Send to a Friend
			Printer Friendly Format
			Leave Feedback
			Read Feedback
			Nerve RSS

As part of our Ten Years of Nerve retrospective, we bring you a series of interviews with the people who made, and continue to make, the publication happen. Today, current Babble editor Gwynne Watkins talks with co-founder Genevieve Field, who is now an editor at Glamour.

Can you give me the Readers' Digest condensed version of how Nerve came about?

Rufus and I were working together at a small book packager called Cader Books. We fell in love and moved in with each other. As soon as we became a couple, we started talking about Nerve. It was something Rufus had been dreaming about doing for a few years. But his original idea was to do a magazine about sex and death. Luckily that idea got sort of thrown by the wayside. I can't say that I'm the only one who took credit for talking him out of it. If you can imagine anything sort of less commercial than Nerve, that would have been it. So we decided to just go with a smart magazine about sex.

We called it "literate smut" at first. That was sort of a coined phrase. Although we found that a lot of people didn't get it.

How so?

They thought we really meant it was smut. And why did we need to say that it was literate? Wasn't it obviously literature?

What happened then?

Rufus quit his job first. And I moved on to another publishing house. He was always great about finding us money. After he'd found us some seed capital, I quit my job at Melcher Media, and we spent a few months working with Joey Cavella, designing it. Rufus and I wrote letters to every author whose book we'd ever read and loved, telling them what we were doing, and asking them if they'd be interested. The response we got was kind of amazing. It was the perfect moment in time for that kind of response. We were so early into the web that people were curious about it and very into it. Rick Moody. Norman Mailer gave us something at the very beginning.



It was different from what it evolved into. It read like a couple of recent college graduates doing the magazine.

Where They Are Now

Genevieve is now the features director at Glamour and the mom of two little boys. She is a contributing writer at Cookie and edited the anthology Sex and Sensibility: 28 True Romances from the Lives of Single Women.

The articles were extremely long-winded and, in some cases, probably too long for the web. It took us a while to figure out that people weren't interested in reading more than 500 words or so. I think Nerve actually still needs to figure that out, to be honest.



It was very literary, and a lot of people made fun of us for taking ourselves

too seriously. Even though a lot of the stuff was funny-literary, it was still fairly highbrow. We liked it that way, and that gave us some credibility.



The process for the photography was the same. Richard Kern was sort of our poster boy, but we also had Ralph Gibson and Sylvia Plachy, and people who were very established in the fine-art community. As the photo editor, that was the direction I wanted to go. After I left, the site got a lot sexier, I noticed. [laughs] I really like the photography now. It's just a different direction.

What about the launch?

Rufus went on CNN the same day we launched, which was timed conveniently by us. The Communications Decency Act was overruled by the Supreme Court. If this bill had not been struck down, we would not have been able to publish our site at all, and the months of preparation would have been for naught. We were immediately picked up as poster children for the new wave of content on the web, and how a sexual site could be deemed literary instead of just straight porn. Rufus went on The Charlie Rose Show a couple of days after we launched, and we just started getting an incredible amount of attention and traffic.



It was the three of us working: Joey was in his apartment at home in his house, and Rufus and I were in our apartment. We just worked like dogs, all the time. The big joke was that we were supposed to be a young, sexy couple starting this sex magazine, but we never had time to have sex.