For me, one of the highlights of 2016 was being invited to
serve as keynote speaker at the annual FUSE Conference—that’s the Forum for
Undergraduate Student Editors, and its conference was held during Winter Wheat:
The Mid-American Review Festival of
Writing, which I helped to found, and where I was a featured reader in 2016.
Here is the text of my remarks, which are about editing and literary
citizenship.
Hello,
editors! It’s so nice to be here among my people—people who spend their
time—without the benefit of pay, in most cases—putting other writers’ work in
front of the public, either digitally or in print. It’s important work.
Sometimes it feels like holy work, or a calling. And you’re doing the work, and
if you’re like me, you’re learning so much about writing in the process. There
is no creative writing class you can take that offers quite as effective a
lesson in where you can go wrong in a poem, essay, or story. I’m still learning
these lessons through my own editing practices, every single day.
And it’s
especially nice to have an opportunity to talk about literary citizenship, a
topic that is close to my heart. I was among the group of editors who created
this festival, the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, sixteen years ago, and
it’s my own greatest contribution to the literary community. I’m intensely
proud of it—how it provides a chance for all kinds of writers, students,
faculty, and people from the region, beginner or advanced, published or
unpublished—to come together and talk about something so essential to our very
selves. Our writing is so often an artifact of the spirit, a product of effort
and hope, a reflection of our deepest selves. We all have that in common.
Writing matters to all of us who engage in it, whether we’ve never published a
thing or we have ten of our own books on our shelves. Look around. These are
your fellow adventurers—people who dive into murky and dangerous waters and come
up with the occasional pearl.
If you’ll
look around, too, you’ll see a bunch of people whose role it is to hold a
jeweler’s loop up to some reasonably well-formed pearls and still say, “Nope.”
What we bring up from deep inside of us is always worthy, always important, but
it’s not always enough, from a literary standpoint, to justify publication. And
so we reject people we know to be our fellow sufferers, not because their
deepest truths are insufficient, but because there’s another part of the equation:
the writing has to be impeccable. We look at work and we judge its form, its
language, its rhetoric, its syntax, and if it misses on any level, we send a
rejection—kindly worded, I hope, with the compassion the offering of an
artifact of the spirit requires.
This is a key point. If we are
rejecting writers and we don’t have in the back of our minds their
vulnerability—their risk and exposure—we are doing them a disservice. I hate to
say it, but I was at my worst when I was on the staff of my own undergraduate
literary journal. Work came in and we judged it with names removed, and saying
no to it felt empowering. I looked at poems and stories that weren’t working,
and sometimes I knew I was a better writer, and that realization gave me a
charge and affirmed me in my path.
But I didn’t always look on the
rejected work with compassion. I sometimes rolled my eyes. I sometimes shared a
funny passage with the other editors gathered around the table. We had a lot of
good laughs in those days—laughs garnered at the expense of people who had,
mind you, sent us what they regarded as their best work, work that they would
have been proud to share with the readers of our magazine. Those writers didn’t
picture their work being mocked by a circle of editors, but we did it, and at
the time doing so felt cathartic—but it was wrong. (I should note that it was
also completely contrary to the example of our adviser.)
I’d venture to guess that I’m not
the only one here who has done this. Maybe others in this room have read comically
bad excerpts aloud, or at least others have laughed when their fellow editors
have done so. I hope I’m not alone in this, on one level, although I also kind
of hope I am. I value literary community, and that community benefits if I’m
the only jerk in the room. I’m a jerk who is mostly reformed, with a few lapses
from time to time, but I’d be willing to be the only one. I’d be happy to bear
that burden—the label of editor-jerk, which I’ve earned from past misdeeds.
But we’re all jerks sometimes. This
work is hard and our decisions have the power to hurt people. A good laugh can
release some pressure and give us the will to stay on task. Sometimes a
writer’s missteps are, frankly, hilarious. Sometimes our own goofs as writers
are equally hilarious—but because we’ve learned so much from the act of
editing, we very seldom send the funny stuff out.
But some things feel much better
than writing. When you engage in the kinds of literary citizenship we witnessed
here at this conference today—walk-in workshops, guerrilla poetry posting,
community zine-making—you’re contributing to community, and it feels amazing,
and much more enduring than a laugh. For me, Winter Wheat feels very good. I
don’t get to come every year anymore, but I like knowing that it continues, and
year after year, writers have a chance to get together and celebrate words,
while also learning ways to make their own words line up a little bit better.
We started Winter Wheat when I was
first out of grad school, but I also had a hand in founding a similar festival
when I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s. Remarkably, it also endures in a
different form. For the Spring Arts Festival at Morehead State, we gathered
everyone who did any art at all and we roped them in to contribute to our
effort. The theater department had mimes giving out invisible flowers on the streets.
The fraternities and sororities chalked the sidewalks. People from the art
department put up installations. Ensembles from the music department set up on
the lawn outside the student union. And traditional artists from the surrounding
Appalachian Mountains came and demonstrated weaving and other crafts. We showed
art films. We tried building with clay. And we had readings and open mics,
putting literature at the core of an arts event. That was very empowering.
Laughing together over funny
moments in submissions builds a small community. The dozen people on your staff
have a better time doing the work they’ve volunteered to do. But it is
incomparably great—and my experience suggests that it is much more enduring—to
build community and to nurture and support writers.
So, here’s the key question that we
must keep asking ourselves: Why do we edit literary journals?
