Southern Comfort

Brandweek, Oct 23, 2000 by ALEX McRAE

With John Grisham providing cash and copy, Oxford American hopes to become the region's answer to The New Yorker

After spending most of his young life in the literary trade, no one was more surprised than Marc Smirnoff when he found his personal epiphany not on a bookshelf but at the ballot box. In 1987, the 24-year-old Smirnoff was selling books in Marin County, Calif., that New Age never-never land on the north shore of the San Francisco Bay, when a light bulb blinked in his head.

"One day I looked around and I realized those people had once voted for Gore Vidal for governor," he says. "I knew that wasn't exactly reflective of America."

Smirnoff emptied his savings account, packed his bags and headed out in search of the real world.

Less than two months into a planned six-month odyssey, Smirnoff's aging BMW gave up the ghost in Oxford, Miss. The young Californian, who had been looking for a "different kind of place," found himself stranded in the center of a cultural crescent anchored at either end by Tupelo and Graceland, where Elvis drew his first and last breaths.

It was about as far from the New Age glitz of Marin County as one could get, and there was something about Oxford that appealed to Smirnoff: a literary heritage so firmly entrenched that even the McDonald's on University Avenue is plastered with posters of William Faulkner.

With funds dwindling and car-repair bills mounting, Smirnoff walked into Oxford's venerable literary emporium, Square Books, and asked for a job. When he was told he couldn't start for six months, Smirnoff holed up 30 miles down the road in Holly Springs. "I couldn't even get hired at fast-food places," he says. "So I just read everything I could get my hands on."

By the time he started working at Square Books, Smirnoff, a literary and magazine junkie, realized something was missing from the local reading mix: a periodical devoted exclusively to the South's unique literary tradition.

"A few had come and gone," Smirnoff says, "but at the time, there was nothing out there. I thought it was outrageous that if a good Southern writer wanted to get a piece in a decent magazine, they had to send it to New York. Then this idea began to form...."

Smirnoff shared his idea for what is now billed as The Southern Magazine of Good Writing with some of his bookstore regulars, who at the time included such Southern literary heavyweights as Willie Morris, who was living in Oxford at the time, Hal Crowther and Larry Brown. There was also a young lawyer turned author named John Grisham. With their encouragement, Smirnoff kept tinkering with the idea, but with no publishing experience, it was slow going. "I knew in my heart it would work, but it was overwhelming," he says. "I was totally unprepared."

It took five years to make his idea a reality, but by 1992, Smirnoff had begged or borrowed the $12,000 needed to publish the first edition of the Oxford American. All he lacked was material, so he sent letters to his favorite authors, asking for submissions-and offering a pay check of $35 per article.

The first response floored him. Not because it was a poem about a bowel movement--which it was--but because its author was John Updike. As Smirnoff sits in his small, cluttered office behind a 1925 Underwood typewriter that rests atop a battered desk of similar vintage, his eyes still brighten when he remembers that day.

"After that, I knew it was going to work," he says. "I knew there wasn't a writer in America that wouldn't want to appear in a magazine that had published an Updike masterpiece." Other big-name offerings did follow, including an essay from William F. Buckley and a piece by John Grisham, by then a publishing megastar.

Less than half the original press run of 8,000 sold. The rest Smirnoff peddled at bookstores and newsstands a copy at a time. Subscriptions began to trickle in, but it still took him six months to scrape up enough cash to publish a second volume of what had been promoted as a quarterly magazine.

Oxford American then limped along for two years, publishing whenever funds allowed. In 1994, with seven months elapsed since its last printing, the magazine was at death's door when an old friend came calling. John Grisham had heard the magazine was in trouble, and he offered to invest. Smirnoff made Grisham publisher and co-owner.

With Grisham's financial support, the magazine adopted a bimonthly schedule. Oxford American tightened its Southern focus, and artwork was increased and improved. Paid circulation rose steadily, and ad revenues started trickling in--albeit slowly.

Subtle changes were made in content. Smirnoff still believed his readers wanted their literature like their sour mash--straight up, no chaser--but the book added new sections on travel and music (though even the lighter stories were done by Southern authors of some heft).

But even as the magazine garnered critical acclaim--its 1998 Southern Music Issue received a National Magazine Award for best single-topic issue, a tremendous breakthrough for such a small title--it continued to lose money. "Without John, we would have died eight or nine painful deaths," Smirnoff admits.