Posted on www.philly.com Sun, Feb. 06, 2005

Two happy for words Philadelphia Stories, a fledgling literary magazine, is beginning to fly, thanks to a pair of women who love writing.

By Melissa Dribben
Inquirer Staff Writer

Lipstick-stained pencil nubs. Empty bottles of cheap but sturdy burgundy. Passionate late-night debates about symbolism and plotlines. And somewhere in the teetering pile of dog-eared submissions on the scrubbed pine desk, a short story by a heretofore unknown writer who will become the next Jhumpa Lahiri.

Ah, the glamorous life of Philadelphia's newest literary magazine editors.

In their dreams.

For Carla Spataro and Christine Weiser, the two women who started Philadelphia Stories, a thin but classy little publication of fiction, art and poetry, the work has been a little less romantic. More like a scene out of On the Waterfront than Girl With a Pearl Earring. They have had to scrape up the money to put out the magazine, negotiate deals with advertisers, printers and suppliers, spread the word on the street that they were looking for creative submissions, and attend to all the vital details, from recruiting board members to deciding what kind of typeface to use.

They have savored moments of pinch-me-please triumph. "In April we had our first fund-raiser at Maggiano's, 85 showed up for that. And on Sept. 10, we had our launch party at Brasserie Perrier," Spataro says. "It was quite the swanky shindig. There were 250 RSVPs. I kept looking at Christine and saying, who are these people? Where did they come from? I'm so happy to meet them!"

But they also have had to do a whole lot of drudgery. To cut back on production costs, they switched printers for the second issue, which came out in December. The two had to schlep out to the loading docks in Cinnaminson, pick up 55 back-breaking boxes, and drive miles and hours distributing the magazines to coffee shops, libraries and bookstores.

Weiser was racing to get home before 3 p.m., when her son's day care center closed. "At 2:40 I was still driving to drop off magazines," she says. "I made it by 2:59."

Spataro, 42, was an aspiring opera singer when she moved to Philadelphia in 1988. For several years, she commuted to New York to study with Rita Shane, former soprano with the Metropolitan Opera, and supported herself waitressing (and singing) at Victor Cafe in South Philadelphia."

I loved to sing, but I wasn't getting the chance and I hated auditions," Spataro says. And she had always been torn between her love for writing and her gift for voice. After performing in an unsatisfying national tour of Phantom of the Opera, she abandoned the stage.

For several years in the mid-1990s, she tried a "real job" as assistant director of annual giving for the University of Pennsylvania Law School."

But I felt that if I wanted to write, I had to make a choice." So four years ago, she took a waitressing job at Maggiano's, began seriously working on fiction, and joined the Rittenhouse Writers' Group.

That's where she met Weiser.

Weiser, 39, is publisher of the Convention Center Visitors Guide and the author of four novels, so far unpublished. Growing up in Bucks County, she had been surrounded by writers. Her psychologist father is a poet, her mother a communications director for a church, and together, they had coauthored several self-help books.

Like Spataro, Weiser had been involved in music, playing bass in a band called the Tights.

The two women immediately hit it off. And unlike most of the writers they knew, she says, neither was particularly shy or reticent."

We definitely liked each other's work," says Weiser. "I always thought she was very talented and also an excellent reader."

"The amount of writing she's been able to get done and the number of jobs she's taken on, it's incredible!" says Spataro.

Since then, they have attended the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, comforted one another through the inevitable heartaches that come with the inevitable rejection letters, and encouraged one another to persevere.

In January 2003, Spataro was perusing the Web site maintained by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), looking for a publication that might publish her work. She came across Literal Latte, a literary magazine distributed until recently in coffee shops, and the thought occurred to her that Philadelphia might be ripe for just this kind of journal.

Most cities are.

While many successful literary magazines have been around for decades, they have been proliferating at an unprecedented rate, with more than 1,000 in existence right now, says Jeffrey Lependorf, CLMP's executive director.

Part of the reason may be that the concentration of book publishing in the hands of relatively few companies has created a void, Lependorf says. "Eighty percent of what is published is put out by only six publishing houses." As a result, readers and talented writers whose respective tastes and talents don't fit neatly into commercial or elite literary categories are not finding one another.

When a literary magazine comes along and manages to find its readership, the chemistry can sustain it. What's vital, he says, is to find a bank of loyal subscribers, not necessarily large numbers of them."

