We have long felt that there was something missing in the world of literary journals and small magazines. There didn’t seem to be a continual discussion about the state of affairs in this avenue of publishing—no reviews of short stories or essays, no commentary about the changing guard at Antioch Review or new formatting at Tin House. Paris Review got—as usual—brief mentions in the mainstream press regarding their recent overhaul, but these comments were brief at best, and not, at least in our humble opinion, long or considered enough writing for such a drastic change to what could be considered one of most important literary foundations in the history of western literature. Luna Park will attempt to fill that void.

There’s no more void. Other sites covering literary magazines, such as Zine-Scene and the impressive Review Review, have emerged. The writers at HTMLGIANT are probably the most prolific commentators on lit mags on the Internet—Roxane Gay has even set up a Literary Magazine Club there—and the blog of New Pages is constantly publishing news of the industry. Newspapers like the LA Times and New York Times seem to be giving increasing attention to the medium. Lit mag websites seem to be more and more talking about one lit mags. There just seems to be more noise. Even though Supreme-Value gave LP a swanky re-design in 2010 and we published great work this past year (such as this and this), I found myself less needing to comment on or solicit commentary on lit mags as I was constantly reading it elsewhere, and overall happy with it.

Beginning this month, Luna Park will no longer continue as website publishing about literary magazines, but will instead transition into a much more static website hosting information about literary magazines. The current blog will still be there, and so, on the face of it, things won’t change that much. I’ve already been doing most of the posting and writing for LP over the past year or so. If anything, there will just be more of this, and more aggregation of what other people are writing about.

Nathan Brown, our intern last year, already began some of the more static changes for the website, building a basic structure LP can use to flesh out the current Directory of literary magazines & sources into a literary magazine encyclopedia. Over the next year(s), I will work to flesh out this encyclopedia, beginning with the help of our current LP intern Sara Adams, as well as the Literary Publishing class at York College of Pennsylvania this coming fall semester. This will no doubt be more Arcades Project than Britannica; fingers are crossed. Submissions are welcome. I hope to have some more news to share on the project in the coming months.

Triple Canopy 14: Counterfactuals

Without a doubt, Triple Canopy is one the most adept publishers at using the Internet as a unique medium with its own rules and possibilities (each issue brings with it an original online reading experience)—and TC also manages to be one of the best avant garde publications running in any medium. Issue 14, their “Counterfactuals” issue, is their self-proclaimed “first literary, or not not literary, issue,” and like most things put out by TC it is a mind bomb. The theme is summed up by Lucy Ives & Co. as “a sensibility both within and without form, genre, medium”—which includes diagram poems, performance pieces, semi-autobiographical surreal theater from Mina Loy, aphorisms from Sam Moyer, anthropology from Tan Lin, and more work way outside the box/screen.

Monkey Business 1

Thanks to the efforts of translator Ted Goossen and the editors of A Public Space, 2011 readers were introduced to the acclaimed Japanese literary magazine Monkey Business, edited by Motoyuki Shibata (curator, along with Roland Kelts, of the Focus: Japan portfolio in APS 1). According to Stuart Dybek’s letter inserted into the issue, “Each year, a magazine of highlights from issues of Monkey Business will appear in English translation via A Public Space…. The first issue features poetry, manga, a wide-ranging, in-depth interview with Haruki Murakami, fiction from Hideo Furukawa, a beautiful sequence of vignettes by Hiromi Kawakami, and much more.” The extensive, 50+ page interview with Murakami by Furukawa is enough in itself to make the issue a must-read. Adding Furukawa’s own story “Monsters,” Yoko Ogawa’s mesmerizing and disturbing “The Tale of the House of Physics,” and a manga comic based on Kafka’s “The Country Doctor,” sends the issue into the stratosphere.

Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita

With TriQuarterly gone from the print world, Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions is probably the biggest doorstop of a literary magazine around, and for good reason. Morrow is one of the best editor/curators of literary magic working in periodicals, and issue 56 of Conjunctions exhibits these talents, offering a kind of literary richness found little elsewhere. The issue reads like walking into a Cirque de Soleil tent, or making a film with Julie Taymor; everything pushes to (sometimes beyond) the edge of the extraordinary. The opening story—Benjamin Hale’s “The Minus World”—explores the lower depths, and sent me enthusiastically back to Mario Bros. video games after a decades-long hiatus, and Charles Bernstein’s manifesto-like “Recalculating” somehow represents both voice and anti-voice, entropy and container. Then there is Susan Steinberg underwater, Kleeman’s “Brief History of Weather,” G.C. Waldrep’s discretions, Coover, Straub, Marche, Swenson… I can honestly say I haven’t read the entire 380-page issue, but neither has it left my desk since it arrived six months ago. I dip in and out, as I would A Thousand Plateaus or The Arcades Project, and, as with those books, am consistently rewarded.

Octopus 14

Certainly there are an increasing number of poetry magazines online, but few of them give such a pleasurable reading experience as Octopus, whose 14th issue is yet again one of the most fascinating collections of verse around. (The reviews in the issue are also fine, and the “Recovery Projects” of older texts very admirable.) The work in this issue almost to a poem seems strikingly in line with the hybrid, rhizomatic poetry described by Swenson/St. John in 2009 (and very influenced by the New York School). But for me, this issue simply contains some of the most engaging, invigorating poetry around—for example. the following excerpt from the long poem, “A Geography of Pleasure,” by Amy King, without a doubt one of the best poems of the year:

…I have never had anything
to say in the face of such prisons. I’m open. My conversation
is a play on the stage of vanity, the who I fuck
and the why I am no boy, how I erase the space
of his mouth’s residence from my skin, how I was never
a room to his marriage plans. I meticulously color out
the ease of nonchalance, the temptation to settle
into permanent housing. Good fences make good cages
and good cages teach patience. Or so the ides of childhood
sell those skeletal portals. I always wanted
escape into dwelling but never held the map’s location.
I beheld the misprints. And ate that choreography…

ZYZZYVA Fall 2011

After threatening to for a couple years, ZYZZYVA founding editor and publisher Howard Junker finally stepped down at the beginning of 2011, handing over the reigns to former managing editor Laura Cogan (Oscar Villalon from McSweeney’s and San Francisco Chronicle took over Cogan’s former position). Issue 92 was Cogan and Villalon’s first issue. Though Junker did so much for West Coast writing and publishing, running an accomplished magazine with one of the most successful literary magazine business models around, with her first two issues in 2011, Cogan has brought out one of the most accomplished literary magazines in content and design I remember seeing in recent years; like a new editor arguably should, Cogan has put her stamp on ZYZZYVA, carrying the magazine to a new level of publishing. Wrapped inside some of some stunning new design work from Three Steps Ahead (I’m a pushover for nice endpapers and french flaps), the issue includes hilarious fiction from Tom Bissell, a band story by Will Boast eerily reminiscent of my time living in NW PDX, alongside more fiction, the usual fine art, and poetry—such as Heather Altfield’s “Houdini at 40″: “There is nothing / that disarms me like milk-cans full of pennies.”

1913: A Journal of Forms 5

Ezra Pound defined lit mags as the home of the avant garde. 1913: A Journal of Forms, published by Sandra & Ben Doller (aka Miller & Doyle), is the journal that seems to be most successfully following that tradition. The magazine is a reading experience, one that admittedly takes time to settle into, time rewarded a hundred times over. (I personally set this no table of contents, no page numbers mass of texts aside for months before reading it.) Intentionally or not, this issue of 1913 feels like one solid unit, a mass of boundary pushing, of pressing words into new forms, of writers so obviously invigorated by language, both its beauty and complexity: Downing, Bernstein, Ives, Mohammad, etc. Reaching again into lit mag past, this issue feels like what Margaret Anderson was trying to create a century ago: If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.

