On January 14, 2022, Sole Magazine published its first piece. Since then, we have posted 35 creative nonfiction essays, ranging from humorous listicles to in-depth journalism to personal narratives. Beginning with seven members of Professor Jon Readey’s Travel Writing class, we’ve acquired an illustration team, gathered a devoted audience slightly more numerous than just our mothers, and are planning to launch a new website and a print issue in the coming months. In other words, we’ve learned to tie our shoes and are now praying they stay knotted.
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In the week leading up to Christmas in 2021, I opened a page on my Notes app and started brainstorming.
There were 30 potential names for Brown’s new creative nonfiction publication by the time I gave up. Reading them over now, I see most were nauseating.
There was the corporate “Van Wickle Magazine,” the pretentious “Ellipsis,” the corny “Brown Paper Mag,” and the wtf-was-I-thinking “Sundry.” And then came “Sole.”
If you haven’t heard our spiel yet, “Sole” came from the term “shoe leather journalism.” It’s a phrase associated with the reporter you imagine in black-and-white who has a cigarette and an old-timey hat and a notepad that opens vertically. It means reporting that involves walking from source to source, from scene to scene, observing things and speaking to people, and in doing so, wearing down your shoe leather.
Creative nonfiction extends far beyond journalism (although see Emma Madgic’s profile on the artist and activist Leonard Jefferson for some extensive reporting), but the principle of building a piece of writing on real life experience is central to our mission. Everybody has gone places and done things and met other people and lost other people and developed weird interests and chuckled and cringed and sobbed. We have broken in our metaphorical soles, and to some degree, I suppose, also our souls.
Because of that, we all have stories to tell. Over this past year, Tevah Gevelber examined the Haven Brothers Diner food truck as a place of cultural exchange in Providence’s downtown, Lily Lustig recounted the seven years she spent learning to put in contact lenses, and Deeya Prakash told us what it’s like to walk through a revolving door and through tragedy.
We’re grateful to all those who shared stories with us, and if you haven’t yet, please do! Go someplace cool and write about it, or go someplace boring and write about it. Either way, your shoes will get worn and our illustrators will draw something pretty.
And to those who supplied our 95 followers on Instagram, the 30 website views from India (and 19 from South Korea!), and the clicks that finally made us the top result on the Google search “sole magazine,” we want to thank you for reading—from the bottom of our soles.
Sole Magazine