The Kenyon Review Editor David H. Lynn’s editorial in the newest issue (spring 2010) comments on the “future of literary publishing.” TKR itself went part-digital a while back with KROnline to complement TKR in print, as well as adding a daily blog, online book discussions, and collaborating with JSTOR to complete an electronic archive.

Lynn comments, “It surely would have been easier simply to continue printing this journal four times a year and leave it at that. But I’m convinced that sooner or later, such isolated publications will come to seem anachronisms, curiosities, not vibrant players in the literary community.”

But far from being a full-fledged missive on going digital, Lynn recognizes the continuing place of ink and paper in our lives, its historical relevance, and its place in the lives of future readers and writers, which is why TKR will be launching a small letterpress operation. “Even as we develop literary media for the future, I believe it’s our responsibility to keep the old technologies, teaching our associates where all the current publishing structures originated. Letting them get their hands dirty.”

TKR is planning printing opportunities for their summer program, and looks to add chapbooks and broadsides in the future, “just for the fun of it.”

Visit The Georgia Review to view silhouette art by Kara Walker, featured both online and in the newest issue (Spring 2010). From the portfolio introduction:

Critics have assigned labels ranging from “provocative” to “exploitative” to Walker’s overall project. At the crux of this controversy is the silhouette itself, which reduces a subject to the least possible amount of information and forces the viewer to rely on stereotypical hints—clothing, hairstyle, exaggerated physical characteristics—leading toward two-dimensional “truths” that make explicit the work’s deep sense of ambiguity. Viewers must become (discomfortingly) reductionist themselves; Walker offers no choice but to understand and then implicitly to accept the stereotypes in order to identify her characters.

Annalemma‘s issue six is the magazine’s first themed issue, “Sacrifice,” and features images of a variety of art forms by a variety of artists coupled with each written work featured. Want to free copy? Annalemma will give one away to the winner of their Twitter contest. Followers just need to tweet: “I’d be willing to give up (insert noun here) for the new issue of #Annalemma” The best tweet wins. Deadline: Sunday (4/25) at midnight EST.

Reader’s guides are one of my favorite features to encourage teachers to use lit mags in the classroom. The Healing Muse, SUNY Upstate Medical University’s journal of literary and visual arts, has begun developing Reader’s and Educator’s Guides for their publication. On the site now are guides for volumes 7 and 8. Here are a couple of the questions for volume 8:

In the third paragraph of Bromberg’s “Poetry and the Creative Healing Process” (p.31), the author discusses the relationship between community and healing. In what ways can writing about illness be therapeutic? What difference does it make to write for an audience?

The speakers of “Puzzled” (p. 81) and “After a Mastectomy” (p. 32) both express yearnings to be made “whole.” How do physical changes in the body affect self-perception and identity? In what ways do the speakers seek help from others to work through these feelings?

Hilda Raz, Editor of Prairie Schooner, has announced a new editorial position: Digital Development and Online Editor. Timothy Schaffert will be the energy behind the keyboard for Prairie Schooner‘s blog, tweets and Facebook updates as well as moving PS into new digital domains.

Jim Hicks of the Massachusetts Review notes some changes to the publication, “dramatically increasing the amount we publish in translation.” To that end, he notes: “Edwin Gentzler, head of the Translation Center at UMass, will be joining Ellen Dor

Celebrating 45 years of publishing, TriQuarterly‘s double spring issue will be its final in print publication: TriQuarterly will be moving online. Editors Susan Firestone Hahn and Ian Morris offer a simple dedication-style page on the matter:

Despite a heroic battle to save the publication, Isotope (Utah State University) will cease with issue 7.2 – a special, double issue. Special thanks to Christopher Cokinos and all those who did what they could and have done all they have over the past nearly-decade of publishing Isotope.

After 15 years of, Issue 38 of Creative Nonfiction is “a magazine,” taking on the larger, trade-size format on the outside, and on the inside, updated layout and design as well as expanded content: essays, columns, and more. Additionally, CNF will be adding exclusive online content for each issue. Check it all out here.

Anthony Cook has taken over as Editor-in-Chief of the Sycamore Review, trying, as he says, to “build on the legacy” of Mehdi Okasi. “Not easy,” he comments, “at a journal where, by design, editorships roll over every year or two. I sometimes envy journals that are able to develop a focused and consistent aesthetic. Such focus makes a journal easier to market; you can find your readership and generate a following.” But, after six months at the helm preparing this newest issue, he’s convinced that “while such a set-up might seem ideal, it would greatly diminish the value of what, I believe, our journal can offer…In short, dissonance and diversity are our strengths, and they make for the kind of stimulating reading experience for which I long.” And for which Sycamore Review is known to deliver!

In the latest issue of Drash, Pam Grossman’s poem “Kaddish” – a Hebrew prayer for the dead – is offered to a tree. It begins: “Our tree is dying / hunks of splintered bark peel away / branches creak ominously / then litter the yard with brittle bones // The tree surgeon arrives, surveys the damage / proffers a prognosis / two years at most.”

It reminded me of trees I have known, and the willingness of some people to care for them rather than just tear them down when they are ill or diseased. It also brought to mind the chestnut tree at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, that years ago was very ill and many feared would need to be removed. The tree had been mentioned numerous times in Anne’s diary – being one of the few images of nature she could see during the day through the uncovered attic window. The tree was not only saved and remains under care, but seedlings from its chestnuts were sprouted and shared. You can read more about it on the Anne Frank Museum Amsterdam website, including an interactive monument to the Anne Frank Tree where you can “Leave a Leaf.”

