Photo By Heather Conley

The Believer: Heidi Julavits discusses her love of lit at UC's Emerging Fiction Writers Festival this week.

Heidi Julavits believes in the written word. As co-editor of the new literary magazine, The Believer, and the writer of two well-received novels, The Mineral Palace and the recently published The Effect of Living Backwards, Julavits' world is one of total literary immersion.

Since debuting in March, The Believer has generated a substantial buzz in literary circles -- and not just because Dave Eggers' McSweeny's is the publisher. The Believer's stark design (few photographs, no advertisements), A-list contributors (Rick Moody, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Lethem) and varied, sometimes esoteric content (a piece on a motel in Vermont?) set it apart.

Then there's the essay. Julavits' piece on the "snarky" state of book reviewing, "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!," drew responses from every corner of the literary landscape, including that bastion of all things relevant, The New York Times.

Speaking by phone from her home in Brooklin, Maine, Julavits' clear, hyper voice is as assured and expressive as you'd expect of someone who claims books as her religion of choice.

CityBeat: Let's start with a very broad question. It's clear you love writing and reading a great deal. Why?

Heidi Julavits: It's what gets me up in the morning. It's what gets me excited, you know? Especially up here in Maine you have these long, full, empty days. You never get bored when you're a writer. I feel like it's one of those ways, especially when you're younger and you have a lot less control over your life, to sort of justify every experience that maybe you didn't want to have. You could say, "Well, maybe this isn't something I want to do, but it might be something I could write about later." It was a way of reconfiguring your whole life so that it felt like it was full of opportunity. And I didn't really grow up with any organized religion so I had to substitute it with something.

CB: What role do books have in our current multimedia culture of the Internet, TV, movies, video games, cell phones and the like?

HJ: The mistake a lot of people make is to assume books are in competition with other forms of media. I would say, yes, they are in competition for people's attention spans, and that there are more and more options out there these days. But I think comparing them and forcing them to kind of compete with each other is a mistake.

CB: Yeah, it seems that is what you're trying to encourage with The Believer -- it's an attempt to create a sort of community.

HJ: Absolutely. As witnessed by the growth of book clubs, for example, there does seem to be a desire for people to have a community through books. That's exactly what we're trying to do with The Believer. So that it's (reading) not, perhaps, this lonely experience that you're having in the vacuum of your room. So that you feel intrinsically that books are connected to all sorts of other aspects of culture, politics, other people, other writers.

CB: One of the things that immediately jumps out about The Believer is the length of the pieces. Why is that so important?

HJ: We really wanted to allow people to talk about books so that you were engaging in a dialogue that wasn't just limited to "This is what this book is about," and one little line of assessment at the end. So that you could actually show a reader, "Oh, OK, here are the issues this book brings up, here are all the other writers who've dealt with this issue, or here is a filmmaker who's dealt with this issue, or here's an artist that deals with this issue." You know, trying to make the experience of reading one that is a lot more interactive and not as isolating.

CB: The other thing that jumps out is that many of the pieces are written in a first-person, conversational tone.

HJ: I like having that sort of sociable tone because it draws people in. The writers I like to work with are the writers who can write about something that I am not personally interested in, but they make me interested in that topic. We've really tried hard to find writers that have that quality.

CB: I'd say you've found them. How have you been able to attract so many talented writers?

HJ: Well, there are a lot of them out there, you know. At first we were scared, like, "Are we going to be able to find enough people to write at this length?" And, amazingly, not only do we not have a shortage, but we now have such a huge backlog of pieces we've edited that we almost need to publish bimonthly to get everyone in the magazine.

CB: Were you surprised by the reaction to your essay?

HJ: Ohhh, yeah (laughs). Every week my mom's like, "Did you see the (New York) Times this weekend?" Yeah, I'm kind of astounded, I have to say. Especially because I thought, and I still think, that it was this incredibly reasonable essay. It seems like, for whatever reason, it touched a particular nerve, and it's still getting battered around one way or another.

CB: It's a good thing. It's getting people talking about books.

HJ: Absolutely.