Attention 12,000 AWP 2013 conference attendees: come check out a panel on lit mags and student learning today, Friday March 9th at 3:00PM. (No, it won’t be three hours long as advertised; just a brief chat with some super nice/smart people. About an hour.)

S234. The Teaching Press: Literary Magazines and Learning. (Travis Kurowski, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Carolyn Kuebler, Ben George, Jodee Stanley) Amidst worries about college student learning, editors from leading literary magazines New England Review, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, and Third Coast discuss the educational benefits of literary magazines on today’s campuses. Topics will include the teaching press, experiential learning environments, learning-based outcomes, and how campus literary magazines are changing 21st-century publishing.

Room 313, Level 3

Evening Will Come issue 26 (Feb 2013) is a tribute issue to poet Jake Adam York, who passed away late last year. The issue includes poetry and prose from Adam Clay, Mathias Svalina, Mary McHugh, Sarah Browning, and many others, as well as a foreward to the issue from Jake’s brother, Joe York—

My brother is not here anymore, but he is everywhere. And through his life and through the lives of those he touched and will touch, I see now that death is simply a shift in tense, a conjugation of the verb, another way of saying the same thing.

From “The Intellectual Situation,” n+1 issue 15:

So what’s an old magazine to do? Should it be like the New Yorker and just . . . it’s hard to say what exactly the New Yorker does on the internet. They do not post their best pieces, except when they do. They do not have their best writers blogging, except when they do. Really, what the New Yorker has done online is remain totally unembarrassed by everything they have done online. Did they spend one zillion dollars on a “digital reader” for subscribers that must have looked great at the pitch meeting but shrinks the 10.5 Caslon type just past the point of readability? Yes, they did. Did they hold a pet photo contest on Halloween? Yes, they did. But do they care? No, they don’t. This may be a model for others, or it may just be something this one magazine can get away with. Hard to tell.

Anyway, we were very upset, and to add insult to injury our dog lost the Halloween contest to two little gerbils reading tiny dictionaries, but then we realized we could just take a Xanax and read the Paris Review. We love the new Paris Review, partly because it always makes us forget what year it is, but never in a depressing way, like Harper’s. We opened a recent issue and found all our favorite hits from the archives: poems from an ancient civilization, an experimental short story by a woman, some brightly colored art that must have been very expensive to print, and obscene fiction by a Jewish person. But what satisfied us most was the feeling that we were enjoying a product with a past, and with the distinction of an earlier age. Where did that feeling come from? Was it the Xanax (or maybe it was Valium) that made us suspect that if the issue had been released in 1959, no one would have noticed that it came from the future?…

Read the entire thing—on The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review—at the n+1 website.

I probably knew his work less than most in the literary world (if there is such a thing)—but after hearing of his passing yesterday evening from my wife, from Facebook of all places, I came across his latest publication “Self-Portrait as Superman (Alternate Take)” in the new issue of New England Review. Though it was only just published, I somehow couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it earlier.

My heartfelt condolences to family, friends, and fans of York. Below is the open-throttled beginning of “Self-Portrait as Superman (Alternate Take)”—read the complete thing at the NER website:

At twenty-four frames per second, sixty seconds is two hundred
feet of film you’ll never see: Christopher Reeve
ready to become mild-mannered Clark Kent—sharp

trilby and blue chalk-pinstripe suit—
once they call Action, the Who-me smile fading
to bit-lip circumspection, cover story and secret,

hand on the button-down’s placket, ready to pull
the buttons from their eyes, peel
the rough-hewn cotton from the ancient crest, the S

that curves like a river between the mountains,
a snake curled inside a chest, invulnerable aorta
of Kal-El’s dense alien body, gone spectacular…

Read the rest. And listen to an audio recording of York reading an earlier draft of the poem for the Kenyon Review this past summer.

“We are young, and when you are young, you have less inhibitions, and you just power through and don’t think about how it doesn’t make sense,” said the magazine’s 32-year-old creative consultant, Shala Monroque, a regular on the international art and fashion circuits who has been romantically linked with the art superdealer Larry Gagosian.

At their party, Ms. Maduka attributed the stylishness of the crowd to Ms. Monroque. Ms. Monroque attributed it to Ms. Maduka’s editorial vision.

“It was immediate, automatic; I was really inspired by what Max was saying about the magazine,” Ms. Monroque said. “I’m often really bored at fashion parties, and it’s nice to get to have intelligent conversations.”

Read the entire piece at The New York Observer.

After receiving the new issue of Oxford American under a new editor, The New York Times’ Dwight Garner reminisces about picking up the magazines first issue in Oxford, Mississippi:

The Oxford American’s first issue, published early in 1992, announced its ambitions. I happened to be traveling in Mississippi that spring. I remember discovering this issue, drawn by its fire-engine-red cover, on the newsstand at Square Books, Oxford’s excellent indie bookstore.

I scanned the table of contents and allowed my road-weary eyes to widen. Here were stories and essays by a rogue’s gallery of the South’s best writers and malcontents: Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Florence King, Roy Blount Jr.

Blended in were provocations from John Updike, who contributed a poem about a bowel movement; William F. Buckley Jr.; Charles Bukowski; and Bill McKibben, as well as an interview with Pauline Kael. This was The New Yorker with a side of hot sauce, a tub of Duke’s mayonnaise and a bib. This was The New Yorker in muddy boots rather than penny loafers.

I walked to the cash register and asked, “Who puts this out?” The lanky kid behind the counter stuck out a hand and replied, “That would be me.”

Read entire thing at The New York Times.

I briefly served as the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online when the magazine was first transitioning from print.  Christ, that was a hot mess.  Susan Hahn and Ian Morris had been fired.  Everyone from Poets & Writers to the New Yorker was enraged that such a seminal magazine was being altered in such a radical way–not just taken out of print, but turned over, effectively, to MFA students who would run the magazine through classes, which Susan Harris, from the astoundingly good Words Without Borders, and I had been hired to teach prior to actually being told that the “new magazine” we’d be training the students to edit was freaking TriQuarterly.  I thought about leaving when I found out, but I wanted to help the TQlegacy survive–there were cool things like an online archiving project…there was history I cared about…it felt more relevant to try to do something positive than to stand outside and hurl stones.  The thing was, TQ was a financial drain, and Northwestern didn’t feel able to fund it anymore.  Subscriptions were apparently way down and the thing had been bleeding money for a long time.  But no one would at the university include that bald fact in their talking points…

Read the entire thing.

I just love the idea of putting something on the shelf and knowing that it’s going to stay there. That it will outlast you.

The young Brooklyn lit mag Armchair/Shotgun recently released an unintentional all-female issue (mentioned at The Millions and The Atlantic):

Though the all-female-writers issue was a complete surprise to us, we’re pretty delighted about it and thought we should tell you a little bit about how it came about.

Armchair/Shotgun has an anonymous submissions process. When a piece of work arrives in our inbox, we strip the author’s name and biography off of it and assign it a number. This number identifies the story or poem throughout the editorial process–from assembling the packet, to assigning volunteer readers to help identify outstanding pieces, to the final editors’ meeting at which we choose the works that will make up the issue. We don’t know who wrote a piece until after the final vote, when we go back to our database and match up numbers and names.

For our first two issues, this process resulted in issues that were made up roughly 50/50 of men and women. When we de-anonymized the pieces we’d accepted for Issue 3, we saw that it had resulted in a set of stories and poems that were all by women. Fifteen pieces by eleven women.

Why is this noteworthy?… [Click to read the rest at the A/S website.]