Trauma at the VQR and the Paris Review; or: the Struggle to Make Lit-Mags Relevant
Two recent literary-journal controversies, both tragic in wildly different ways, have left me with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.
This summer, the lit-mag-blog-osphere was on fire with the news that the Paris Review had rescinded some poetry acceptances - stuff accepted under one editor was rejected by a new editor because it didn’t jibe with their new vision for the journal. Can you imagine? Getting an acceptance from the Paris Review - with all the life-changing that would come along with that - and then being told “sorry, no.” I’d be devastated. Good info on and coverage of the issue was included here, here, and here.
Last month, the managing editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review committed suicide. From the look of things, his relationship with the journal’s allegedly bullying editor was a big factor there - and at least one person is arguing that that’s partly because Ted Genoways was trying to “elevat[e] what had previously been a respected but quiet literary journal into one of America’s best magazines” (other good coverage: here, here, and here). As someone who has struggled with clinical depression my whole adult life, and watched people I love do the same, suicide is something I find profoundly disturbing and upsetting. Because when you can see that gulf up close, you know how real and truly dreadful it is, the head-space of being where such a horrific act actually makes sense. So I don’t even want to think about the sadness and suffering of his friends and family, let alone the pain he must have been going through.
I adore both these literary journals. I have a tiny moral problem financially supporting journals that are obviously doing so much better than many smaller struggling presses, BUT I subscribe to them because I know I will find amazing writing. Period. Fiction, poetry, essays - the caliber of writing in both places is top-notch. Not uniquely top-notch, there’s tons of other excellent places I also subscribe to - but I’d definitely say their “market share supremacy,” or whatever the stupid economics term is, is deserved.
But here’s what troubles me about my own response to these incidents (which on one level I have a hard time grouping together, because in the face of suicide it’s hard to waste tears on a rejected poem - no matter who it was rejected by, or how f*cked-up it is to be accepted and then rejected). I have a strong sympathy for this whole notion of editors trying to radically re-invent their journals. Because really radical change is needed. Because in spite of the numerical proliferation of journals, in spite of all the amazing writing that gets published every year, in spite of the vibrant community of amazing people who write and love good writing and love talking and writing about good writing, for whom these journals are a crucial source of daily joy, as they are for me, I fear that the literary journal is too much an island unto itself. I say this not because of any doom-and-gloom analyses in blogs or the editorial pages of these same journals (although there’s an endless stream of both of those things), but as a writer who, when I tell my friends about some amazing new publication credit (LIKE MY STORY “BLACK BABE” IN THE UPCOMING ISSUE OF SLICE!!), gets blank stares. Because no one’s ever heard of these places. Because people who are not writers do not know that these places exist. It sounds like an oversimplification, and maybe I’m just hanging out with the wrong non-writers, but it’s real.
On the one hand, that’s cool. I love my community of writers and readers and editors and bloggers. I love my relationships with the people who publish me, and the people whose great work runs alongside mine. Our communities should be complete unto themselves - I believe that my beloved queer community will continue to thrive and survive without the slightest bit of attention or respect or money from folks outside our community.
On the other hand, it’s not just about the money. It’s about how we all belong to MANY communities. To continue the analogy with the queer community: nobody’s just queer - they might be queer and of color, for example, so they are part of communities of color both straight and queer. Queer and Southern. Queer and from upstate New York. Queer and Asian American. Queer and Southern and Asian American. I’m queer and Jewish, and my relationships with queer AND straight Jews are really important to me. I’m a writer AND a community organizer, and it makes me sad that literary journals are so completely outside the world of many of my comrades in the social justice movement. Lots of other awesome community organizers happen to be great creative writers, but our artistic life is partitioned off in a dark room somewhere.
As writers, how do we function in a world where no one knows what we’re doing? Of course our loved ones follow our writing, read our stories, buy our stuff when it comes out, support us through the ups and downs, but I can’t be the only one who feels absolutely certain that the vast majority of people I really care about and are not writers do not subscribe to a single literary journal.
So it’s not a frivolous issue, this question of how relevant and widely-read and financially-secure and “mainstream” a literary journal is. It’s not about whether editors are after money and fame and glory - or not JUST about that. It’s at the very heart of who we are as artists and how we function in the world (…nor is it a new question, for that matter, brought on by the fact that supposedly no one reads anymore because of the internet (or television before that, or cinema before that)).
I don’t know the people at VQR or the Paris Review. Any of them. I want to step back from the deep (if relative) trauma in both of these cases, which have provoked hundreds of impassioned blog comments and emails. I’m not talking about any people or personalities. I’m talking about a dynamic that I spend a lot of time stressing out about. Who reads us? And how can we get our work in front of new people who will care about it? And how might that involve changing the way we do things? And how traumatic will that be? And how can we do it in a way that respects but challenges writers and editors and unpublished fledglings and Guggenheim fellows in equal measure? And what are the risks? And what might be the benefits?
Thirteenth Century Illuminated Manuscript, from the Cloisters in NYC. Photo by me.
September 7th, 2010 at 11:13 am
This was a really interesting post. The Paris Review debacle was handled so poorly. I agree it would be devastating to have a poem de-accepted. I know I would recover but still, it would be such a disappointment. The VQR thing is so very sad. There’s little else to be said about the situation but I do think it opens a larger conversation about ambition and literary magazines and how magazines are funded and what it takes for literary magazines to achieve national prominence. I suspect it requires a bit of ruthlessness, but is it worth the cost? I also think about this issue you raise about community. What do we owe to each other as writers? How do we maintain a sense of community when writing is such an isolating endeavor? Do we need community? Anyway, this was a great post. I enjoyed everything you had to say.