Obviously, we edit to gain
experience and understanding. Through our discussions, we learn to articulate
our aesthetic judgment, and as writers ourselves, usually, we also build
empathy and understanding for the people on the other side of the transom.
Those are some of the chief personal benefits, and they are great.
But editing is also a service. We
do it to serve several other constituencies: our staff members, our readers,
and our writers—three communities that overlap in many ways. This is actually a
crisis in our field; very few people read journals unless they’re in them or
trying to be. I don’t know anyone, aside from the occasional student intern
with an interest in publishing, who messes around with litmags but isn’t a
writer.
This sounds like a digression, but
hear me out. I was recently at a Cracker Barrel restaurant with its kind of
cheesy, fun gift shop. They had this toy, and I don’t know what you call it,
but if you hold it in one hand it doesn’t do anything. (Not a great toy,
seemingly!) But, here’s the thing—if you hold it in two hands, it lights up and
plays holiday songs.
I wish I had this toy here today,
because it would be fun to show you an experiment. I could hold this toy in my
one hand and then grab the hand of the person closest to me, who could grab
another hand and so on in a circle, and as long as we were to complete the
connection, we would get the lightshow and the music. (Maybe there’s a limit to
how many people could be in this theoretical circle for the toy to work, but in
the metaphor I’m about to slap you upside the head with, the number is
limitless.)
This little toy is an excellent
metaphor for editing. As editors, we act as conduits for a very significant
spark.
There is electricity in the
creative act. In writing, we usually sit alone somewhere—at a desk, maybe—and
we forge a connection with something. This idea of connection is very key to my
creative process. Art comes from my intellect, clearly, but there is also a
source. Jung called it the collective unconscious. Yeats referred to it as the
Spiritus Mundi—the spirit of the world. For the Romantics, this spark was found
in nature, and the ancient Greeks attributed it to actual gods, the Muses, who
visited them with inspiration.
I guess we all have our own ideas
about where art comes from, but I credit
divine source that matches up with my construction of God—a river of
everything, of cosmic memory and intelligence. This source accounts for those
pinnacle moments when we look closely at an emerging draft and we see something
unexpected, like a system of imagery we didn’t intend, or a shift that occurred
unplanned, but that adds a layer of meaning.
If you believe in electricity as an
impetus for art—even if it’s an electrical synapse firing in the brain—the toy
metaphor I offered earlier becomes especially relevant to a room full of
editors. It is our job, after all, to transfer that divine spark from that very
private place and moment in time to the readers. We close the circuit from the
writer’s desk or corner table in a coffee shop (or, at least once for me, a
bare leg and a Sharpie!), and in doing so we move along the energy from the
writer into the world.
I guess it’s appropriate that I’m
giving this talk in a chapel! I don’t necessarily think we need to regard this
as a spiritual concept; it still works to think of our work pragmatically, or
even capitalistically. A writer makes a thing, and we distribute it. I have a
terrible time thinking of it so starkly, though, because the “thing” might
change a reader’s life, or even save it. I know I’ve been transformed and saved
by poetry many times, and it’s a solemn duty to be entrusted with something so,
well, electric.
Editing for me has never been about
making a journal. That is a truly challenging, enjoyable part of the job, but
for me, editing is mostly about this connection.
In editing, I try to connect with
submitters, even those whose work is not chosen. I always thank them, and I try, too, to have predictable policies for
them (e.g., I would never close a reading period unannounced; most journals get
a lot of submissions, and it’s important to work through them while putting the
needs of the submitters before the needs of the editors). Additionally, I never
play favorites. I may on rare occasions solicit work to try to improve
diversity or to raise the cachet of the journal, but generally, every submitter
is read the same way, and no invitations are offered casually.
Back when we read paper
submissions, I was famous for my smileys. It’s a strange thing to be known for,
isn’t it? But I’d put a note of personal thanks and a smiley face on every
rejection—and that grin was certainly not a symbol of mockery, but one of
friendship and esprit de corps; we’re all, as writers and readers, in this
endeavor together. When I’m at a writing event, such as the AWP Conference,
people still come up to me all the time and thank me for my smiling rejections (and
occasional acceptances). They appreciated that I made things personal. It took
away the sting and offered encouragement.
As an editor, I also try to connect
with readers. At the last journal I served as editor-in-chief—and it was a
large national journal—most issues that we distributed were in envelopes my own
hand had actually touched. I was usually the one who made the labels, stamped
on the return addresses, sorted out the recipients who had perished since the
last mailing, inserted a discounted subscription offer (since editors are honor
bound to always try to build audiences). If you subscribed during those years,
I may have licked your envelope. Real editorial DNA with every issue!
Of course, in the daily work of
putting together a litmag, we also work with our fellow staff members, and it
has been an incredibly gratifying part of my professional life to work hard
with so many people on a shared mission. Sometimes when the work takes place
online, we don’t even know our fellow editors’ faces—these may be people we’ve
passed in airports, completely oblivious to the fact that a good friend was
near. But we are committed to the same goals—to passing along the spark, and to
getting as many readers as we can for the writers whose work is entrusted to
us.
Editing a journal is all about
building community—a community of a staff with a shared mission, a community of
writers, and a community of readers. As I leave you today, I encourage you to
ask yourselves what you might do to create and nurture community.
The questions we must ask are
these: How can I encourage and support writers? How can I forge lasting
relationships with my fellow editors? How can I reach the maximum number of
readers? And most importantly, how can I share the discovery and the magic and the
deeply felt meaning of the written word?
How can I pass the spark, keep it
moving, and thus electrify the world?
