Edgar Allan Poe was notorious for bad luck and worse decision-making, but leaving Philadelphia to start a literary magazine in New York City might have been his biggest doozy. The City of Brotherly Love was, back then in the 1840s, an epicenter of American literature, thanks to its many publishing companies and magazines.

And Poe was already a published and noteworthy author — if also an impoverished drunk — with an adoring wife/cousin Virginia, a loyal cat Catterina and cozy little fixer-upper on North Seventh Street. He'd already worked as an assistant on somebody else's litmag, so he had experience.

But off he went to the Big Apple to look for financial backers for his own jawn. On those rare moments when he looked on the bright side of things, Poe probably figured he was due for a windfall.

web feat: Ducky editors Dennis DiClaudio (left) and Tom Hartman savor their online cachet. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Sadly, like so many chorus girls and indie rock bands since, Poe's life turned to crap the moment he moved to New York City. Five years later, Virginia was dead of pneumonia, Poe was dead of madness and addiction, and Catterina was probably entombed behind the drywall of an overpriced loft in the Village. (Just a guess.) His literary magazine never put out an issue. "All in all," observes USHistory.org gleefully, "he should have stayed in Philadelphia."

Which is not to say this is an easy town to run a literary magazine in. For each success story — we had one of the first, Literary Miscellany (in 1795), and one of the most influential, Lippincott's Magazine (in 1868) — there are a thousand failed vanity projects and well-meaning go-nowhere zines. Meanwhile New York has had its share of literary high points in the one and a half centuries since Poe discovered he couldn't make it there. These days it's home to literary-minded publications both large (n+1) and small (Pindeldyboz) — and it shows in the unnatural number of short stories set in charming-but-tough Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Here in modern-day Philly, where the infrastructure is grassroots and only Lippincott's medical publishing houses remain, litmags have a tougher time catching on or getting noticed. And none of them even humor the idea of turning a profit.

"Small press journals are labors of love and grit," says Peter Krok, editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, a twice-yearly publisher of prose, poetry and essays with a local bent. When the magazine started in the mid-'90s, founder Jim Marinell hoped making it available in local bookshops would help to turn the fledgling publication into a financially solvent business.

Turns out patrons and volunteers are what keep such independent enterprises afloat. "There are some sales, particularly when an issue is first released, but the sales are a minor factor in the settling of costs," explains Krok.

But still, in its own way, SVJ thrives, even following Marinell's death in 2001. With Krok at the helm the staff has expanded and is looking into small steps toward upping its profile (like adding bar codes and a Web site). The issues are professionally, if simply presented, and the area has proven itself to be rich with writing talent. "As the saying goes, there are more writers than readers," says Krok.

Where SVJ is making a go at the traditional literary magazine, other litmags have embraced the paper-free alternative. Ducky, a Web-based biannual, may be beyond even Poe's formidable imagination, but its goals are the same: the publication of original poetry and prose.

"We like publishing online — prefer it, in fact," says fiction editor Dennis DiClaudio. Of course the overhead is low compared to a printed publication, and the potential readership isn't limited to a finite number of copies, but it's the interactivity that excites the five-person staff at Ducky. "They're searchable from Google. Authors can link to them on their Web sites and e-mail links to anybody that they'd like to send it to. Readers can link to our stories from their blogs," says DiClaudio. "There is a certain something to holding a book or a story in your hand, and you lose that in online publishing. But, for our purposes, the positives outweigh the negatives." Still, he says, don't be surprised if Ducky puts together a print compendium at some point.

Ducky poetry editors Scott Edward Anderson and Tom Hartman were senior editors at Painted Bride Quarterly when that esteemed but beleaguered Philadelphia litmag was reincarnated as a Web-only, Rutgers-based publication in the late '90s. "We didn't give a shit about how the lit establishment at the time was pooh-poohing the Web," says Hartman. "The Web made so much sense for literary content, the primary customers of which — students, underpaid humanities professors, struggling artists of all stripes — can hardly afford the cover price of the various print mags, none of which, I would argue, is having the impact on contemporary writing that the leading online mags are having." When an editor from PBQ's print days returned, creative differences arose and Hartman and Anderson left to start their own site.

A downloadable music "mix tape," curated by Hartman, accompanies each issue of Ducky. "While I have the pulpit, I'd like to say that I think that the next generation of litmag will probably turn out to be a combination of blog and podcast portal."

"As corny as this sounds, I suspect that one day people will look back and think of this as a sort of Internet renaissance for writing," says DiClaudio, who is himself an author of The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have, due out this November from Bloomsbury. "I think that a collection of writers will emerge from the online world, and it will be because of what's currently happening. What we have right now is a young, excited, impressionable writing community that is not confined to one city. So, people from all over the world, people who, only a few years ago, would never have even met, are forming friendships and alliances and supporting one another's growth. If that renaissance does happen, it will make me happy to have been a small part of it."