Guernica—all of 2011

Some publications have a great year, with a consistency (and schedule) that make it difficult to isolate one specific moment. Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, publishes continually fascinating issues twice monthly. Once every two weeks last year, I would lose 2-3 hours in the morning reading through interviews with Craig Thompson and David Simon, fiction from Jess Row and Laura van den Berg, poetry from Limón and Cortázar—not to mention new essays from Slavoj Žižek, Deb Olin Unferth, and John Berger. I began not opening emails from Guernica, not wanting to get lost in the texts, sending links into cyberspace. Sure, their staff has grown over the years, but it’s sill amazing this online publication could cover so much of the globe consistently so well—its literature, art, and politics—and offer it all up for free (with essentially no ads) is impressive, and deserving of more than just recognition: it deserves a wealth of readers.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed last month as I sat in the bleachers during my daughter’s swim meet and flipped through the 2012 Pushcart Prize edition. Was it just the chlorine making me uneasy? As usual the work in the anthology was generally good, sometimes fantastic. I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “Mister Lytle” once again and lingered over each sentence of Lydia Davis’s short fictions. I stuck my tongue out at Anis Shivani. I read Katherine Graber’s poem “The Telephone” five or six times.

The problem was the severe limitation of the anthology’s scope, an anthology ostensibly offering up the “Best of the Small Presses.” This is a shortcoming most significantly represented by Henderson’s disparagement of any and all online and electronic publishing venues. (Only one online publication was chosen from for this 2012 anthology.) Here is from Henderson’s introduction:

I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous—great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.

As if that isn’t enough, Henderson goes on to quote from a letter he received from Clay Reynolds, director of creative writing at University of Texas at Dallas:

Now literary parties are peopled by crushing bores talking about iPads and Nooks, bragging about the number of volumes they’ve downloaded and comparing computers. There is no booze, certainly no smoking. And there are no books.

I want to say that Reynolds sounds like someone who hasn’t been getting enough invitations, but it is more likely he just hasn’t been paying close enough attention to both how much the literary world has evolved over recent decades and how much it has stayed the same. It’s still a bunch of people in love with books, with stories, with language. Now I haven’t been to a Paris Review Revel or FSG book launch, but all the book festivals, conferences, and parties I’ve been too are filled with people nerding out about books in all forms, touching them, clicking them, flipping them, scrolling them, and passing them around. And there’s usually plenty of booze.

Maybe it is because I am writing this on the back end of a Word Press platform, but I am simply overwhelmed by such perspectives about literature twelve years into the twenty-first century, three decades after the invention of the personal home computer, and when every kid in my daughter’s sixth-grade class has an email address and can use Google Docs better than I can. All of the smartest and best writers I know write, publish, research, and communicate both in print and online: Benjamin Percy, David Shields, Kelly Link, Michael Robbins, Blake Butler, Laura van den Berg, Margaret Atwood… This isn’t even a point that needs to be made any longer; perhaps in 2002, but not 2012.

When the Pushcart Prize began in 1976 it was the anti-establishment (for lack of a better word). Anais Nin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Newman, and Ishmael Reed were all prominent supporters from its inception. Maybe today things have changed? Not only are electronic and online publications nearly missing, but so are most cutting edge literary magazines and presses—Conjunctions and n+1 are about as avant garde as it seems to get this year. The anthology begins with work by Steven Millhauser and John Jeremiah Sullivan, two stunning authors, but also ones we can easily find in the glossies. Most of the publications with work chosen from them are largely mainstream, lit mag industry staples: Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, New England Review, Poetry, Third Coast, Tin House, and so forth. Again, these are largely great magazines; what’s lacking in the anthology is greater diversity and real coverage of the best being published in the indie presses.

Of course I’ll buy next year’s anthology, and the following year, and the year after that. And if I run into Henderson I’ll try to remember to introduce myself and thank him for all the great work he’s done for literature over the decades. The Pushcart anthologies are overall great publications, probably the best out there for representing and promoting what’s going in indie literature. I’m just hoping for a bit more electricity in the future.

