Tomato (월간토마토) is a Daejeon cultural and artistic magazine and is celebrating its 15th anniversary. For 15 years, the technology of publishing books continued to evolve. Therefore, monthly tomatoes began publishing their own books last year. Time is to be used as a way of expressing sincerity. If it is handed over to a printing factory, the work that will finish in two days will be printed directly for more than a week, and the paper will be folded and tied into books.
The Tomato office is located in Daejeon Printing Alley. Daejeon Printing Alley, which grew greatly in the past with the creation of Daejeon Station, is still running large printing machines. There lies an office, which introduced a small printing machine to create a factory space where you can make your own books, a working space for writing and editing, and a cafe space where anyone can come and rest comfortably. At the end of each month in the factory space, the machine runs to make a monthly tomato magazine. In the editing space, it covers and organizes local content-oriented books and writings. The cafe space is the space that I paid the most attention to when I created the office. I decorated it hoping that it would be a salon-like space where many local artists and cultural activists gather daily to share their thoughts. Recently, I opened an independent bookstore on the side of a cafe. Good books from local publishers across the country have been selected. It's an open space that can be heard from time to time.
Company work is done in a free environment. As each lifestyle appears as the character of a magazine article, it encourages people to break away from the static and vertical atmosphere and become free and clear in their personal lives. If you have an employee who likes cooking, you can cook and eat in the kitchen of the company's office, and if you want plants, you can make a small garden and grow vegetables. It pursues a work culture that enjoys so that people can connect individual play and learning to work.
Tomato dreamed of an alternative life. Suppose people throw away a lot of garbage in the vacant lot next to the company. In that case, they plant flowers and open a village market so that villagers can meet and enjoy each other. Since it is a village market, I could sell products with money and buy products with persimmons I got from the countryside without taking pictures. There's no natural life, so I'll try many different lives, and this life isn't bad.
The Tomato Literature Award is an extension of this idea. Is it necessary to give literature awards only to large publishers? He steadily hosted the Wolgan Tomato Literature Award, hoping to discover new artists working in the region and create opportunities to continue their activities, and as a result, he opened a book called "The Six Very Natural." It is a collection of works by the Monthly Tomato Literature Prize. Some writers are encouraged by this and are still active.
There is "Daejeonyeojido" as a series that is continuously published. Daejeon was made up of five districts. It is a book about the stories of elders visiting the old villages in each district. The village is disappearing. The speed is getting faster. The work began with the idea that someone should remember the place and the moment if the village disappears someday. Currently, Dong-gu, Jung-gu, Seo-gu, and Yuseong-gu have been completed, and one side of Daedeok-gu is left.
Recently, I have focused more on publishing and have been interested in finding local writers and encouraging local established writers. This is because I think the first way to maintain the local cultural ecosystem is to produce a lot of local content in the region.
For more information: mtomating.tistory.com
