Slow-jamming the news with the Rocket Grant-backed journal Civilian

There’s no shortage of media outlets covering the Kansas City area: The Kansas City Star, KCUR 89.3, the Business Journal, four TV stations, hyperlocal operations such as Prairie Village Post and Northeast News, gossipy blogs like Tony’s Kansas City and KC Confidential. The Pitch, of course. But as media fortunes have been reduced by the challenges of monetizing the news in the digital age, what we call the news is often just a bullet list of information presented without much context. We note headlines through the echo chamber of our Twitter and Facebook feeds, maybe hear part of some nightly broadcast. A day later, the stories are mostly gone, set aside for the next round of secondhand talking points. 

After the news is news, though — two months, two years or two decades down the line — it’s part of the community’s history, where it goes begging for context. Big-picture intellectualizing of events as they pass from breaking news to yesterday’s papers to the stuff of our shared history is in short supply these days at the local level. For one thing, there isn’t as much money to pay people to do that kind of reporting and intellectualizing as there used to be.

That’s part of the niche the founders of Civilian, a civic-minded literary journal set for release this week, want to fill. 

“We saw an opportunity to create something that we could publish over a longer period of time than a typical blog or zine or news site,” says editor Kent Szlauderbach. “There’s this 24-hour news cycle, and we thought we could try to slow it down a little.”

Along with Leandra Burnett and Sarah Murphy, Szlauderbach is a founder of Front/Space, a small gallery in the Crossroads District. Szlauderbach is a writer — his byline has appeared in this publication and also on Kill Screen, the video-game site and journal. Murphy is an architectural graduate at BNIM, and Burnett worked until recently for MainCor, the group that aims to revitalize Main Street.

“All our conversations at Front/Space tend to go back to art as it relates to urbanism and community development,” Szlauderbach says. “For us, the context of the art community was sometimes more interesting than the art itself. So we wanted to bring the discussion of the city to the same plane of discussion as the art.”

In March 2013, the Charlotte Street Foundation, where Szlauderbach was a writer-in-residence, awarded him, Burnett and Murphy a $5,200 Rocket Grant based on their proposal to create Civilian. 

“Originally, the plan was to pair an artist or a writer with a community organization, with the idea of them doing a collaboration or research-based work,” Szlauderbach says. “And they’d produce a document for each one — the artist would make something, or the writer would write something. And then, hopefully, we’d figure out a way to distribute it.”

That idea evolved into a publication that would examine the intersection of urban planning, art, architecture and literature in the Kansas City area. Szlauderbach says he was inspired by N+1, the literary and political journal in New York. “I wanted to use their model because it supports pieces about art, literature, reportage, essays and history, in a way where it can all stand alongside each other,” he says, “and other journals and general-interest magazines — Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Baffler, the Oxford American. I like how the [Southern-themed] Oxford American elevates its regionalism to a national discourse. That’s kind of what I wanted to do with Civilian. The themes we cover are not unique to Kansas City. I think we can speak about local topics without alienating readers from other cities.” 

Among the pieces in Civilian‘s 130-page first issue: José Faus traces the collapse of industry in the Historic Northeast’s Sheffield neighborhood; Nathan Clay Barbarick looks at where punk economics, property ownership and the urban core meet; and T.S. Leonard examines proposed redevelopments of long-abandoned West High School, in the gentrifying West Side. (It also features poetry, along with illustrations, a piece of short fiction and some photography.) It’s available for purchase Friday, August 1, at Front/Space’s Civilian launch party (6–9 p.m.) and online at shop.frontspace.info. (It goes for $16.)

After that, Szlauderbach is leaving for New York — he was recently accepted to Columbia University’s MFA program for fiction, and classes start September 1. He says there are more ideas for Civilian stories, but the move has left the journal’s future up in the air.

“We produced this in part to see if the format works,” Szlauderbach says. “Maybe it doesn’t work for this audience. Maybe it works better for a national audience. Can you do a quarterly magazine here that’s, you know, not even necessarily trying to represent a really intellectual discourse but is just at least not being anti-intellectual, that’s having fun with analyzing things in theory and discourse. I think of it as a response to anti-intellectualism.”