Here’s a final quote, this time from Frederick Barthelme, who nailed it back in 1997:

There seem to be two basic views of the Web among literary folk. The first and most common is that the Web is a wasteland, another television, a form of advertising — all utterly unsuitable for literary activity. Among these folk there is a curious parallel between response to the Web and response to alternative literatures. Those who are terrorized by any change in the habits, practices, and product of writers, any change that might tend to disenfranchise them, are also, and perhaps not surprisingly, terrorized by the rise of the Web as a publishing forum. The second common view is the giddy “it’s all experimental” approach that proclaims that anything on the Web is a fabulous extension of literary activity as we have known it and will clearly destroy all not up-to-date literary activity in about twenty minutes.

Both these views are, even in their most sophisticated disguises, silly.

My sense is that the Web is a gun. It’s all potential, what we do with it; it’s a device, a system, a “site” in the linguistic sense, a prospect. How we use it over the next decade or two will define it. At the moment it’s politically and socially semi-neutral, uninflected, a tool for, in our case, the distribution of literary information. Years ago Charles Newman wrote a series of acute essays for TriQuarterly in which he discussed at length the power and potential of literary distribution systems. I know he didn’t have the Web in mind, and who knows what he thinks about the Web, but the Web certainly qualifies as a stunning development in distribution systems.

OCCUPY! seems like one of the most important texts to come out of U.S. literary magazine publishing in recent history, and probably from the publishing world in general. This newspaper—an “OWS-inspired gazette”—is a fingerprint of the occupy occupations, protests, and thinking since September 2011, as well as a look at the influences, origins, and goals of the movement. Obviously many magazines publish necessary, often essential writing, magazines as different as Guernica, Paris Review, and Annalemma. What makes OCCUPY! so different, why it has reinvigorated my faith in the power of publishing, is that the newspaper is of-the-moment, for-the-moment in the best sense. As opposed to the randomness of YouTube videos and most online commentary on OWS, n+1′s newspaper is filled with finely edited, chosen, and arranged texts, letters, commentary, diary entries, manifestos, and responses that vividly and powerfully communicate the diverse nature of the people and thoughts and struggles behind this movement. It is publishing at its best: both relevant and well-produced. OCCUPY! serves as—to rewrite Arthur Miller’s famous dictum about playwrights—a litmus paper of a moment. It is, as Frederick Barthelme once told me was the main concern of the novelist, “these people, this place, this time.” It’s writing and publishing that seems essential when you hold it in your hands, how I feel when I hold Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the first issue of New York Quarterly. And isn’t that what we always want?

NOTES: OCCUPY! issue 2 has recently been released, though I haven’t read it yet. A copy can be downloaded for free here. And Verso Books has “turned [the] gazette into a book, with a fair amount of added material,” titled Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. The Verso launch party for the book is December 16.

PROSPECTUS OF THE PENN MAGAZINE, A MONTHLY LITERARY JOURNAL, TO BE EDITED AND PUBLISHED IN THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA,BY EDGAR A. POE. — To the Public. — Since resigning the conduct of The Southern Literary Messenger, at the commencement of its third year, I have constantly held in view the establishment of a Magazine which should retain some of the chief features of that Journal, abandoning the rest. Delay, however, has been occasioned by a variety of causes, and not until now have I felt fully prepared to execute the intention.

I will be pardoned for speaking more directly of The Messenger. Having in it no proprietary right, my objects too, in many respects, being at variance with those of its very worthy owner, I found difficulty in stamping upon its pages that individuality which I believe essential to the perfect success of all similar publications. In regard to their permanent interest and influence, it has appeared to me that a continuous and definite character, with a marked certainty of purpose, was of the most vital importance; and these desiderata, it is obvious, can never be surely attained where more than one mind has the general direction of the undertaking. This consideration has been an inducement to found a Magazine of my own, as the only chance of carrying out to full completion whatever peculiar designs I may have entertained.

