Maurice Sendak died on Tuesday, May 8, at the age of 83. He scared children because he loved them. He described himself as a scavenger. He will be missed by many.

I love talking to other editors about editing, how they run their magazines, and what they’re thinking about the state of the literary magazine. I had a chance to talk with the editors and designer of Salt Hill to get a sense of the view from Syracuse.

Tell me a little about the history of Salt Hill. Where does the name come from? How long has the magazine been publishing.

Rachel Abelson: The journal has been around for about fifteen years. We are approaching our 30^th issue. I’m not sure who is responsible for the name—Michael Paul Thomas was our founding editor—but it’s a reference to the geology of Syracuse. Most of the salt in this country came from Syracuse way back when. There’s a whole museum dedicated to salt here. I believe they reenact the mining of salt pre-1900. I guess Onondaga Lake, besides being wildly polluted, is fed by brine springs. There’s also a lot of snow and a good deal of road salting, too.

Gina Keicher: Salt Hill is run by graduate students in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program. It’s a fitting name for a journal based out of the “Salt City.” Also, Syracuse’s campus is situated atop a rather massive hill, so there’s that as well.

What is your editorial process like? How are decisions made? Who has input?

RA: It’s a collaborative process, but there is some autonomy, too, which is key. We often have multiple editors for each genre—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. The goal is for us all to be proud of each section but to avoid editing the life out of something just to ensure we’re unanimous on the matter. Each genre editor is often responsible for a handful of pieces: work they solicited or pulled from slush. These are a genre editor’s babies. And then genre editors work together to build a section around their babies. Editors-in-chief manage separate genres while being responsible for their own pieces as well. Our readers suggest solicitations, too. We’ve worried in the past about over-editing individual pieces. Too many cooks in the track changes. We’re all in MFA mode right now, so we’ve maybe acquired a dangerous instinct to workshop the universe. A degree of editorial autonomy has been our way to respect the stylistic integrity of each piece. If an editor is stoked about a story, she is who will be working with the author on edits and proofing. The logic being: if you like it, you’ll maybe do it justice.

GK: Over the past few years, we’ve also aimed to streamline the process by switching to an online submissions manager, eliminating the paper shuffle. Unsolicited submissions are assigned to readers. If a reader likes a piece she passes it onto the genre editors. If the genre editors are enthusiastic about the piece it goes on to the editors-in-chief. Ultimately, the editors-in-chief make the decisions as to what goes into the journal, taking into account the feedback and comments we receive from readers and genre editors. Throughout our production schedule, editors-in-chief regularly check in with each other, as well as with the genre editors, to determine what may be needed to round out an issue.

Who designs Salt Hill, and how do they come up with the aesthetic of each issue?

RA: Nadxieli Nieto Hall at NIETO Books (nietobooks.com) is our brilliant designer. When a grad student at Syracuse, Nadxi started designing our issues (and also served as an editor-in-chief, as well as the art editor and nonfiction editor) and during her time at Syracuse she revamped the entire design aesthetic to how it has looked for the past five years. Nadxi was also instrumental in making visual art a more prominent component of the journal. Today we receive a growing volume of unsolicited art submissions because of this. The overall visual aesthetic of each issue is determined first by the art editor, who usually reads a sampling of accepted work from other genres, consults with the editors-in-chief to solicit art that plays nicely off content, and then works with Nadxi on layout. We’ve been working on creating more crossover between art and the journal’s other genres.   Our upcoming issue, for instance, includes both a comic by Aaron $hunga, excerpts from a larger illustrated book by Faye Moorhouse, and drawings by cyberpunk writer Rudy Rucker. Issue 22 included Stefanie Posavec’s visual analyses of Kerouac’s sentence structures in On the Road, and issue 25 featured drawings by poet Michael Burkard.

Nadxieli Nieto Hall, Designer: Salt Hill is a wily beast and I love a wily beast. The main challenge is trying to keep the design somewhat consistent while allowing the editors-in-chief—which change every year—and art editors, to express their own aesthetic. It’s surely not something we’ve perfected, and some issues are more successful than others, but it is a good challenge issue to issue.

How does the magazine maintain continuity from one year to the next with the transitory nature of student-run magazines?

