THE LITTLE MAGAZINE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA The Little Magazine in Contemporary America EDITED BY IAN MORRIS AND JOANNE DIAZ The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London IAN MORRIS has taught courses on literature, writing, and publishing at Lake Forest College in Illinois and Columbia College Chicago. He was managing editor of TriQuarterly magazine for over a decade and is the founding editor of Fifth Star Press and the author of the novel When Bad Things Happen to Rich People. JOANNE DIAZ is associate professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She was an assistant editor at TriQuarterly and is the author of two collections of poetry, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Each selection is the copyrighted property of its respective author and appears in this volume by arrangement with the individual author. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 24055- 8 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 12049- 2 (paper) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 24069- 5 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226240695.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The little magazine in contemporary America / edited by Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-226-24055-8 (cloth : a lkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-12049-2 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-24069-5 (e-book) 1. Little magazines—United States. 2. Periodical editors—United States. 3. Periodicals— Publishing—United States. I. Morris, Ian, 1961– editor. II. Diaz, Joanne, editor. PN4878.3.L54 2015 051—dc23 2014045144 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Preface vii IAN MORRIS AND JOANNE DIAZ Introduction: A Decade or So of Little Magazines: One Reader’s Perspective 1 JEFFREY LEPENDORF Part 1: The Editor as Visionary This History of BOMB 19 BETSY SUSSLER The Life of Ontario Review (1974–2 008) 28 GREG JOHNSON The Word Sacred Is Not Misplaced 35 DAVE EGGERS On n+1 38 KEITH GESSEN Part 2: Politics, Culture, and the Little Magazine Callaloo: A Journal of Necessity 51 CHARLES HENRY ROWELL Critical Thinking from Women 65 AMY HOFFMAN The Bitch Interview 70 LISA JERVIS AND ANDI ZEISLER As interviewed by Joanne Diaz The World Doesn’t Stop for Derek Walcott, or: An Exchange between Coeditors 83 GERALD MAA AND LAWRENCE- MINH BÙI DAVIS Part 3: Innovation and Experimentation: The Literary Avant- Garde Exquisite Corpse 97 ANDREI CODRESCU L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 106 BRUCE ANDREWS Publishing Is Personal 124 REBECCA WOLFF This Being 2015 130 ANDER MONSON Part 4: The University Magazine War of the Words: Fighting for a Journal and a Genre 143 LEE GUTKIND Decent Company between the Covers 155 CARA BLUE ADAMS Alaska Quarterly Review and the Literary Tonic 166 RONALD SPATZ Making a Living and a Life in Little Magazines 175 CAROLYN KUEBLER Part 5: Today’s Magazines and the Future About At Length 189 JONATHAN FARMER Summoning the Bard: The Twenty- First- Century Literary Magazine on the Web 198 REBECCA MORGAN FRANK The Future of the Gatekeepers 209 JANE FRIEDMAN Poetry Magazine: On Making It New 218 DON SHARE Contributors 225 Index 231 Preface IAN MORRIS AND JOANNE DIAZ We compiled this book in order to off er some insight into the experience of editing little magazines during the most radical paradigm shift since the invention of movable type. This undertaking draws its inspiration in large part from two infl uential texts of the last century. The fi rst of these, The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History (published fall 1978 as an issue of TriQuarterly, and again in 1980 by the Pushcart Press), was a sprawling, 750-p age compendium of essays and interviews detailing the state of little magazine publishing in the United States from roughly the end of the Second World War through the 1970s. The editors, Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie, were partly inspired in this project by an earlier book, The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography, edited by Fredrick J. Hoff man, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. The study was pub- lished by Princeton University Press in 1946 and surveyed magazines from the dawn of modernism and the founding of Poetry in 1911. These two books, which have established a cult following, feature the stories of edi- tors with outsized personalities whose iconoclastic impulses have inspired many of today’s best editors. The moment seems right for another broad view. Not only has the ad- vent of online platforms disrupted the prevailing order in every aspect of publishing, but the thirty-fi ve-year interval since the publication of the Anderson/Kinzie anthology has the feel of a coherent epoch. New Criti- cism has been supplanted by theories of reading that are more attentive to gender, race, and issues of globalization. Enrollment in creative writing programs has risen exponentially across the country; even so, funding for many little magazines has been cut or omitted altogether from university budgets, while many other independent magazines struggle to survive. It has become increasingly apparent that the period between 1980 and 2015 will be seen as the end of the ascendancy of print periodicals. With this new paradigm in mind, we began reaching out to editors of the leading little magazines of the past thirty years, asking them to contribute original essays on a topic of their choosing. The imposition [ VIII ] PREFACE of these requests became apparent to us as soon as we began