To those who remember the early years of The Messenger, it will be scarcely necessary to say that its main feature was [a] somewhat overdone causticity in its department of Critical Notices. The Penn Magazine will retain this trait of severity in so much only as the calmest and sternest sense of literary justice will permit. One or two years, since elapsed, may have mellowed down the petulance, without interfering with the rigor of the critic. Most surely they have not yet taught him to read through the medium of a publisher’s interest, nor convinced him of the impolicy of speaking the truth. It shall be the first and chief purpose of the Magazine now proposed, to become known as one where may be found, at all times, and upon all subjects, an honest and a fearless opinion. This is a purpose of which no man need be ashamed. It is one, moreover, whose novelty at least will give it interest. For assurance that I will fulfil it in its best spirit, and to the very letter, I appeal with confidence to the many thousands of my friends, and especially of my Southern friends, who sustained me in The Messenger, where I had but a partial opportunity of completing my own plans.

In respect to the other general features of the Penn Magazine, a few words here will suffice. Upon matters of very grave moment, it will leave the task of instruction in better hands. Its aim, chiefly, shall be to please; and this through means of versatility, originality and pungency. It must not be supposed, however, that the intention is never to be serious. There is a species of grave writing, of which the spirit is novelty and vigor, and the immediate object of the enkindling of the imagination. In such productions, belonging to the loftiest regions of literature, the journal shall abound. It may be as well here to observe, that nothing said in this Prospectus should he construed into a design of sullying the Magazine with any tincture of the buffoonery, scurrility, or profanity, which are the blemish of some of the most vigorous of the European prints. In all branches of the literary department, the best aid, from the highest and purest sources, is secured.

To the mechanical execution of the work the greatest attention will be given which such a matter can require. In this respect, it is proposed to surpass, by very much, the ordinary Magazine style. The form will nearly resemble that of The Knickerbocker. The paper will be equal to that of The North American Review. The pictorial embellishments will be numerous, and by the leading artists of the country, but will be only introduced in the necessary illustration of the text.

The Penn Magazine will be published in Philadelphia, on the first of each month, and will form, half yearly, a volume of about 500 pages. The price will be $5 per annum, payable in advance, or upon the receipt of the first number, which will be issued on the first of January, 1841.

Earlier this October, my wife bought me the new iPhone—a phone whose great power seems to be absorbing chunks of my time. I lost entire days the other week. One thing I spent a great amount of time doing was searching for literary magazine apps. I didn’t find that many.

Here’s what I have on my phone right now:

• McSweeney’s (carried over from when I put it on my wife’s phone two years ago)
• Electric Literature (same as above)
• Narrative
• Poetry (which is actually for the Foundation, not the magazine)

But that’s all I found. I used to have a Keyhole app on my wife’s phone, but it stopped working after awhile and I can’t find it now in the app store. I had expected more. A phone filled with literary periodicals! Or some such thing. I had heard so much about literary apps over the past years when I didn’t have a smart phone, that I thought there would be a deluge of them now that I had one.

Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places. I sent out a twitter missive about the issue and received the following:

From @paigelovesbooks: @sleeperspublish is a small & funky Australian publishing house who have an app for the almanac.

From @paperhaus: Storyville & Tin House are 2

From @OnceMagazine: photos+words, we’re not really a literary magazine, but an app of nonfiction stories.

Electric Literature was nice enough to forward my query on to their 150,000 followers, so maybe I’ll still here back from some others. But until then I’ve got a list of 4-7, depending on how you slice it. (I couldn’t find the Tin House app.) Where are all the lit mag apps? Maybe it’s too early. Or maybe publishers sense the audience just isn’t there. I would love to hear some feedback—if only so I have something to do on my phone besides read Dark Horse Comics and play around with this mustache thing.

Hi There Writers,

This is Dave Housley from Barrelhouse. If you’re receiving this, then you have an active fiction submission in to Barrelhouse, most likely one you submitted quite some time ago. I’m writing to let you know that, first of all, we’re sorry for how long it’s taken us to get back to you (more about that below). Second of all, we’ve accepted all the fiction we can publish in our upcoming issue (number ten, which will be out in a few months). Third of all, we’re still planning to read through the remaining 250 or so stories we have in the fiction backlog, so the purpose of this email is not to inform you that we won’t be reading your work or carry out some kind of creepy mass rejection. Quite the contrary, we want to let you know that we’re
striving to turn things around faster, and we are absolutely committed to publishing unsolicited work that comes through the slush pile.