RA: Salt Hill doesn’t have a prevailing literary aesthetic on its sleeve, but the journal is a kind of microcosm of the readerly tastes of the Syracuse program. We’re not a one-vibe kind of place, but like any MFA program, there are vibes that tend to reoccur. So, in that sense, we don’t encounter a tough time hitting notes in certain registers again and again. But the practical how-to’s of managing and publishing a journal, yes, the turnover makes things difficult. We have a fat, three-ring binder that is passed down through the years like some secret society torch. The binder usually knows what’s up.  That, or the Gmail archives. Also having Nadxi on staff as our designer for all these years has been a blessing. She gets too many desperate, amateur-hour emails from us that she responds to with much grace.

GK: We’re very fortunate to have Nadxi’s design expertise. There’s something about Salt Hill looking the same from issue to issue that seems crucial to maintaining visual continuity. The journal is recognizable from one issue to the next. Content-wise, there’s carryover from year to year. All the editors have had previous experience with the journal in some capacity. Students entering the MFA program who wish to be involved with Salt Hill start out as readers, or as the Distributions Manager. By working on the journal, they get a feel for the work we publish and this tends to carry over to the next year when a few readers and/or the Distributions Manager are appointed genre editors.

What are some of your favorite pieces from Salt Hill 28? Why?

GK: One of my favorite pieces is Tony Trigilio’s “My soul sometimes floats out of my body./I don’t listen to the radio while driving.” I gravitate towards poetry that haunts via any number of craft-related feats—tone, image, subject, voice, to name a few that I think this poem employs to skillfully hit the mark. I also keep coming back to Oliver de la Paz’s “Labyrinth” poems. The prose poem form lends itself to the sustained bildungsroman narrative threaded through the five poems in Salt Hill 28. There’s also a bigness, perhaps even an epic sensibility, to these poems that strikes me. Also, I’m drawn to the dialogue in James Robison’s “Zurich.” There are interesting tonal and thematic echoes between this story and the art that precedes it from Frederik Heyman. I also find myself revisiting Casey Wiley’s nonfiction piece “Sgt. Slaughter” quite a bit. For me this nonfiction piece does description, voice, and nostalgia exceptionally well.

RA: I love Amy Benson’s “Outlaws and Citizens” and “Gone” from our nonfiction section. In these pieces, Benson documents her encounters with two art installations: video and projection artist Pipilotti Rist’s Heroes of Birth and the Starn Brothers’ “Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop,” which was a massive, nest-like sculpture built atop the Met in 2010. Instead of functioning as art criticism—Benson never names the exhibitions or the artists—the pieces become lyrical reflections on the personal, real-time experience of immersive art. I’m also partial to Jason Schwartz’s “Housepost, Male Figure.” Schwartz’s domestic objects—fences, shutters, doorknobs—become so ominous and uncanny in his sonic, crisp sentences. John Madera’s interview with Mary Caponegro is something I will continue to return to as well. Her discussion on digressive, idiosyncratic, phenomenological prose is honest, funny, and inspiring.  Few writers—Gary Lutz would be another—can speak as eloquently about the music of the sentence as Caponegro can.

What do you love most about editing?

GK: love encountering work that makes me excited about writing. Editing a literary magazine, I get to see some of the wide range of things happening in writing and that’s really exciting. Even if a piece isn’t the best fit for Salt Hill it’s still an enjoyable experience to come across such varying aesthetics and styles.

I also think it’s fun to be the one who contacts an author to share the news that Salt Hill is accepting a piece for publication. It’s satisfying to find outstanding work that will make an issue great, but that satisfaction is infinitely greater when the connection is made, contacting the author and witnessing that excitement.

I’m also fond of sequencing the book, the curatorial aspect to editing. Salt Hill doesn’t tend toward themed issues, but when we sit down to sequence an issue all the work seems to naturally coalesce. For example, in Salt Hill 28 so much of the content focused on the body, even though we hadn’t set out to search for work that addressed the body. The repetition and torque on this subject gave the issue a nice arc. It’s really quite eerie and perhaps speaks to some unconscious nodes that the editors-in-chief and genre editors mull over throughout a production schedule. I love that inexact science of editing. It’s an organized chaos. Each piece of content is distinct. Still, I’m always amazed at the cohesion, the echoes and reverberations we get across an issue.

RA: Besides the sequencing of each issue, I enjoy suggesting possible edits to an author. Thinking about how to improve a story without violating the author’s terms, keeping in mind his or her style and original conception of the piece while further refining its strengths. We are also cautious to honor an author’s grammatical choices and edit toward maintaining consistency across each piece in this respect. Meticulousness is rewarding. I also love when an author rejects an edit, especially when I believe I’ve come up with some inspired change and the author goes a different direction entirely or even better, flat-out refuses. I like to imagine us eye-rolling at each other across the internet. It’s an important lesson for writer and editor alike: learning what can go and what should never get axed and why.