A literary magazine is a labor of love. It takes a lot of energy. They're not done as income-producing projects... . Marketing is always the missing link. A lot of good ones come and go."

Of the current thousand, Lependorf predicts that half will be gone within two years. Like restaurants, which must have an identifiable style and appeal, literary magazines must define themselves, he says. And again like restaurants, which must suit the needs of their customers, magazines need to fill a niche for their readers.

When Spataro first approached Weiser with the proposal that they start a literary magazine, she wasn't even sure it was a good idea herself. "I expected rejection," Spataro recalls.

But Weiser leapt.

"Because I had started my own magazine, I knew the business end," Weiser says. She dug out her notes from 1993, when she started the visitors guide and contacted designers and printers.

Spataro, meanwhile, knew how to raise money. When she worked at Victor Cafe, she helped found the Voices for Children Foundation, making Christmas recordings and donating the profits to AIDS research and support services.

At their first fund-raiser, they raised $10,000. In May, they put out the call for submissions. By summer, they had more than 70 short stories, 100 poems, and 20 essays to consider.

"Clearly, we had found a niche," Spataro says.And the magazine's prospects for survival are better than average.

"Many of the most successful literary magazines are region-specific," says Lependorf. So Philadelphia Stories, which selects writers and subjects from the area, has that in its favor. It has also started off with a few attainable, clearly defined goals.

"The first thing we decided was to not publish our own work," Spataro says. Which is critical, agrees Lependorf, to establishing a magazine's credibility. Vanity publications rarely attract a stream of high-quality work from other writers.

The layout had to be inviting, Weiser and Spataro decided. "We wanted enough white space so that people who had never read a poem would not be intimidated," Weiser says. She insisted, too, on four-color separation, a more expensive but higher-quality printing method that would give the magazine a sharp look.

Coffee shops including the Last Drop in Society Hill and Mugshots in Fairmount are carrying the magazine, which is free to the public. So are Borders bookshops, dozens of branches of the Philadelphia Free Library, and cafes from Bucks County to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Spataro and Weiser are arranging writing workshops, concerts and numerous readings in the area. At one event the magazine organized, well-established author Ken Kalfus read from his recent work. Lisa Scottoline and Jennifer Weiner have appeared in the magazine's "local author profile" feature. And restaurants including Maggiano's, Le Bec-Fin and Monk's Cafe have lent their support.

"Philadelphia Stories came along at the perfect time," says Patrick Madden, a stay-at-home dad from Erdenheim whose peak literary accomplishment until recently was a handwritten rejection (that was nonetheless very encouraging) from the New Yorker. He has since written the short story "Obliviosity," a semiautobiographical tale about a father's sweet but realistically trying relationship with his autistic son.

The story was rejected the first time he submitted it to Philadelphia Stories, Spataro says, but she read it carefully, with the respect she says she would like her own work to be given, and made suggestions. Madden took her advice. The fine result appears on Page 14 of the winter issue.

As they prepare for their third issue, 10,000 copies of which will come out this spring, Spataro and Weiser say the quality of submissions continually improves. And while they can't say how long the enterprise may last, they both feel that their own writing is getting better as they learn from the stories they're editing about what works and what doesn't.

Spataro finishes her lukewarm cup of coffee, leaving no trace of lipstick. Weiser excuses herself to get to a meeting for the Visitors Guide. The afternoon presses upon them with the soft, insistent weight of the uncertain future.

The unspoken question lingers. Isn't it inspiring what two ambitious friends can accomplish?

'Tis.

Contact staff writer Melissa Dribben at 215-854-2590 or mdribben@phillynews.com.

A collection that loves you back

The tales within the quarterly's pages are sensual, savage, and funny - not unlike this city itself.
Full Review
by Susan Balée
Philadelphia Inquirer
June 10, 2007

The new The Best of Philadelphia Stories, collecting highlights from the magazine's first three years, has some impressive heft to it. It's also a good chance to appreciate just how much good stuff they've been giving away all this time.

—Patrick Rapa
City Paper 5/17/07

Carla Spataro, Editor of Philadelphia Stories,was on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane Thursday, July 12, 2007. Listen in RealAudio from the archives at whyy.org.

Philadelphia Stories at the
Kelly Writers House
October 30, 2006
Hear the whole show

See a Weekly Press video interview with Carla Spataro and Christine Weiser at Philly1.com.
video link