Outside Providence 3rd bed, a Lincoln-based literary journal, seeks to expand the definitions of realism while remaining solvent and building its following BY TIM LEHNERT

LINCOLN, RHODE ISLAND — home to the Lincoln Park dog track, the 17th-century Eleazer Arnold house, and the Lincoln Mall, among other attractions — might seem a strange place to base an absurdist literary journal. But then again, why not? Given 3rd bed’s tendency toward the quixotic, the unexpected, and the unexplained, Lincoln is as good a headquarters as any. The journal is housed in a converted 19th-century schoolhouse, which in a previous incarnation was a tavern, and doubles as living quarters for its editor.

The Lincoln-based periodical is one of thousands of "little magazines" in North America. The universe of literary journals includes such established publications as the Paris Review, Ploughshares, and the Threepenny Review, successful newcomers like McSweeney’s, and a raft of smaller print and online-only ventures, some of which exist for only a few issues before disappearing. Journals like 3rd bed exist at the margins of a media culture that celebrates spectacle, celebrity, units sold, and profits grossed. As such, 3rd bed and its editor, Vincent Standley, must confront problems common to small presses: maintaining financial solvency, developing and sustaining a readership without diluting artistic standards, and seeking excellence without fostering elitism. Another difficulty for the editors surely is existential: Why bother? Why publish a nonprofit magazine that relatively few people read or even understand?

3rd bed (www.3rdbed.com) was founded in 1998 at Syracuse University. MFA graduates Standley, M.T. Anderson, and James Wagner, along with Syracuse writing program director Christopher Kennedy, decided to put together their vision of the ideal literary magazine — the kind of journal they would like to read and publish their work. When Wagner and Kennedy dropped out after the first issue, Standley and Anderson assumed their respective ongoing roles as editor and fiction editor.

Growing from a first issue with 73 pages and a gray cover, 3rd bed’s ninth edition, published in late 2003, numbered 268 pages and featured a full color reproduction of a painting by Alexandre Lobanov. Lobanov (1926-2003), a deaf and dumb Soviet folk artist consigned to a mental institution for 50 years, produced detailed self-portraits, many of which depict him holding a rifle while standing against a backdrop of trees and birds. 3rd bed, whose 10th issue is due in late June, is a handsome publication, the size and heft of a trade paperback, with an elegant front marred only slightly by a bar code (required by one of the magazine’s distributors) at the bottom left. It’s surprising that a low-budget journal (circulation 1500) can look this good.

While hardly mainstream, 3rd bed is no longer underground, and it has become prominent enough that contributors include several heavyweights in the world of experimental writing. Robert Coover, the postmodern electronic writing guru at Brown University, Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun (author of more than 30 widely translated volumes), short fiction author Diane Williams, and poet Michael Burkard have all published in the journal’s pages. Standley used to have to personally put the magazine into readers’ hands, but the journal is now available nationwide. The Brown University Bookstore is the largest single seller, but 3rd bed also sells well at Quimby’s in Chicago and Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, and about half of its sales are in the New York area.

As 3rd bed has expanded, its presence has grown beyond a twice-yearly publication schedule. In addition to its inventive Web presence — complete with pulsating type — the periodical has published three books, including two cult classics, Gary Lutz’s Stories In the Worst Way (2002), and David Ohle’s Motorman (2004), books that had gone out of print in hardcover and were reissued by 3rd bed in paperback. Several 3rd bed readings and performances have also been staged at AS220, the nonprofit arts space in downtown Providence.

Fiction editor M.T. Anderson is responsible for the name 3rd bed, which, Standley says, represents, "a fuck you to Plato." The Greek philosopher posited three kinds of bed: the first is the ultimate as conceived by God — the bed in its transcendent or ideal form. The second is the bed as crafted by the carpenter; a useful imitation of the perfect bed. The third form, as depicted by the artist, is the lowest. Plato holds that such a representation of the bed is essentially corrupt, limited and unnecessary, and the artist little more than a liar. The first issue of 3rd bed featured an epigraph quoting Plato on this notion of the hierarchy of beds, and followed it with quotations from Laurence Sterne’s 1768 comic travelogue/novel A Sentimental Journey, and finally, from Goldilocks: "This bed’s just right."