When you’re done working with a writer, do you feel you’ve done the work justice?

RA: Justice in a cosmic sense? I don’t know, probably not. But there is an ingrained ethos at Salt Hill, which essentially amounts to that Wilde quote: a writer can survive anything but a misprint. After the alienating ordeal of submitting work to various publications—enduring rejection and setback, not to mention the xtreme endurance sport of actually writing—to have the work rushed to print or slapped together haphazardly is tantamount to heartbreak.

GK: It is a great deal easier, also much less time consuming, to send a rejection letter than to work with a writer on edits. But it’s satisfying to build a relationship with a contributor, to put in that time because I care about the work enough to get it firing on all cylinders. When a writer submits her work, it deserves attention and close reading, especially if the work reaches the stage of publication. I want the writers Salt Hill publishes to feel that the editors are attentive in their reading and careful in offering suggestions. Anything less feels like a disservice to the writer. So the short version is that I feel I have done the work justice when the writer and I have engaged in a conversation surrounding suggested edits and produced the most successful work possible. 

As editors, are you concerned about the proliferation of literary magazines and the very crowded market? Why or why not?

GK: Certainly not. If anything the proliferation of literary magazines strengthens my belief that right now is a really exciting time to be writing. There are so many literary magazines available that it makes the challenge of creating a distinct and recognizable journal that much more rewarding when we succeed. It’s really satisfying to hear from contributors and readers who admire Salt Hill with all the journals there are to read.

Sending a rejection is undoubtedly my least favorite part about editing.  But the large number of literary magazines means there are many opportunities out there for all kinds of writing, so there’s often a confidence that the work can find a home elsewhere.

RA: I don’t lose sleep over it, no. But I do think that given the crowded market and given the staggeringly good and innovative work available for free online, it behooves us paper-based journals to produce beautiful, singular objects. Small, student-run journals might consider emulating artists’ books more, aiming to assemble a more fetishistic product. Too many journals—regardless of the merits of the writing published—are indistinguishable when it comes to looks. Yeah, yeah: don’t judge by the cover, okay, but we don’t all have to be the string quartet on the decks of the Titanic, playing the same old dirge. We can be the string quartet in 3D. That’s one awful, clunky analogy, but the question sunken beneath it is this: faced with the given reality, why just go through the well-rosined motions?

What other magazines are you reading and enjoying?

GK: There are so many handsome journals to love. I picked up a few issues of Bat City Review and Gigantic at AWP that I’m really digging. Bateau selects some great work and is a beautiful journal. Each issue feels like an artifact. They publish striking books as well. I think Ninth Letter and New York Tyrant also are great journals that always have strong work happening in tandem with some nice-looking designs.

RA: NOON and Conjunctions are my mainstays. Recently I picked up the first issue of Unstuck, and it has quickly become a new favorite. I’m inspired by the projects coming out of Dexter Sinister and DIS Magazine.

What has editing taught you as writers?

GK: Editing has pushed me to recognize when my own work is not succeeding and how essential revision is to the process. It’s also taught me that belief in a piece is essential to publication. Editing inspires, perhaps even demands, belief in a poem or story, enough to publish work that’s operating at its best quality.

Also, to be on this end of the process increases my enthusiasm about submitting my own work and helps me accept any rejections. Because I’ve been in the position of saying, “We already have a story about ninja alien cats so while this is a good story, it’s too much ninja alien cats for one issue.” So in that respect, I’m more accepting of rejection as a natural occurrence in the submissions process. On the flip side though, having edited and sent acceptances, I know it happens, that this isn’t some weird numbers game, that if the work demonstrates quality writing and is a good fit for a journal, it will get accepted.

RA: Basically everything Gina said.

What are some trends you see in submissions? 

David Nutt, Fiction Editor: When we get short pieces, say 1 to 3 pagers, they skew towards the strange, the surreal, the deadpan, the fragment. The longer submissions, and most of them are longer, tend to be nicely groomed, well-behaved animals. Sometimes too well-behaved. The humor is mild, polite. The tone is self-aware and sincere. In general they take relationships as their capital topic. Sepia-tinged eulogies for the halcyon days of adolescence, embarrassing moments from my idiot twenties, amusing anecdotes about amusing friends who suddenly turned into tragic figures one drunk night in an empty riverbed. That sort of thing. The weakest of these usually suffer from clunky exposition, needless and awkwardly shoehorned back-story, too much narrative handholding. The strong mongrels always leap out. They start fast, sometimes indecently, and plunge us right into the muck of things, plowing forward without bothering to heed the creaky mechanics of narrative convention. They come at their subjects a little sideways. Witness James Robison’s “Zurich.” In lesser hands this story would be a tidy slice of domestic melodrama. Instead it’s simultaneously manic, sweet, and caustic. Kind of miraculous.

