If Black Clock had a foreign older uncle, it would be Landfall of Otago University Press. Founded in 1947, it is New Zealand’s oldest literary magazine. Landfall publishes two, often theme-driven, magazines a year featuring New Zealand’s best contemporary writers – their poetry, prose, and essays – as well as artwork in full color.
Also like Black Clock, Landfall works beyond the stories and poems it publishes – it provides an art-object readers can hold and experience in their hands. The art and captivating layout of each issue saturate the senses with visual and tactile beauty on par with the textual that simply cannot be conveyed on a screen. In so doing, Landfall challenges the print is dead theorists who consider magazines little more than justified text on tree bark.
In a world where the CEO of Amazon can promote the Kindle and the hope of a “paperless society” without destroying his career in bookselling, print magazines such as Landfall and Black Clock inevitably find themselves in the same boat — a beautiful boat, which we’re all proud of and devoted to, but one that consistently faces the challenges of ebooks and an unstable publishing world. It’s heartening to know that in a city over six thousand miles away, a magazine akin to our own continues not only to endure but thrive despite these obstacles.
by Diana Arterian
who is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at CalArts and assists California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes;
her self-published chapbook First Wind is available at Skylight Books
image from Landfall