We’re all writers, though, and we understand how annoying it is to have a story sit at a particular market for six or nine months with no word, and the fact is that we’re now reading for issue eleven, which will be published in early 2012. We realize that’s a really long time between submission and possible publication, so we just wanted to get
in touch to let you know that we’re working on it, but if it’s just been too long for you, we totally understand — by all means, feel free to withdraw your work and consider submitting when we’re open again for general fiction (not sure when that will be, but it will be after we get through this backlog).

In the effort to cut our turnaround times, we recently made significant changes to our editorial process by bringing on a group of experienced and talented (seriously, they could stage a coup quite easily) assistant editors, who now serve as the front line on all fiction submissions. Previously, the original founding editors were managing all fiction, and our slush pile had simply grown too large for the five of us to manage. We’re really excited about the new people and process, and think it will only serve to make us better and faster. In the meantime, though, we need to get through this backlog.

So again: we’re really sorry it’s taken us so long. As a writer who submits all the time to literary magazines, I know all too well how frustrating the waiting game can be. We’re doing what we can to make our process faster.

I know this is kind of a strange letter to receive, but we thought it was important to let you know what’s going on with your work, because we do consider every submission carefully, and your submissions are what keep the mighty Barrelhouse moped chugging along the side of the literary highway.

Thanks again, and please feel free to email back with any questions.

Sincerely,

–dave

Literary magazines come and go at a rapid clip. For example: Charles McGrath once noted “the typical lifespan for a literary magazine appears to be roughly that of a major household appliance.” And when asked what the darkest moment in the history of magazine Grand Street was, editor Ben Sonnenberg answered simply, “When we ran out of money.” This past March, Open City announced it is ceasing publication due to lack of funds. In his introduction to They’re At It Again: Stories from Twenty Years of Open City, an anthology published in June celebrating the magazine’s rich history, magazine co-founder Thomas Beller questions the ability for literary magazines to be both timely and timeless. Somehow Open City managed both, pushing literary boundaries and supporting writers like Sam Lipsyte, Lara Vapnyar, and Jonathan Ames, who called the magazine “the new Paris Review” for his generation. Though its magazine arm has folded, Open City Books will continue publishing.

More on Fictionaut

Running across Michael Copperman’s short story “It”—and his accompanying craft essay “Race, Authenticity, Culpability”—in Copper Nickel‘s new online venue COIN reminded me why I read literary magazines. Life is hectic. Motivations can get confused. Students and neighbors alike look at me quizzically when I tell them what I’m reading—the new issue of Conjunctions at the moment—and I have long since given up mini-lecturing people about lit mags, and now just say something along the lines of, “It’s like The New Yorker,” and quickly change the topic to craft beers or The Daily Show. More personally, in the fog of MFA programs, conferences, lit blogs, etc., it’s easy to forget why I spend so much time constantly checking out the newest issues of, say, New England Review, Open Face Sandwich, and Zoetrope. I’m the first to admit how easily distracted I am by other, perhaps less important reasons for reading: awesome covers (I’m a big cover nerd), names (hard to pass up an issue with Jim Shepard‘s or Kelly Link‘s name on the cover), grad school nostalgia, a general print/pixel fetish, etc., etc. I often read for different reasons than those I tend to tell my students or my children about.

So what did I remember about lit mags from reading Copperman’s story? Sort of what Emily Dickinson got when reading a poem:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?

Lit mags have, historically, been the home of the avant garde, or at least a good portion of the best avant garde we’ve got. What many of us hope to find in their pages is, if not the Poundian new, at least something distinct, different, maybe even problematic. Something amarketable, if that’s even a word. Something hard to pin down. And, if that is combined with a great deal of literary panache and empathy, than there is often nothing better.