GK: I’ve read and edited Salt Hill for three years now so I have seen such a variety of things come through the mailbag and, most recently, the online submissions manager. I’ve been on the poetry end of things so I can speak mostly to that genre. We receive a great number of prose poems, which is fantastic and exciting; it’s always interesting to see how the writer has adapted and used the form. Another trend is the series, which is most successful when it does its work in the manuscript rather than the cover letter. It’s nice to know the poems are from a larger project, but beyond that any explanation tends to make me disenchanted with the work. Sometimes there are also smaller trends like recurring words or themes. For example, I recall a span of time during which the word “cochlea” and memento mori were frequent occurrences in the submissions manager, though I don’t recall seeing the two together in any one particular packet.

1. Last year, I watched a documentary called I Am Comic which featured comedians talking about the challenges and joys of performing comedy. I love watching stand up so I watch almost anything involving behind the scenes stuff about comedy. It was really interesting to see just how demanding and relentless it is to perform comedy. The kind of drive a comedian needs to succeed is intense. They are relentless in marketing themselves and completely shameless about it and I found that combination inspiring. Writers could benefit from that energy.

I tend to believe writers have to be the most vigorous advocates for themselves. If you won’t fight for your writing, who will? Closed mouths don’t get fed. I love that saying because it is so true. If you want an opportunity, ask for it. A lot of people believe there’s some kind of magical formula for certain writing and award opportunities but most of the time, it is writers who have chosen to advocate for themselves who benefit from these opportunities. Every day, I hear a writer lament about how uncomfortable they are with sharing something as innocuous as a link to their work. Relax. Share the damn link. If you write and submit your work to a magazine and consent to have that work published, you want to be read. Accept that you want to be read. Make peace with yourself. There is no shame in it. There is a difference between self-promotion and being obnoxious. In the time you Tweeted about feeling bad about sharing a link you could totally just share the link.

2. John Scalzi has provided handy links to the Hugo short story nominees. Expand those reading horizons!

3. Electric Literature is doing a Kickstarter for their Recommended Reading project. You might also become a member of the Los Angeles Review of Books which consistently produces excellent literary commentary.

4. Here are some great free e-books.

5.What the hell is going on with this season of Survivor?  They assembled the stupidest cast in the history of reality television casts, and that is quite a feat. Each episode I am struck by how everything continues to go awry for everyone. It’s baffling.

6. Anna Leigh Clark compiled a great annotated guide to the journalism and arts & letters Pulitzers.

7. I’ve been thinking about James Salter as I continue to familiarize myself with his work and I am particularly impressed by his descriptive power, both in A Sport and a Pastime, and Last Night.

I was also thinking about this whole men’s versus women’s fiction business and how writing really cannot be measured by gender.

In each story, in Last Night, Salter describes people and places and how people fill places with exacting detail very reminiscent of, say, Edith Wharton, where each detail both describes a scene or a moment and opens up the story in new ways. Salter’s story, “My Lord You,” begins, “There were crumpled napkins on the table, wine-glasses still with dark remnant in them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie. Beyond the bluish windows the garden lay motionless beneath the birdsong of summer morning. Daylight had come. It had been a success except for one thing: Brennan.”

In Chapter Five of Wharton’s Age of Innoncence, “A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the young man. The house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire.”

There are more similarities  than differences between these two passages (a rich sense of place, the implication of more story than is being told, clean prose), which makes the fact that we spend so much time talking about women’s fiction and the like, a bit perplexing.

8. What has always impressed me about soap operas is how the genre has mastered serial storytelling. We applaud primetime television shows for staying on the air for 100 episodes when there are soap operas who have celebrated 10,000 episodes on the air. Year after year, they tell the same stories about the same characters but they do so in a way that keeps people watching. Or they did. Over the past few years, soap operas have been dying, fairly quietly. As the World Turns was cancelled. Guiding Light was cancelled. All My Children and One Life to Live are now cancelled. Thankfully, my beloved General Hospital remains unscathed but as any soap fan now knows, it is only a matter of time before the remaining soap operas disappear and daytime television becomes littered with unscripted lifestyle programming. As I’ve continued to think about writing novels and teaching the writing of novels, I have been oddly inspired by soap operas and what they do (and don’t do) well in long form storytelling.

