SUBMISSIONS

Inside/Outside Southwest magazine, est. 1998, is a free, alternative magazine speaking to the entire Four Corners area — from Durango to Taos, Santa Fe to Sedona, Albuquerque to Flagstaff and Moab to Telluride (See below, “Our Region”). “A local’s guide to what’s really up in the Four Corners,” Inside/Outside Southwest is a lifestyle magazine with a strong emphasis on the outdoors, recreation and culture whose writing strives to capture the interests, issues, characters, concerns, humor, and literary voices of this unique place, and it does that with a perspective that the region's mainstream media cannot. Each issue contains high-quality features and sidebars, as well as an assortment of columns, photographs, artwork, and reviews of upcoming events.

MISSION STATEMENT: To inform and entertain the people who live in, play in and travel to the Southwest by addressing the interests, issues, characters, concerns and literary voices of this region.

How to submit:

Inside/Outside Southwest is 90 percent freelance written. 45,000 - 60,000 copies each issue. Pays one month after publication. 

Features and essays pay up to 10 cents per word; $25 - $50 for reprints. Lengths range from 1,000 to 3,000 words, and we accept only high-quality pieces. Queries by e-mail are preferred, but unsolicited features and essays are welcome on spec; include a SASE with adequate postage if you want the manuscript returned. We usually respond within two months; response not guaranteed without a SASE.

Shorter pieces pay $10 - $60, depending upon length and editing needs. Lengths vary from 200 to 1,500 words. Query by e-mail first. We usually respond within two months; response to mailed queries not guaranteed without a SASE.

Fiction has limited space but will be considered. We run a limited amount of poetry, and we pay $10 per poem.

Photos: Pay depends on usage. Digital submissions preferred. 35 mm, 2 1/4, 4 X 5 transparencies and some prints accepted. High-quality B&W considered. Cannot accept ASMP terms and conditions. Call or query first; we will not accept or be responsible for unsolicited photos or artwork. Submissions will not be returned without a SASE. Query with business card, promo sheets or cards and list of publication credits. Include a SASE. We are also interested in photo and fine-art essays.

Tips: Read the publication, know it — then query. We seek to establish a core-group of reliable, quality writers from around the region, so good work may well lead to a regular relationship. We encourage pieces with a personal and creative voice and also pieces with a journalistic style where appropriate, so experiment. We also place a premium on tight, concise, informative writing that requires little editing. Always write from a regional rather than local perspective. The bottom line: We are open to ideas; try us.

Query or send to:

Inside/Outside Southwest magazine

Editor

Attn: Jan Nesset

PO Box Drawer A

Durango, CO 81302

 

(970) 375-4538

E-mail:  editor@insideoutsidemag.com

2008 CONTRIBUTOR DEADLINES

 

Issue                                       Deadline

January/February                      Nov. 16, 2007

Feb/March                               Jan. 4, 2008

April/May                                 Feb. 22

June/July                                   April 11

August/September                    June 6

September/October                  July 25

November/December               September 12

(*)January/February 2009        November 7

* tentative

 

OUR REGION

We're Four Corners, Exactly Thereabouts

 

Inside/Outside Southwest magazine provides outdoor, recreation and culture coverage of the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It’s the region in which we live. It’s a wild, wonderful, glorious place and we love covering it. But where, exactly, are the boundaries of the “Four Corners region of the Southwest”? It’s a question students ask when I speak in a classroom. It’s a topic of discussion around a campfire. It is a good question.
Our staff defines the boundaries of the vast Four Corners’ playground rather broadly along fat, undulating lines that stretch between the communities of Green River, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Taos, Pagosa Springs, Silverton and Telluride, with the epicenter located at the actual meeting point of our four states. But our actual coverage area is even broader than that. We’re not opposed to covering topics about nearby (outside) places of interest, preferably to points that do not stretch too far beyond the boundaries a single tank of gas. For examples, we’re prone to using Escalante National Monument, Great Sand Dunes National Park, the Grand Canyon, Fruita mountain biking trails and Gallup, NM, all destinations beyond our described boundary. The places make sense to us to cover because our residents are interested in them, we do travel to them, and as such we cannot overlook them.
But our publication is Inside/Outside Southwest magazine, not Inside/Outside Four Corners magazine, so where are we now? Hangin’ loose, that’s where. Among other interesting descriptions, the Southwest has been described as the area between Durango, Colo., to Durango, Mexico, and from Las Vegas, Nev., to Las Vegas, NM. In a past issue, we all but stepped over this line. We went to Nacapule Canyon, Mexico, where an author found a bit of paradise to share. We took the big step south of our range because it’s where many road trip-lovin’ Southwesterners turn when the weather turns cold. Our coverage probably won’t make a habit of road trippin’ to Mexico, but we’ll see.

