Below is the opening of Tania James‘s new story “The Scriptological Review” in the latest issue of A Public Space. Not many stories center around editors of small magazines, maybe none do so this endearingly. (Just typing the beginning out now, here, I see how much the story rewards rereading.) James’s story collection Aerogrammes, in which this story is included, will be released from Knopf next week; the title story appeared in a 2007 issue of One Story.

This is not a guide to good handwriting. You’ll find no dos and don’ts, no dotted lines here. If that’s what you are looking for, try Cursive First, a workbook force-fed to me at the age of eight, when the nuns tried to mold my hand around the rubber pencil grip of conformity.

What you’re reading is the final copy of the Scriptological Review, a journal dedicated to the social analysis of handwriting. Our inaugural issue appeared two years ago, with a cover story titled “Slanty Signatures and Secret Turmoil: The Correlation Between High Cursive Slant and Low Self-Esteem.” In this, we analyzed a letter from John Wilkes Booth, whose cursive was brambled with signals that the lay reader would likely ignore, such as intraletter gaps and distended a’s and o’s.

If you’re still reading, then it’s likely that you are a subscriber and a scriptophile, but for the remaining fraction who have happened upon this issue on a bus seat or in a dentist’s office (or propping open a window, as I found my mother’s copy of volume IV), let me introduce myself…

Seeking Assistant Publicity Editor

Anomalous Press is an innovative multimedia online journal and handmade chapbook series. We’re looking for a publicity person to join us! We’re a collective of writers working towards a common goal: discovering and making room in the literary world for great new writing.

We’re looking for someone with ideas about establishing and coordinating social media publicity campaigns (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Someone who is enthusiastic about online literary publishing, interesting (or anomalous) writing, translation, international literature, handmade books, and the world in general.

The ideal person will help envision and execute a publicity plan, including but not limited to social media efforts, conference and festival presence, readings and other events, and other awesome stuff. There may be room to move into other areas of the publishing process, such as proofreading, reading submissions, etc. Approximately 5 hours a week.

This could be arranged as an internship for credit, or you can join our staff as an editor (we’re an all-volunteer operation). Best of all, since we’re online, you can be anywhere you want to be!

Send a letter of interest with some indication of your previous experience (or brilliant ideas) to shannon@anomalouspress.org

It was OK to start with literature and art. As long as you said what you meant, and what you really thought on reflection (subject to later correction), then if you spoke honestly about anything you would be striking a blow. The magazine started with just $8,000, which four of us had pooled, plus $2,000 we extracted from friends and relatives in $20 subscriptions, sold on the basis of 100 copies of a prototype issue we had xeroxed and stapled. When we sold our first official issue in 2004, the meaning of n+1 as a title was simply that we’d try to document, or discover, one next step in every action that people said was settled, solved, or complete. One more step forward in the arts, in fiction, in government, in dance, in dating, in economics. We weren’t afraid of steps to the side, either, on the diagonal.

[....]

The truth that appears to me now is how much continuity there is in small literary and intellectual magazines in America. Some decades leave the feeling that you may be the last one left. When we started, we felt lonely, and as if we were picking up obligations from giants.

—n+1 founding co-editor Mark Grief over at New Statesman on a renewed place for little magazines in American today

In the same vein as Lewis Hyde’s well-known book The Gift, Hemley argues that, even when writers aren’t rewarded in direct monetary terms for the publication of their writing, this doesn’t mean there aren’t real benefits to the publication, though they may not be readily apparent. It’s not a new argument, but Hemley lays it out succinctly and with compelling personal examples. Hemley begins with the “Dispatches from Manila” column he wrote for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency when he was in the Philippines. He didn’t get paid for the column, but it forced him to work on a topic he was already interested in pursuing and garnered him a considerable amount of free advertising. As another example, Hemley brings up a decision by his friend Steve Yarbrough to give an essay to Michigan Quarterly Review as opposed to other, “heavier hitting” and better-paying publications. Yarbrough made his choice “because the editor there had always been a supporter of his and had published his first fiction.” The MQR publication eventually led to the reprinting of the essay in Utne Reader and work writing in Hollywood, paid work.

As founding editor of Defunct, Hemley is himself “an editor who doesn’t pay.” Defunct is a beautiful, well-designed online publication (Marcelle Heath wrote about it for Luna Park back in 2010), functioning “as a literary repository for everything that’s had its day, from defunct technologies to defunct religions and fads and foods and beliefs.” The latest issue has some interesting new work from David Shields, Paul Collins, and Elizabeth Kadetsky, along with stunning photographs from featured artist Noah Doely, such as “Naturalist,” shown above.