9. The Guardian has a wonderful interview with Toni Morrison.

10. Google Art Project has added new works (via Missouri Review). 

11. Anne Helen Petersen decoded Beyoncé’s new Tumblr and her analysis is exceptional.

12. Eastbound and Down  is over. What a show.

13. Joel Stein wants adults to read adult books.

14.

Book giveaways:

Two new books are out now or soon–the paperback version of Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones, which I reviewed last March, and Helen Keller In Love by Rosie Sultan. I have a copy of each to give away. I’ll do a random commenter drawing on Friday, so if you want one of these books, comment between now and Friday and say which book you would like to read.

It’s all these damn faces. They’re all over issue 28 of Salt Hill, and I can’t get them out of my mind. Frederik Heyman’s watercolors and pencils grace both the cover and an inside portfolio—faces in profile, faces looking at the reader, ghostly watercolored faces looking at each other. Then on page one, before the title of the journal or the table of contents or anything else, we’re confronted with the first of Andrew Jilka’s many pencil drawings. The Jilka drawings resonate. They’re layered and repeated, almost like a collage, close-up drawings of faces twisted in ecstasy and reproduced over and over—each time the same face, yet each slightly different. Mouth wide, eyes screwed shut or gaping. The Jilka drawings are meant to be sexual, reverent, and horrifying.

How fitting then to find Maile Chapman’s wondrous short story “Foreign Wedding,” where looking at other people, faces thrust together, examining each other’s movement and motivations, figures so heavily.

The nameless narrator is an American woman attending a wedding in Aix. As she says “it’s hard to have confidence about pronouncing the name at first. But people who’ve been there say it easily: Aches.” Still reeling from her recent divorce, the woman feels fragile and lost. She’s an outsider both literally, she doesn’t seem to know anyone else at the wedding, and only barely knows the bride, but also emotionally: “Of course I’m tired of feeling like this. Of course I would rather feel normal. But really, nothing seems to help.”

In the hands of a lesser author the narrator’s depression and isolation would grow tedious, but Chapman renders her character’s interiority so well that we remain intrigued by the woman and wonder if she’ll find any measure of happiness on this misguided vacation.

The woman is such an outsider that all she can do is look at other people. All she does is look, and it’s almost as if she’s not really there: “Later, when I looked at the photos online after the bride sent around the links, I didn’t see myself anywhere, in any of them.”

She watches old women watch the wedding procession, she watches guests at a party and tenses when she feels them glancing over at her. These glances solidify into an encounter with a Frenchmen, at least ten years younger than the narrator, who notices her staring at him.

Her relationship with the Frenchmen forms the heart of the story. When they look at each other, she’s convinced that she knows him: “His eyes were tired in the way of a person who doesn’t acknowledge his own tiredness, even to himself.”

“Foreign Wedding” is about seeing, understanding, and reading people. She can tell the groom is nice by looking at him, she can tell the man is decent by the way he looks at her during her panic. But this same examination is what she’s afraid of. When she invites the man into her room she can’t face him: “I turned my head because I didn’t want to be looked at, and I didn’t want to be kissed, and if he thought this was strange, at least I didn’t have to see that in his face.”

She doesn’t want to be examined, eyeballed, read, or understood. The woman spends the rest of the story trying to escape the man’s gaze and failing to do so. She sneaks out of the hotel but accidentally jumps into his car. The man follows her when she rents a car and drives out of town. Trying to lose him on the road just makes the man think she’s playing a game, teasing him.

The weight of eyes threatens to crumble her psyche. Try as she might to escape being looked at, being understood, she can’t do it. The story ends with a jolting bit of violence that hinges around someone looking at her and paying a price. It’s tragic. Yet the final image of the story is of another woman, a stranger, looking in the narrator’s direction but not actually seeing her.

Maybe this is a happy ending. She escaped detection. She finally escaped the weight of faces, which the reader of Salt Hill cannot do, since there’s just another painting a few pages later.

