of Strathclyde, and I was the editor of From Glasgow To Saturn, the creative writing magazine of The University of Glasgow. I don’t want to hold a grudge, but they were only open to submissions last year to the twenty people in that class, so if you were in the class, you were going to get published.” Obviously, that’s changed this year. “I was running a magazine,” Gillespie continues “which was open to any student, graduate, or staff member of the University of Glasgow, so I felt we were much less exclusive.” There is a humorous tone to this. “They did a wonderful job”, he admits “and now they’ve made it open submissions I sent them a piece and they accepted it - so I love them, they’re brilliant.”

The submissions process has opened up though, which should lead Valve’s second issue to be stronger than its first. Though it’s not just for the Valve-ites, they have been allowed to submit work. “I have an experimental poem, but just the one thing,” says Gabriella Bennett. Another of last year’s contributors, Lynsey Cameron, has one piece in this year. “It’s supposed to be about how weird hotels are,” she says. “You go in and you don’t really know who’s been there before you, and then it just turned in to this ridiculous thing where a guy doesn’t sleep and goes crazy.” But it’s by no means exclusive, Gabriella tells me. “We struggled to decide whether to put our own stuff in, because we wouldn’t want to just have a magazine that’s perceived as a platform for our own work.” It’s not though, and the readers at the taster event proved this.

Elaine Reid is connected to Strathclyde, but not this particular course. “I was at Strathclyde a couple of years ago,” she says, “and I graduated in 2009 from the journalism and creative writing program, so I sort of keep in touch with some of the tutors and the current students.” When she heard about the second edition. “I put something forward and it was accepted.” Others took different roads to the magazine. Elizabeth Reeder, the author of the acclaimed Ramshackle, and the upcoming Fremont, tells me: “Gabriella invited me to submit something. So I had essays that I already had going, and that was nice because they were between the two books.” Her decision to contribute was a simple one: “You invest in people that you think, well, they approached me, they were professional, it seems like a good thing to do.”

Roddy Shippin is one of the new writers accepted by Valve, and his journey to publication is different again. “I think I originally found out about it on Twitter,” he says. “I think another literary magazine I follow had re-tweeted something saying ‘new Scottish writing, submit here,’ and I thought ‘that sounds perfect.' So I went on the website and submitted some stuff”. His quirky and amusing poems were a highlight of the event. He found out he was in the magazine at work. “I was in the middle of the call centre and got a text saying ‘you’re in,’” he says. “I did a fist pump in the middle of the office and got a few strange looks for it.” But Shippin is happy to explain why it was so important to him, and why it’s so important generally as well. “I think it’s a really good thing that it’s happened… it’s a good chance to get published, and this sort of thing is really important. These people have obviously come out of University and thought ‘we think there’s a space for this literary journal’, and have just done it themselves. As someone who’s just starting out as a writer, it’s great that there are magazines actively looking for new writers. I like the whole feel of it.”

The event was something of a success then, entertaining, yes, but also persuasive that this kind of endeavour has a future. Lynsey Calderwood underlined this for me when she said that “I didn’t think this many people would turn up for a writing event, it just doesn’t really happen. So to waste that would be ridiculous.” It certainly would.