News from Nowhere

Porter Fox has published two essays in the Believer: “The Long Good-Bye Man,” on the “abstract-expressionist fiction writer” Fielding Dawson, and “The Last Stand of Free Town,”  a dispatch from the tiny sovereign community of Christiania, in Copenhagen, which was included in Best American Travel Writing 2011. Fox is the editor of Nowhere, a digital arts and travel magazine that’s recently undergone a significant revamping. We wrote to Porter for more details on his project.

—Andrew Leland

Who are you?

I am the great great great great grandson of General George Meade, who lead the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Gettysburg. I am also the man who picked up a perfectly good loaf of bread from the top of a trashcan outside a bakery in Brooklyn last night and brought it home.

 What is Nowhere?

It is an imagined depot for stories from the road. Which is to say it is a digital magazine of literary travel writing, photography and art. We publish journals, sketches, fiction, creative nonfiction, audio, video and visual art in addition to traditional travel stories. We illustrate stories with found objects, knickknacks and bric-a-brac brought home from the trip. We were a web site for the last three years. In November we relaunched as a tablet magazine for e-readers and computers with all the multi-media bells and whistles that come with that.

Where is Nowhere?

nowheremag.com. And in an 1869 warehouse built by William Beard in Red Hook – or “Roode Hoek” as the Dutch named it – Brooklyn, overlooking New York Harbor, the Gowanus Canal and the New York Ferry terminal… Our office building is the brick one that CNN showed a million times submerged under six feet of East River water during Hurricane Sandy. (We’re on the fourth floor; we were spared.)

What’s new with Nowhere?

New writers, designers, editors, video and audio engineers, programmers, photographers, artists, musicians, bookkeepers and creators of all kinds who are interested in making something different from what is out there. Digital publishing has leveled the playing field for startup magazines. We can make and distribute a great read for little to no overhead. All it takes is an incredible amount of work.

Why are you making Nowhere?

Because we got tired of everything else. And we travel quite a bit and wanted a place to read and tell stories about how places actually are. Not how fancy travelers wish they would be. (More like home.) We also missed the old tradition of travel writing in magazines like Holiday, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, by novelists, poets and creative...