Fall 2010 issue of Kenyon Review

Nearly a year has passed since I implored secondary school teachers to use literary magazines in the classroom. Thanks to CLMP’s Lit Mag Adoption program and other initiatives, undergraduate and graduate classrooms engage contemporary literary magazines at a regular rate, yet the logistics of such programs (which require students, rather than the institution, to handle the purchases) are less appropriate for secondary schools. Public-school teachers must carefully choose their district-budgeted purchases on a wide variety of curricular goals, and though I have had the support of administrators and colleagues, New Jersey’s educational budget woes have slowed the literary magazine adoption process at the whole-class level. It will take time to convince community members that a subscription to The Kenyon Review might be more useful than a new class-set of The Old Man and the Sea.

This is the time for such a conversation, though: the literary magazine world needs some serious self-reflection. Can the closed economy of writer-contributor-reader sustain literary magazines? John Gardner, in typical hyperbolic fashion, once lamented the miniscule number of “serious” American readers. Gardner’s rhetorical reason was to prepare future fiction writers for the seriousness of their vocation, but we need to make the same consideration of literary magazines. Where are the potential homes for an issue of Sou’wester or Tin House?  Certainly the lounges of MFA programs, university libraries, perhaps the random local public library and independent bookstores. A more likely home is the desk of an aspiring writer, though even the hope that writers will become familiar with such magazines is waning.

The problem will not be solved with shotgun manifestos or truncated posts. No one economic model of the literary magazine exists. Some thrive through generous endowments or university grant support. Others are run by savvy independents who understand the need for branding, publication community, and marketing.  Regardless of the model, though, most magazines would benefit from more subscribers, more readers, and more intellectual engagement. Writers have quipped elsewhere that they sometimes only read the contributor biographies tucked in the back of the magazine. Can literary magazines thrive if only contributors form their readership?

I return to my argument from last year: if writing programs at all levels are serious and responsible about preparing students for the business of literary magazine submitting and publishing, then they should support those magazines and integrate them into the curriculum of essential courses. Dinty Moore, editor of Brevity, recently lamented the lack of preparation of certain undergraduate submitters—some who were told by instructors to blindly submit work. Moore was not trying to dissuade young writers; rather, he was focusing the conversation on instructors who do not adequately prepare students to enter the professional publishing community. As a teacher, it is my responsibility—not the responsibility of my 17 year old student, or of the overburdened magazine editor—to ensure submitter preparedness. I should not be the one pushing send on the submission, but I need to make certain my student can do so with intelligence and appropriateness.

I have tried to keep my end of this bargain. I am a preliminary judge for the Million Writers Award, and I share the top ten finalists for the prize with my students. I encourage them to visit the magazines that have published the work of these writers so that they can investigate other work. Some students even participate in the public vote for the best story of the year. I share reviews with my students: from here at Luna Park, and also from New Pages, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Southeast Review. I still use all the texts mentioned in last year’s essay, though this year I am learning the even more pressing need for students to become active critical and editing members of this community. Would it hurt that the future student editor of an undergraduate-only literary magazine knows the submission processes of Western Humanities Review?

June 1999 issue of Poetry

My biases should be apparent: I graduated from Susquehanna University in 2003, where creative writing and literary magazine reading were an important part of our literature studies. Early in our Introduction to Creative Nonfiction course, Gary Fincke placed a pile of thin magazines onto the table. We passed them around: The Southern Review and Ploughshares and Pleiades. One had a black and white photograph of a windmill set against a beige background; another multi-colored stripes that stretched onto the back. I held on to Poetry. Black title, the cover a watered-down, tepid aqua, with a centered photograph of a crag.

I browsed the table of contents. Most other students did the same, although a few simply settled into the midst of a story. The only name on the list I recognized was John Updike. Here he was, writing poetry, one with the title of a Kerouac novel, no less. Something about such genre jumping seemed freeing; I would learn that such freedom was endemic to literary magazines.

Later, back at my dorm, I reread sections of Of the Farm. Updike’s prose was fluid and observant, much like his sentence-crossing lines in that poem. The poem had felt like prose, and when I returned to the library and browsed the stacks of archived issues, I realized Updike was not unique in his flexibility. Writers did different things in literary magazines than they did in books. Books were stodgy, hard, spine-formed collections. There seemed little room to breathe within such pages. But literary magazines were athletic, a place for play—serious play, no doubt, but certainly capable of more range. Writers could stretch. Most importantly, as a young writer I felt much more confident with an issue of Boulevard in my hand than one’s collected poems. I certainly needed to be familiar with both, but the possibility that my own work could one day appear in the thinner volume was exactly the confidence I needed to go write, to submit stories for workshop, and to pursue the study of writing.

