Dushko Petrovich, a founding editor of n+1’s erratically released art journal Paper Monument, has a new publishing venture called Adjunct Commuter Weekly. He announced the publication’s existence in a video on a Kickstarter page to help raise funds to cover production, in which he describes Adjunct Commuter Weekly as a lifestyle magazine featuring “news, opinion, interviews, features, recipes, syllabi, poetry, fiction, personal memoir, and advertisements for products that will be of interest to the adjunct commuter.” (The video is shot with Petrovich behind the wheel of a car: “I’m talking to you today from the offices of Adjunct Commuter Weekly on I-87 South,” he says.) The idea struck him when a fellow part-time academic instructor told him a joke that “the new Cedar Tavern,” referring to the legendary hangout for Abstract Expressionist artists, “was the bar car of Amtrak.”
“Doing this kind of teaching,” Petrovich said over the phone from the Yaddo artists’ retreat, “one hears about other people doing it because they need a ride or you find out that you and your friend both teach in this other city on the same day. So you start–or at least I start–to imagine this community of people sort of moving around, especially in the Northeast.”
Petrovich said he’d been adjuncting for about eight years, and adjunct commuting for five. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and teaches classes in New Haven, Providence, and Boston–“the commuter triangle,” as he put it. The magazine’s first issue will be released on July 30 at an event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It’s 20 pages and is modeled off of a “local news tabloid format,” Petrovich said.
Included in the issue is an interview with Sam Messer, “a super-commuter” who travelled from L.A. to Yale for an adjunct job; a recipe column for the academic on the go by filmmaker Charlotte Glynn, who offers a self-contained day of nutrients in a mason jar that’s layered with breakfast on top, lunch in the middle, and dinner on the bottom, “a good way to have all of your daily protein in one super disgusting vessel,” Petrovich said; an audiobook review, with suggestions for audiobooks to listen to in a variety of different travel formats (train, bus, etc.); visuals by Ted Mineo, Elaine Tin Nyo, and Tom McGlynn; and an open letter from artist and teacher Justin Lieberman to his students with whom he makes art with in an organization called the Student Art Collective (“Our insistence upon the re-instatement of oedipal relations in art education was only our first salvo, designed to confuse and disorient our enemy,” he writes).
Adjunct Commuter Weekly is part of an “enterprise of magazines” that Petrovich is releasing under the umbrella DME, an acronym which he wouldn’t disclose the meaning of. (“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said.) Other publications include Privacy Magazine (“a lifestyle magazine for people interested in privacy”) and Part Ecuadorean. “Because I’m part Ecuadorean,” Petrovich said. “It has a limited print run.”
Petrovich added that adjuncts have a great deal of momentum gathering now around organized labor, citing that Tufts recently voted to unionize, and won increases in pay, and that Petrovich himself voted for Boston University adjuncts to unionize as well. He said this was a “good time” for adjuncts to have a magazine. Asked how earnest the “weekly” description in the title was, and whether he intended to publish issue two on August 6, Petrovich said, “I’m really hopeful that there will be a second issue.”