I admire Salt Hill because of the  strong writing found in each issue and the impeccable production values. I first learned about the magazine at AWP in 2009, when I came across their table and found  two issues, one a hardbound book, and the other, a paperback filled with glossy, color pages. In both instances, the design was gorgeous and clean and showed that the editors valued both form and function. Each issue looks different, not radically so, but enough to get the reader’s attention and in each issue there is always something that stuns me. Salt Hill 28 did not disappoint in this regard. Laura Eve Engel’s, “For You Out of Soft Materials,” is one of those poems I loved starting with the title, all the way through the last line. There is no unnecessary flourish in the language and still each stanza evokes something really interesting. I loved lines like Once I admitted I made my face/for you out of soft materials,/so you’d have a place to put all your fingers and the final stanza, There are all these ways/we can decide not to be very tender. Another standout was the work of H.L. Hix, and “Counterexamples,” with the last line, “You say what we can imagine matters most. I say what we cannot.” “Gown Rain,” by Sarah Rose Etter was as imaginative as I have come to expect from her. The sky is raining gowns, you see, an unstoppable downpour of fabric. The writing is as strong as the premise and the ending is both satisfying and unsettling. The strongest work in a very strong issue was, Maile Chapman’s exceedingly smart “Foreign Wedding.”  There’s a woman, likable in her unlikability, attending a foreign wedding, not connecting to anyone, just out of a marriage, having awkward encounters as she takes in France, and you think with all that you know where the story is going. “Foreign Wedding,” is not going there and the ending is not only unexpected, it is quite chilling. The issue also contains art and an interview with Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia.

Have you read Salt Hill 28? What did you think? What pieces stood out to you? Why? Why is Ben Mirov’s “Destruction Manual” oriented differently? Did some of the art disturb you?

Let’s talk in the comments.

Coming up, an interview with the editors and a guest post about “Foreign Wedding.”

If you’re interested in writing a guest post or some other feature related to Salt Hill 28, get in touch by e-mailing me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. Topics you might consider discussing include the design, content, overall aesthetic, whether the magazine met your expectations, what the magazine contributes to the literary scene, etc. You might also do an in-depth analysis of one writer’s work, etc. There are no limits.

CONTRIBUTORS

POETRY

Ciaran Berry, Bruce Bond, Brett DeFries, Jennifer Denrow, Laura Eve Engel, John Gallaher, H.L. Hix, Bridget Lowe, Ben Mirov, Oliver de la Paz, Wang Ping, Nate Pritts, Zachary Schomburg, John Skoyles, Tony Trigilio, Dara Wier

FICTION

Mark Baumer, Maile Chapman, Sarah Rose Etter, James Robison, Jason Schwartz

NONFICTION

Interview of Dana Spiotta by Rachel Abelson, Interview of Maile, Chapman by Chanelle Benz and Natalie Rogers, Interview of Mary, Caponegro by John Madera, Amy Benson, Casey Wiley

ART

Frederik Heyman, Andrew Jilka, Anders Oinonen

Abby Koski talks about the issue briefly at Vouched Books. This is a beautiful magazine and one you do not want to miss.

LMC Administrivia:

Future club selections:

May 2012: Trnsfr
July 2012: Uncanny Valley
September 2012: J Journal: New Writing on Justice
November 2012: Unstuck

Stay tuned for special offers and giveaways for these magazines.

There’s also a Google Group with light posting about literary magazines and club announcements. If you want to join the group or want more information about the LMC, if you’re an editor who wants your magazine featured, etc, send me an e-mail. To summarize: however you want to participate please get in touch or watch this space in November when hopefully, we’ll have a great discussion about an interesting literary magazine.

It is June 1993 and I’m halfway through a roadtrip that will kill a friendship. I’ve fled the campground for the beach, trudging through the sandy tunnel under the highway with a notebook and a copy of An Atlas of the Difficult World. Because I can’t imagine spending fifteen dollars to tour Hearst Castle, my roadtrip companion has gone off to do it herself, in a huff. I take my chair, my notebook, my Adrienne Rich volumes and head out to the beach, free for two or three hours to read and write.

The trip is going very badly, and I can’t quite articulate why, even to myself. I am 29 years old, in the summer between a masters and Phd program.  I’ve started a novel, and been admitted to a PhD program where I hope I’ll have time to finish it. I’m terrified of taking on more debt but stopping now means I’ll have to get a “real” job to pay off the MA I’ve just finished, and if I do that I doubt I’ll finish my novel. I’m betting on myself in a way that seems outrageous. I’m broke, but I’ve always been broke, so I’m used to it, but my friend is not, and although I told her before we started that I didn’t have any money, she seems startled by how little money no money actually is.