This opening set the tone for the entire 3rd bed enterprise: a journal with serious ambitions, although one leavened with humor and eccentricity.

3RD BED’S SIX PRINCIPALS are a geographically dispersed group. Editor Vincent Standley, 37, grew up in Bellingham, Washington, 20 miles from the Canadian border. In addition to an MFA from Syracuse, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, Standley has an MA from Boston University in editorial studies. He looks the part of the Pacific Northwest artist, sporting thrift store clothes and driving a white van to haul issues of 3rd bed, as well two huge dogs, a Shepherd and Shepherd-Malamute mix. Standley, who is not paid for his 3rd bed duties, supports himself by freelancing for the Green Guide, a health and environmental publication, and Barnes and Noble Publishing. One of his Barnes and Noble gigs involves writing 40-word captions for bird calendars.

Although he has little affinity for his suburban-rustic surroundings, Standley moved to Lincoln because he needed an affordable place that could accommodate his canines. He left his previous home in a dilapidated Central Falls mill building because of a lack of garbage pickup and heat after 5 p.m. Despite having lived in Lincoln for almost two years, Standley was unaware that he was only minutes from the Lincoln Park dog track until I informed him of such.

Ying to Standley’s yang is Boston-based fiction editor M.T. Anderson. Standley and Anderson are in perfect agreement on the 3rd bed aesthetic and mission, but differ on most else. According to Standley, Anderson was "the only guy in Los Angeles in tweed" during the latter’s brief time in California, and "was so preppie he left Harvard to go to Cambridge [England]." I haven’t myself seen Anderson, 35, but can say from a phone conversation that he is one of those rare individuals whose speech is like good writing — precise and elegant, rather than filled with banal "ya-knows," "likes," and other verbal fillers. Anderson, the author of several award winning children’s and young adult books, including Feed (Walker Books 2003), a speculative novel for teens in which TVs and computers are implanted in people’s brains, teaches in the MFA program in children’s writing at Vermont College. Joining him in culling through fiction submissions is associate fiction editor Popahna "Poppy" Brandes, 32, the most recent addition to the 3rd bed staff. A 2002 graduate of Brown’s MFA program, Brandes is also an accomplished cellist, an exponent of what she terms "chamber noir," who has played and recorded with a number of groups. Artist Tom Davis provides illustrations and reviews comix submissions.

The other half of the 3rd bed masthead is in New York. Poetry editor Hermine Meinhard, a self-described "woman of a certain age," is author of the forthcoming book of verse, Bright Turquoise Umbrella (Tupelo Press, 2004). Meinhard is an administrator at Lincoln Center and teaches poetry in NYU’s McGhee Division and at New York’s Jewish Community Center. She was initially a contributor to 3rd bed (issue 2), and was invited by Standley to become poetry editor. Meinhard subsequently recruited fellow New York poet Andrea Baker to share the load, the latter joining 3rd bed as associate poetry editor for issue 5 in 2001. The final New York member of the editorial team is Web and art director Paul McRandle, 38, a writer and editor who has known Standley since middle school. Kirstin Fenn Chappell works with McRandle on web and cover designer.

3rd bed is hardly a Rhode Island institution. Not only are its editors scattered about the Northeast, but since the journal’s inception in 1998, Standley and 3rd bed’s official base has moved from Syracuse to Seattle, Boston, Central Falls, and finally, Lincoln. Standley is currently threatening to decamp to Canada (particularly if the current president is reelected), the West Coast, or Western Massachusetts, although odds are he will stay in New England in deference to Anderson, who recently purchased digs in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, an examination of 3rd bed fails to uncover any discernible southern New England or Rhode Island influence, and Standley suggests that the 3rd bed is in no way a regional publication. Anderson does note, however, that the rich experimental tradition of Brown’s MFA program has been an important source of local contributors and readers.