By Mare Pritchard, OMAHA, Neb. – According to a recent study 223.6 million people are reading magazines. Omaha natives George Stephens and Luke Koester alongside Grace Porter and Justin Cunningham are finding their way in the magazine industry.
The quartet all graduated from University of Nebraska Omaha’s creative writing program. The idea to create a magazine came to fruition at George Stephen’s kitchen table.
“We wanted it to be a Omaha, Nebraska based zine where creatives can send their stuff and know that it will be taken delicately and really looked over and thought about,” said George Stephens, co-founder and creative nonfiction editor.
The biggest motivator behind creating a magazine was creating a space where creatives could share their work. As the tagline goes, ‘showcasing art that is hard to swallow.’
“To me it means something that takes a minute to digest something that you might have to read two or three times to get through something that will like lift the eyebrows up,” said Stephens.
While society is rapidly advancing in the world of digital media, the editors of Gulped Zine wanted to go old school with their magazine. At some point the editors took a book-binding class at UNO and said that that course inspired them to print and hand-bind every issue of their magazine.
“And I think if you do it right print media can be super archival where it’s like we are going to make hopefully a few issues where they are going to be made to last and made with care,” said co-founder and poetry editor Luke Koester, “And if we’re going to ask for work that is going to challenge us and our readers, we want to challenge ourselves to deliver a really good product.”
Gulped Zine plans to launch their first issue in the summer of 2025. The editors say they are looking forward to the first launch and hope to see the magazine continue to grow.
Submissions are being accepted until March 31st. Email submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and visual works to gulpedzine@gmail.com.
Check out the full report by Mare Pritchard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5qebR8zVKE