There is no reason why a student should have to wait until college to experience such an epiphany. Here is one such test case. The New England Review, one of the consistently strongest literary magazines affiliated with a university, has lamented its forthcoming lack of funding. A class subscription to The New England Review would be appropriate for literature and creative writing students. Consider Volume 30, Number 4. I purchased the issue because of Robert Alter’s essay “American Literary Style and the Presence of the King James Bible,” a wonderful excerpt from Pen of Iron. Alter cogently explicates the influence of that 1611 translation on the oratory and syntax of Abraham Lincoln and the prose of Herman Melville, but also opens his analysis to larger considerations of the decline of critical responses toward style in the novel. One of Alter’s theses is that a decline in American stylistic aptitude and sensitivity occurred concurrently with a decline in variations of colloquial and literary register, and that the latter likely resulted from contemporary interest in more “accessible” translations of the Bible. Alter does not posit belief in the Bible as a holy text; rather, he quite clearly articulates that iconic writers such as William Faulkner appropriated “Biblicisms,” or the close juxtaposition of variant linguistic registers, and in doing so imbued the emotional gravity of the King James translation in their own prose. A quite astute essay to appear in a literary magazine, and a wonderful example for students of the back-arguments that are rhetorically necessary to make even the most direct of points.

New England Review 30.4

Now, with that issue of The New England Review in hand, I went from the Alter essay elsewhere and was amazed by the wealth of offerings within a single volume. The issue begins with two gorgeous poems by Natasha Trethewey.  “Elegy,” invoked “for my father,” is a careful meditation on loss through specific memory and event: a fishing trip with father and daughter.  Even then “I can tell you now / that I tried to take it all in, record it / for an elegy I’d write—one day— / when the time came.  Your daughter, / I was that ruthless.” Honest lines tucked, not cramped, into couplets. Writing made relevant. As I return to the contents of the issue, I nearly feel overwhelmed; I want to address each and every piece. Here is only a sample: Eduardo C. Corral’s “Watermark,” a horizontally-spaced piece that stretches the space of the page to connect the disparate phrases, ending with the beautiful “If I dream I’m cupping her face / with my hands, I wake up holding / the skull / of a wolf.”  Corral’s poem would be perfect to show students how concrete decisions of structure lead to enhancements of content. Matthew Olzmann’s self-effacing “Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion” could teach students that poems light-hearted in content can be fist-tight in form, as Olzmann pares line-breaks to give his verse the fluidity of prose. William Gilson’s extended, part-photo essay “Stone Faces” is a palpable example of how students could marriage clever, personal creative nonfiction with presentations of history. The history-minded student would also likely appreciate the three translated letters from Alexis de Toqueville and the engaging, dynamic essay “Fugitive Music” by Joshua Harmon, a fresh approach to the peculiarities of sound recordings.

I could teach an entire semester course on this single issue of this single literary magazine, and in doing so not merely introduce students to an important text in contemporary letters, but also give students tangible skills of reading and writing that are applicable toward, and necessary for, disciplines beyond creative writing and literature. I hope that “could” becomes a “will” in the upcoming months. I have already shared Alter’s essay, and his ideas have sparked classroom debate. Imagine that: people actually talking about literary magazines.

We have asked some writers and editors to weigh in on the direction of lit mags and will also be republishing some stuff on the topic. The usual stuff: digital publishing, the graphic lit mag, literary journalism, financial obstacles, submissions, the environment, and so on.

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the future of the literary magazine. Such as

PEN America hosted editors of Granta, Tin House, and PEN and writers Rodrigo Fresán and Stamm in a conversation about “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future” (video)

Ted Genoways of VQR launched a ribald discussion of lit mags & fiction in his Mother Jones article “The Death of Fiction,” which continued over at the VQR blog

Following that, Carolyn Kellogg wondered at the LA Times “What is the future of printed literary journals?”

Fictionaut founder Jurgen Fauth posited his vision of lit mags future at Huffington Post with “Transcend and Include: Fictionaut and the Future of the Literary Magazine”

Joshua Harmon pondered “on the future of higher-ed-subsidized literary magazines”

I talked with editors of Opium, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and Antioch Review about the subject in a panel during the 2010 AWP Conference “The Future of the Literary Magazine”

Roxane Gay of PANK has been writing about this subject almost constantly at HTMLGIANT

And Jim Hanas recently blogged about individual publishing overthrowing lit mags, “Nobody Likes the Slush Pile. Let’s Get Rid of It.“

We want to continue this. Essays, fiction, interviews, poems, drawings, etc. Submit via our submissions manager or query lunaparkreview <at> gmail.com.