But, more than just moving me, than just having “the top of my head were taken off” reading—which specifically happened in the last line of the piece—Copperman’s story and complimentary essay engaged my intellect, as reader and writer, forcing me to confront the basic notion of representation in creative work. And this, all the above taken together, the moving alongside the problematic, the new and the empathetic, is, I suppose, what I’ve long read lit mags for, have read them for since I first picked up a copy of Paris Review in the Southern Oregon University library and read Shepard’s “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea.” It was Garcia Marquez’s Kafka moment. It was “Awesome!” combined with “Writers can do that?!”

Along with a great story, lovely writing, and compelling characters, what is interesting about “It” is its direct engagement with the core element of creative writing: imagining others (even if that means imaging our past selves). Representing the other in literature has long been a bone of contention, at least since Philip Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” in the 16th century, and probably as far back as Ancient Greece, if not before, anytime someone questioned just what gave the author the right to do what he/she was doing. William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was the center of a heated controversy over the author’s right to fully imagine the voice of an other—an other race, an other sex, an other nationality, ad infinitum. And it is this fully imaging of an other’s voice, or dialect, that Copperman is interested in—interested in both the doing of it and the controversy surrounding it. For COIN readers, Copperman has offered up both story and essay engaged in dialect writing, together making a very persuasive case for the creative artist’s imaginative right to cross any biological and cultural boundary.

Here’s a particularly dialect rich portion of the story “It,” which is told in the voice of Shandreeka, a schoolgirl in Mississippi, where Copperman taught for a time in the Teach for America program. In this part, Shandreeka relates what Corneil, a friend, is saying:

He tilt his big head sideways and grin. “So like I been said, I was over at them ball courts at Benton Middle, and Felicia Jackson come up, look round for who she gone start in on, and start talking my ear off bout ‘Pipe one ugly black boy can’t play no ball,’ and Pipe hear his name, he come up and she keep on, and he say he gone knock her upside her head, and she say, ‘Go on then, boy, hit me,’ and he make like he gone do it. She look him straight in the eye, don’t move when he swing his hand. She don’t move an inch. Pipe, he just shake his head, say, ‘Girl, you out your mind,’ and go back to playing ball.”

Like the rest of the story, this part is fast, musical, and I can’t help feel this style of voice—of both Shandreeka and Corneil—helped Copperman write the story, as the work has a sense of the organic that I feel is hard to find in the contemporary short story. Though Copperman admits the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara is close kin to his story, he says “if there’s really a book that inspired me to try such a formally difficult task, it’s Huck Finn first and foremost, and then perhaps Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City.” Like the voices of many characters of Twain and Jones, Shandreeka’s voice seems to fall out in one captivating rush, not sloppily, but ordered, like the 19th century well made play or DNA. Everything is part of a larger whole, such as Shandreeka’s early tossed off description of a boy as “smooth, that what he is”—a description resounding only later in all its threatening power (that last line that took the top of my head off). The entire work is powerful, compact, and I can’t help but feel, in its emotional intensity and sense of risk (for both writer and characters) it stands out in the landscape of contemporary short fiction.

Copperman’s thoughts on using dialect in fiction—an argument for the author’s right to embody the voice of an other, an argument that engages in literary history, politics, the landscape of literary magazines, and writing craft—are as captivating as his fiction, and I urge people to read the essay for themselves, excerpting here a key passage:

I don’t suggest that we should open the gates, and encourage anyone to write and talk black, that it should ever be appropriate to fetishize the black experience and AAVE dialect as entertainment. But I think there’s a serious risk in the position I’ve encountered at panels at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, where I once heard a well-published black writer make fun of a white graduate student for asking a question about the speech of a minor character in their novel-in-progress before suggesting that no writer should ever represent a black person except a black person like . . . herself. This declaration was met with thunderous applause. Such a position segregates black literature, is self-marginalizing. It refuses to allow representation to be particular and complex. It divides on the basis of past division, insists on a demarcation predicated on a construction of identity that is unresponsive to the present. In reacting against the status quo, it inadvertantly affirms it.