My friend is a woman I’d worked with back east. We’d spent a summer guiding rafts and living in a community of hippie boaters, but in the intervening years she’s married and has put her adventurous years behind her. I’m a mother now, she keeps telling me, as if it explains everything, as if it justifies every convention. Her husband comes from one of those families with enough money that she doesn’t have to worry about houses or schools or replacing the expensive bike that was stolen at the beginning of our trip. She’s  giddy with the idea that she’s left her two small boys with their perfectly competent father, has taken the mommy-van, is on a road trip with me, her “funky” single friend. She seems to think we’re Thelma and Louise. However I have disappointed her to the extent that she’s spent the past few days accusing me of not being married, of not having kids, out of selfishness. It’s the same fight I’ve been having with my mother for several years. My girlfriend is angry that I don’t care about Hearst Castle, or about gift shops. She won’t let me drive, claims she gets carsick on the curves, complains that there aren’t enough guardrails. Then she complains about driving. The trip was a mistake, but I still won’t spend fifteen bucks on Hearst Castle, not even to keep the peace, and frankly all I want at this point is a couple of hours to myself.

And so I’ve taken Adrienne Rich with me out to the beach that afternoon, looking to her as always, to reassure me that being a woman does not mean having to get married. That not being married does not mean I’m a failure. That children are not the entire point of a woman’s life and that writing is not self-indulgence. That it is real work.

The first book of poetry I ever bought for myself was A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. I was sixteen, a senior in high school. I remember crouching on my heels to read the poetry shelf in the Lake Forest Bookshop. It was near the floor. I remember the pebbly taupe cover, those thrilling words. A wild patience.

I come from a family of ruined women. Toxic marriages, bad divorces, alcohol and cigarettes and depression. You kids go outside. It was clear that we ruined our mothers lives. They were stuck with us when the unreliable husbands went missing. There were whispers of bedroom humiliations, accusations of mental illness, and always the clink of ice cubes in glasses, the smell of cigarettes.

We were fallen gentry, living amid the debris of former glory — portraits of ancestors on the walls of cheap rentals, scattered bits of old silver, a Chinese screen, a good chair.  The expectations were those of a class to which we no longer financially belonged. Marry early, marry well, start having kids two years apart. Buy a nice house, buy the right clothes, join the club, play tennis. But I ran off, guided rafts in the southeast, lived in a shack called “the Low Post,” then went west, skiied and hiked and worked odd jobs. Even graduate school was not a triumph — I borrowed money for degrees in creative writing. It wasn’t law school. How was I supposed to restore us with such foolishness?

Through the long fight to get clear of the expectations that as “the smart one” I’d some how make it up to them, that I’d somehow achieve the marriage and family and financial success that eluded all of them, it was Adrienne Rich and Doris Lessing who sustained me. Women my mother’s age. Women who fought their own ways clear, who never wavered in the belief that the interior life had value.

That day on the beach I was reading for my life. And as in all those instances where I turned to her, Adrienne Rich’s work was there, shining with the fierce conviction that our lives were what we wanted them to be. Adrienne Rich came to my rescue again that day on the beach at Cambria. I knew she was a few miles north of that beach, an actual woman in an actual California. In a little house like the one I imagined for myself. With a desk. Where she was writing. I knew that she had done it, had broken free of the story she’d been told about her life. And just as it had years earlier, when I’d found that first volume on the bottom shelf of my hometown bookstore, Rich’s work once again provided the essential handhold up and out of a life I didn’t want, a life I knew would ruin me.

If there is an afterlife, I hope she has some idea of what she meant to us, how crucial she was. I hope that wherever she might be that she knows how internet has been abuzz with tributes these past few days, knows that she knocked the pope off the front page of the New York Times site, knows that her death has been an event. That despite the current regressive war on women, that what she stood for has become ordinary in the best way. She already saved my life, that day on the beach, when her work got me through my doubts, reassured me that taking a risk on my own words, my own inner life, was not selfish, but the opposite, the thing we were put here to do. She saved all of our lives. With words. With her selfish, glorious, fierce words.

Charlotte McGuinn Freeman is the author of Place Last Seen. She lives in Livingston, Montana where writes about food, gardening, dogs and wilderness at Livingsmallblog.com. In recent years she’s been published in Big Sky Journal, Culinate.com, Bookslut and The Best Food Writing of 2010.

YOU

want to run a nationally recognized micro indie press. like head honcho big mamma jamma.

want to work with Lidia Yuknavitch.

want to reinvent online, print publication, and cross genre media projects.