sending out solicitations. Any little magazine editor has thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of manuscripts pass before his or her eyes every year, along with review copies of hundreds of new books, e- mails from authors, and requests from subscribers. The advent of the Internet has added expo- nentially to the demands upon the editor’s attention. In addition to time spent blogging, tweeting, editing Tumblr feeds, and posting on Facebook, editors now have access to an inexhaustible supply of information pertain- ing to the fi eld, including other magazines, the works of authors whom the editor may wish to publish, and endless links leading to matters current in the fi eld, both high and low. Add to this unceasing textual blur the fact that many little magazine editors are college instructors or are support- ing themselves with better-paying editorial work, and most are writers themselves, facing deadlines for articles, while the cursors on their home computers blink on page 307 of a fi ve- hundred- page novel in progress. We were therefore gratifi ed that most of the editors we approached were enthusiastic about the project and eager to contribute. Some of them cited a desire to continue the discussion begun by Hoff man, Allen, and Ulrich; and Anderson and Kinzie. Others were motivated by the state of the debate over the eff ects of online publishing on print magazines. The prevailing sentiment, however, was that a revisiting of the subject was overdue. Much to our delight, each submission we received provided fresh in- sight into the state of little magazines today. For months we had worked in solitude, outlining the structure for this book and, in doing so, devel- oping a sense of the history of publishing over the past thirty years. Now, all at once, a dialogue was forming. From the fi rst we could see why the individual stories of magazine editors dominated not only the fi rst-p erson recollections in Anderson and Kinzie, but also the ostensibly scholarly Hoff man et al. Above all, little magazine editors value the ways in which literary conversations evolve in their pages and on their websites. It is this conversation that inspires, challenges, and sustains them, regardless of changes in technology, medium, or fi nancial constraint. There are many compelling creation myths in this volume, as editors tell of the experience of waiting for the shipment of the fi rst issue to ar- rive, all of them anxious, all of them, it would turn out, with good reason. Lee Gutkind wakes in the middle of the night and rechecks the fi rst issue of Creative Nonfi ction to fi nd a large chunk of the fi rst essay missing. Keith Gessen recounts nearly losing his rent-c ontrolled sublet when the fi rst shipment of n+1 arrived early. Greg Johnson describes the moment that Joyce Carol Oates and Ray Smith opened a box containing the fi rst issues of the Ontario Review only to fi nd many of them smeared with blood. PREFACE [ IX ] A few of the editors we invited were unable to contribute. One or two others initially committed but had to drop out owing to time con- straints. Because this anthology begins with the 1980s, we wrote to Gor- don Lish—t o many the father of 1980s minimalist fi ction—t o contribute a piece on his Quarterly (1987– 1995). What we received in return was a blank postcard, with the handwritten message: Sorry, the thing was the thing it was, and now it’s not. Nothing to add, save Kind regards, Gordon Lish1 We felt this was an elegant articulation of how little magazines burn brightly for a time and then extinguish themselves. As Jeff rey Lependorf observes in this volume, literary magazines are usually quite short-l ived: “I regularly describe starting a literary magazine as akin to starting a restau- rant: some open and close, some have a few good years, and a few seem to be around as long as anyone can remember.”2 In fact, many scholars of the little magazine would argue that such impermanence actually defi nes the format. T. S. Eliot believed that a magazine should have “a single edi- tor, a small circulation, and a short life span, rarely exceeding that of the founding editorship.”3 In the second and third decades of the twentieth century many magazines appeared spontaneously in support of a fl urry of new movements, including Futurism, Surrealism, and Vorticism. Their editors would turn out a few numbers at odd intervals and then move on to new projects or movements. However, as the century progressed, edit ors sought and perfected more sustainable approaches to publishing. Longev- ity was in. Indeed, Poetry, one of the fi rst modernist magazines, thrives to this day (after nine or so decades of hand-t o-m outh existence). In our book, current Poetry editor Don Share off ers a vision at the end of the next century of the magazine’s operations. Once we recognize that the general profi le of the little magazine editor allows for an intrinsic idiosyncrasy, the history of little magazines (for all their characteristic eclecticism) aligns along a relatively narrow range of tendencies. Editors characteristically establish new magazines in reaction to—a nd usually out of dissatisfaction with—t he literary status quo or their respective eras. For example, Harriet Monroe founded Poetry to pro- 1. Personal correspondence with Ian Morris, October 30, 2010. 2. “Introduction: A Decade or So of Little Magazines; One Reader’s Perspective,” 5. 3. T. S. Eliot, quoted in The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History, ed. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie (Yonkers, NY: Pushcart Press, 1978), 217.