 

— Jan Nesset

 

The Way It Was:

A brief personal history from the (former) Editor

Publications, like wars, are sacred causes.

— Charles Bowden

In the summer of 1998, I was approached by two men who had a business idea: a free, alternative magazine for the Four Corners. They sought my thoughts because — or maybe despite — I already had been failing at something similar for several years.

Since 1993, some friends and I had been publishing the San Juan Almanac, which we smugly tagged, “Your cattleguard on the information superhighway.” In that guerilla spirit, we did our journalistic dirty work in my house on a budget drawn mostly from handouts, a few kind benefactors, and change found under sofa cushions. After five years, we decided we had done our karmic duty to the literary culture of the Four Corners, and accepted the fact we were as much businessmen as the Bureau of Reclamation are conservationists. We, though, knew when to quit.

Regardless, Phil Lauro and Daniel Esper thought I could offer some useful insights when they sought to launch Inside/Outside Southwest, which they envisioned as a journal of entertainment, culture and recreation bonding the entire Four Corners area. Business-wise, all I could do was giggle. But they had start-up money, by gods! So, I offered to write stories, do some editing, and contact writers I knew from the Almanac days.

Six months later, my dream of a regional publication, like Jason, like the Colorado Rockies, like Al Gore, was somehow alive again after logic, experience, and common sense insisted otherwise. I did some editing and wrote the lead feature for the premier issue — a brilliant intimate literary portrait of the reclusive Stone-Age hunter and author David Petersen — which then led to my taking a fifty percent cut in salary from my “real job” to become Inside Outside Southwest’s first Managing Editor. Dreams are cheap, but following them isn’t.

Underway, we settled into the restored principal’s office in the former Smiley Middle School building, in downtown Durango. His partner already had fled, so Phil sat behind a big desk playing Publisher (think: “Rosebud …”); I wrote, edited, planned issues, and lined-up writers; and the genius Todd Thompson was brought on board as art director. We had computers, space, views, some money to work with, and a refrigerator stocked with an endless supply of Ska Brewery beer (keep it local!). So began the glory days.

Mostly it’s a blur. Putting out a magazine, especially a start-up publication, is like rowing into a steady headwind in low financial flows. But we made it, for a while, and, I like to think, with style – subtly subversive and vocally local. Each of our issues was chock-full of well-written stories (partly to take up the space where the ads should have been) by both local and nationally renown writers. And, thanks to Todd’s dedication and skill, our pages looked as good or better than many “glossy” publications.

We had our moments. We scored exclusives with some big-name writers, including John Nichols — who premiered a chapter of a new novel in our pages — Ed Quillen, Will Hobbs, and the aforementioned David Petersen. We enlisted a few outstanding columnists — Art Goodtimes, Rob Schultheis, and David Feela (a holdover from the Almanac who still writes in Inside/Outside Southwest). We had some fun provoking our new readership: Shultheis’s “Moron of the Mountains” column drew raging hate (and love) mail; and if that didn’t, Phil’s many pseudonyms under which he wrote stories and letters (Victor Lazlo, Artimus Vark, et al.) did. We even had a special “Edward Abbey” issue that garnered national attention, sporting a cover drawn by artist Bryan Peterson and featuring a “lost” Abbey short story that no one, not even Abbey’s wife, had seen since the mid-1950s.

Mostly, though, I remember just doing the magazine. Late nights (and early mornings) poring over paste-ups and tinkering with layouts with Todd while chipping away at those six packs of Ska  . . . breaks out on the roof of the Smiley Building, overlooking downtown Durango . . . day-time breaks tossing a Frisbee on Third Avenue . . . and quick breaks sitting in the hallway watching the participants arrive for the dance class in the room next door. And we always looked forward with great anticipation to the crazy “issue release” parties Phil would throw at local bars to stir up interest in the magazine. And the wacky visitors alternative magazines attract  . . . whew.

But, as happens to most start-ups, after a year and a half of glory days, the headwinds finally outstripped our ability to row toward financial security. Fortunately, though, for Inside/Outside Southwest — and for readers in the Four Corners — there’s a happy ending to this story. In 2000, Phil sold out to The Durango Herald, and Inside/Outside Southwest was, like Jason, the Rockies, and Nobel-prizing-winning Gore (!), given a new life. And that life, under the steady hands of its later editors — Pete Pendegrast, and now Jan Nesset — is still beating, and growing stronger.

Long live crazy dreams.

 

— Ken Wright