What does Hemley think about not paying his writers? “I wish we could pay them,” he writes. Throughout the essay it’s apparent Hemley wishes things were otherwise, that authors received generous remuneration for their work in real dollars. Though publications such as Electric Literature and One Story work hard to put sound financial compensation for writers at the forefront of their mission, the majority of literary magazine have never had the funds to do so. It’s the nature of the work. Alongside such pieces as Nicholas Ripatrazone’s recent essay on author payments at The Millions, Hemley’s essay adds to the necessary exploration of the unusual economy of literary art in the 21st century.

He introduced us to little magazines and literary periodicals by bringing a box of them to class one day and passing them around so that we could acquaint ourselves with their names, see what they looked like and what they felt like to hold in the hand. He told us that this was where most of the best fiction in the country and just about all the poetry was appearing. Fiction, poetry, literary essays, reviews of recent books, criticism of living authors by living authors. I felt wild with discovery in those days.

—Raymond Carver on his teacher John Gardner in 1983 issue of The Georgia Review, “John Gardner: Writer and Teacher”; stumbled upon in Shannon Ravenel’s Five Points essay, “Wild with Discovery”

A little magazine is a serious magazine or a serious magazine is a little magazine. Such a definition may be nonsense but it is as near to definition as most readers of little magazines get. Nor will this pamplet get further.

Let me offer up another well-underlined bit, where Whittemore digs insightfully back into the historical origins of the modern literary/non-literary magazine divide:

Here is what the little magazine movement has been, generally, about: it has been a manifestation of opposition to the cultural results of American and French revolutions, that is, opposition to some of the realities of the resultant age of the common man, opposition to a historical condition. [emphasis his]

In 1939, while still undergraduates at Yale, Whittemore and future CIA chief James Angleton launched the influential literary magazine Furioso, which focused largely on modernist American poets, such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, but also published notable work from Edmund Wilson and Wayne Booth. Whittemore himself described the magazine as “a late showing of the odd twentieth-century art beast, modernism.” His bibliography since then as author and editor is daunting, to say the least. (He was twice U.S. Poet Laureate, for instance.) He will no doubt be missed; luckily, his work remains. This is from Whittemore’s very early poem, “Still Life”:

I must explain why it is that at night in my own house,
Even when no one’s asleep, I feel I must whisper.
Thoreau and Wordsworth could call it an act of devotion;
Others would call it fright. It is probably
Something of both. In my living room there are matters
I’d rather not meddle with
Late at night.

New job postings from lit mags:

Literary journal NANO Fiction is searching for an unpaid (sorry!) associate editor position. Responsibilities would include reading and evaluating submissions, attending (virtual) monthly editorial meetings, and helping to man the NANO Fiction table at any event that the associate editor can attend. NANO Fiction is a semiannual print journal devoted to publishing flash fiction of 300 words or fewer, founded in 2006 by Kirby Johnson and Jennifer Eberhardt. Anybody interested in applying for this position please send a couple of flash pieces written and a brief paragraph discussing any editorial or publication history to nanofictionmag@gmail.com with the subject line ASSOCIATE EDITOR.

And:

The Georgia Review, one of America’s premier journals of arts and letters, is seeking a managing editor to oversee production of the print and digital versions of the magazine.  This position works closely with the editor to ensure the quality, accuracy, and timely publication of each issue, and to contribute to editorial planning for both the print journal and the website.  This is a highly responsible position that requires considerable independent judgment.  Major responsibilities include:  final editing of all accepted manuscripts; negotiating edits with each author; acquiring, selecting, and preparing artwork for cover and interior portfolio; establishing and maintaining a production schedule; and developing and editing web content. The managing editor may also evaluate manuscripts; manage social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter; lead or participate in the planning, coordination, and publicity of events; write grant applications and administer grant awards; and represent The Georgia Review at local, regional, and national functions. To view a full description of duties and qualifications please go to http://www.libs.uga.edu/humres/jobs/managingeditor.html.

I fished in Larry Brown‘s lake, which had good crappie, Florida bass, and catfish in it. (Brown’s posthumously published novel is called The Miracle of Catfish.) We chatted many times on his pier. Larry was great with his hands. He was finishing a solar-powered writing cabin on the south side of the lake when death by heart attach took him, a young fifty-three years of age. As Charles Bukowski says in one of his poems, “When death comes for him / It ought to be ashamed.” From almost zero resources except the books his mother got him at the lending library in Memphis and Yocona and Tula, Larry made himself a brilliant artist who knew his time would be short, with heart disease on his father’s side killing his pa at forty-nine, I think. His father was also a haunted WWII vet, bad to drink. Larry had 120 rejections before the Mississippi Review, a precious organ out of Southern Mississippi University, guided by Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry, took a short story. Then Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Books discovered him and served as his exquisite editor and publisher in that fine house begun by Louis Rubin in North Carolina.

—Barry Hannah writing on Mississippi in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America