The Importance of Being Editors
After I’d first begun serious work on my dissertation, the head of the English department greeted me at a semester-end shindig and asked what I was working on. “Magazines,” I said. “Little magazines, and the women who published or edited them.” I rattled off a few names—Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review, Bryher of Life and Letters To-day, Harriet Shaw Weaver of The Egoist—while he smiled very politely and nodded. “So,” he said when I paused, “are you going to write about anyone important?”
During my research, I realized fairly quickly the dynamics of literary prestige: writers and poets top the list as artistic geniuses, fueled by inspiration and the undeniable importance of their work, followed distantly by those astute patrons whose money and connections carried artists through difficult times, and finally, often, in the way back, editors and publishers toiling long hours to ensure the publication of that genius. I’ve spent more than enough time debating the viability of this ranking. What strikes me now is how that order ignores the romance of magazines: the excitement of whiskey-fueled editorial clashes, the late nights spent setting and resetting type, the unpredictability of funding, and the unrelenting pace of monthly or quarterly or even semi-annual production. Most people, it seems, want to be the geniuses. Me, I want to publish them.
Today, I am the managing editor at the Massachusetts Review, a quarterly “little magazine” that is over five decades old, with a history of publishing Pulitzer and Nobel prizewinners, and a dedication to, as its tagline reads, “Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs.” Along with new and exciting voices, our current issue features art by a 2013 MacArthur “Genius Award”-winner; Winter will include previously unpublished translations by John Ashbery; the Spring is full of award winners, including new work by Mira Bartok. Winter is being put to bed as I type this, and Spring production starts in two weeks.
The pace of magazine publication engenders access to great new work—authors are in print within weeks, not months or years—and it also enables a willingness to take risks, to be timely in a way that book publishing makes difficult. There is both more and less at stake in magazines. More, because we can respond quickly to new ideas, new artists, and underground rumblings—as the history of MR’s collaboration with African-American intellectuals, civil rights activists, and international voices demonstrates. Less, because as a quarterly (or monthly or weekly) publication, a magazine can take risks knowing that there is always another issue in the pipeline in which to correct, refine, or elaborate on an idea.
I was reminded of this when I first joined the staff. Jim, the executive editor, handed me a book given to him by Jules Chametzky, a co-founder of MR. Encounters: A Memoir recounts the life of photographer and editor Dorothy Norman, best known for her art and her affair with Alfred Stieglitz, but also the founder of Twice A Year: A Semi-Annual Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, which launched in 1938, ran for ten years, and published Kafka, Anaïs Nin, Stieglitz (of course), and others.
There are plenty of unrecognizable names as well, because prestige wasn’t part of the original plan. Like Margaret Anderson, who confessed to starting Little Review because she wanted “the best conversation the world had to offer,” Norman’s conception of publishing included not simply providing access to art but, as Lewis Mumford wrote in an early letter to her, “bringing into a social-intellectual relationship the creative spirits around [her],” through a magazine that was “capable of drawing [artists] out of the narrower orbit of their egos.”
As her journal of “Art and Action” developed, Norman describes working with an editor who resisted debate and dissent within their pages: Indeed, she says, while “publishing opposite opinions help[ed] clarify my own beliefs,” she found herself fighting to publish “unliterary” work like one essay on conscientious objectors, which she called “a most important document of our time.” In addition to photography and fiction, Norman peppered her magazine with civil rights briefings, debates about the War, and questions of art. Like Anderson, who published both Emma Goldman and James Joyce, Norman embraced the possibilities of magazine work in all its risky flexibility.
The most recent issue of MR, the one that hit shelves just as I hit the office, is subtitled “W. E. B. Du Bois in His Time and Ours.” Published on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, which happened one day before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic March on Washington, the issue features essays from the archives, including an early autobiographical piece by Du Bois himself, and contemporary responses to his influence. In a gorgeous insert, readers find reproductions of art created in celebration of Du Bois for the UMass Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s a thrilling issue, one that captures precisely why MR exists, and why “little magazines” are so important.
I am excited to continue this work, helping the magazine move into the twenty-first century without losing sight of what made its longevity possible. New media outlets and social media platforms perhaps risk emphasizing the ephemerality of magazine publishing, but they also make possible new levels of engagement with art, public affairs, literature, and culture. I look forward to publishing voices and ideas both emerging and established, canonical and revolutionary, and to taking my place within a tradition of people who may not themselves be “important,” but whose work certainly is.