YOU HAVE
big time digital savvy and skills, including web, blog and podcasting.

large experience with alternative press world–all facets.

impeccable literary and media counter culture taste.

crazy good organization skills.

a relentless desire to correct culture.

alternative forms of marketing do not frighten you. in fact, they turn you on.

you have big ideas everyone else thinks are nutso.

it’s likely you drink and enter altered states on occasion.

OTHER
compensation negotiable. if you know what “micro indie press” means then you have realistic expectations.

it is not mandatory that you live in Portlandia, though it would be helpful. We have heard of Skype and shit before though, so you know, we are down.

if this is YOU, send a 500 word description detailing your experience and desire and why we should pick YOU to: lidiamiles at yahoo.com by April 15.

yes, really.

ALL GONE. MORE SOON.

Cream of Kohlrabi by Floyd Skloot

Nothing Can Make Me Do This by David Huddle

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

Umberto Umberto Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto by Gianni Rodari

LA Is the Capital of Kansas by Richard Meltzer

Luminarium by Alex Shakar

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other by Stephanie Johnson

Traffic With Macbeth by Larissa Szporluk

Mama’s Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan

The Best Of (What’s Left of Heaven) by Mairéad Byrne

She’d Waited Millennia by Lizzie Hutton

A Man of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed by JA Tyler

The Hieroglyphics by Michael Stewart

The Nostalgia Echo by Mickey Hess

The Harbor by Ernest Poole

The Girl With the Crooked Nose by Ted Botha

Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Pocket Kings by Ted Heller

Dead Man Upright by Derek Raymond

The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

Until the Next Time by Kevin Fox

Dogma by Lars Iyer (2)

Radio Iris by Anne Marie Kinney

Red Weather by Pauls Toutonghi

Livability by Jon Raymond

Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy

God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet

Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw

The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost

When I was a kid, my mother assigned homework to my brothers and I in addition to any homework we may have been assigned in school. My mother’s homework was generally more of a priority. Some of her assignments came from Little Professor workbooks but most of her assignments came from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she made us read, a lot. I have, in my lifetime, read the entire compendium. I know things.

My mother would give us a page range and we’d read and write little reports on what we learned. Other times we had to do assignments that reflected critical thinking—comparing and contrasting different topics, creating new entries or using existing entries as the starting point for a story or article of some kind. At times, I did not understand why we were being forced to read that stupid thing, but I know now—my mother wanted, in her way, for us to understand that knowledge is important, that knowledge is a tool for better thinking.

Having an encyclopedia set in our home was a Big Deal. It was something my parents saved for, a major purchase. They bought it from a traveling salesman and when the set was first delivered, it was exciting to open the huge box and pull out the leather bound volumes, so many of them, the pages lined in gold. We weren’t allowed to touch the set with dirty fingers but we were never kept away from the encyclopedia. The volumes were kept on bookshelves easily accessible by little people. In my free time, I nerdily enjoyed flipping through the pages. It was really fun to read the encyclopedia when I didn’t have a specific task ahead of me. I have very fond memories of those encyclopedias which I still have though they are in storage now–not enough room, you know.

What always impressed me about Encyclopedia Brittannica is how it compiled a really wide breadth of knowledge for 244 years. It did so without the help of crowdsourcing, the way Wikipedia does. It did so without the benefit of the Internet and instant access to a wide range of information. A lot of work went into maintaining the encyclopedia, for so long, and relatively well. There were, certainly, flaws with the encyclopedia—it promoted the notion that knowledge requires gatekeepers and that knowledge is immutable. Not all of the information was necessarily correct. The encyclopedia had a lot of merits, though. When I wanted to learn about Egypt, I only needed to pull down the correct volume and I could learn something about a different part of the world. I could learn something about any number of topics and that was awesome. These days, I only need to direct my web browser to Wikipedia or Google but learning seemed like more of an adventure when I had to find something in a book.

It was with some sadness and a lot of nostalgia I read that the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer publish print volumes, focusing instead on their online offerings. This surrender to progress was inevitable. Wikipedia is also a flawed compendium of knowledge but it is unstoppable in its growth and the breadth of knowledge it contains. There’s also a lot more Encyclopedia Britannica can do with their digital offerings in terms of offering dynamic content. It makes more sense for all that knowledge to be easily accessible online than to have a 32-volume set taking up space, probably gathering dust. Change is mostly good.

Nonetheless, this is the end of an era. The older I get, the more I realize many eras are ending–we are saying goodbye to a lot of things we used to be able to have and hold. I’m not sure how I feel about having to say goodbye to all that.