In addition to the beautiful cover (Ding Jitang “Picking Persimmons,” Xi’an, China, 2000) and the carefully selected poetry to fill its pages, this issue (v60 n3) of Beliot Poetry Journal includes a conversation with Coleman Barks by John Rosenwald and Ann Arbor. In it, they talk about “the relationship between music and poetry, isolation and community, judgment and acceptance.”

For anyone who has seen Barks read along with musicians (visit YouTube if you have not), this interview adds another layer of depth to the idea of poetry and music combined, as well as to the complexity of Barks. As Barks says of joining his reading with musicians, “I work regularly with cello; I mean any instrument. The poem feels just so bare or something; I think the music puts it out of the mind, puts it in that layer below, back down in the water table. Somewhere the music lets the personality maybe dissolve a little more, or the ego. A lot of people think that the poem should stand on its own, but it feels good; it feels like I’m giving up some of my proudness, pride in the language of selection, when I let the music carry it along.”

With the newest issue of Sou’wester, Adrian Matejka steps in as the new Poetry Editor, taking the place of Allison Funk, a job Matejka recognizes as “daunting.” Still, Matejka hopes to “perpetuate the precedent set forth by Allison, who was dedicated to publishing thoughtful, provocative poetry, while also working to cultivate a dialogue between the diverse aesthetics in contemporary American poetry.” Welcome Adrian – may this be the first of many more issues of Sou’wester for you!

Fourteen Hills has always had the talent for selecting cover-poppin’ art, and their latest issue is no exception. “Stuck on Morning Thoughts” by The Pfeiffer Sisters is the appetizer for the center portfolio section of the journal, which features more of their sadly/sweetly haunting characters. Fourteen Hills also provides a link to a web portfolio of The Sisters’ (Jenny and Lisa) work, featuring some divine nude-art & graphics prints (for which they not only created the works, but modeled for them). Worth the click (and then some) to check it out.

While previous posts have shared news of literary magazine changes in editorship, Jeanne M. Leiby of the Southern Review writes of SR’s “lost years.”

The story of how SR began is recounted in the introduction to An Anthology of Stories from the Southern Review (LSU 1953). It has been 75 years since the Louisiana State University president, James Monroe Smith, first began the journal. It was in 1942 that “because of the war and the national economic crisis, the university suspended publication of the journal” – until 1965. Leiby writes, “It’s sad for me to thing about this gap in our history, the words and works we could have brought to readers in those intervening twenty-three years. And it’s not lost on any of us here that we are again a country at war, a nation deeply affected by bleak economic realities.”

But, Leiby shows her gratitude to a supportive administration and especially to readers who have kept the magazine running, who have helped to maintain SR as a “grand literary legacy.”

At such times of struggle for so many in the literary community, her words of appreciation are well received. We do not want to have to wonder about lost years of voices and words, and we won’t have to, as long as we keep our readership and support of literary magazines strong.

Editor Neil Shepard offers his Editor’s Farewell in the latest issue of Green Mountains Review. He recounts his beginning with the journal in 1986, and spotlights many of the accomplishments over the decades. Shepard will stay on as Senior Editor, while Elizabeth Powell, a new faculty at Johnson State College, will be taking the role of Poetry Editor and General Editor.

In his Editor’s Note to the Winter 2009 issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Nathaniel Perry writes of beginnings: “Beginnings always fascinate us: we remember the first lines of novels, the first lines of well-worn poems. We relish memories of childhood. Storms build up over the far ridge and ride into town, and we stand and crane our necks to watch them.” With this issue of, Perry takes over the role of editor from Tom O’Grady, who has stepped down.

As part of his own new beginning the journal itself will take on some newness, including a larger format and full-color cover, a new section of reviews, which Perry considers an “attempt to expand [their] own participation in the larger poetry community,” and, finally, a new feature: 4×4. Each issue will include the same four questions asked of four of that issue’s contributors.

As all good things must come to an end, our farewell to Tom O’Grady, and to Nathaniel Perry: here’s to new beginnings!

Yet another intelligently fun non-fiction piece from Lisa K. Buchanan – excerpted here from Meridian 24:

Pandora Seeks Advice Online

Dear Pandora,
My vote: Have your husband open it.
~Eve

Panny Love,
Why didn’t I think of that?
~Epimetheus

Sweet Pandora,
It’s like I told Eve. You will not die. Do you have that straight? Hear me loud and clear. You will not die.
Open it.
~The Serpent

Pick up a copy to read the rest of advice from other notables: Bluebeard, Plato, Francis Bacon, Snow White, Aphrodite, Zeus, and many more – often with exchanges to one another, and including some “real life” comments by equally archetypal figures from Buchanan’s own life.

The newest edition of Antioch Review couldn’t be more timely, with its focus on “Celebrity Houses.” The issue opens with an essay by Daniel Harris, who takes readers into the newest realm of “celebrityhood – politicians as celebrity.” The issue includes a several essay on France “all of which praise it, its citizens, an the French way of life,” and includes a look at their celebrities and politicians in turn.

Delta House Publishing Company, and home to Indian Bay Press, will end their seven year run of publishing Poesia with the Spring 2010 issue to be released April 1, 2010.

The Kenyon Review Winter 2010 is a special issue “Devoted to work by North American Indigenous authors” and edited by Simon Ortiz, including a conversation with Ortiz by Janet McAdams. A full list of contents is available on their site.

Always worth the cover/subscription price, so an absolute steal this issue, Salmagundi magazine Fall 2009-Winter 2010 is a special issue devoted to the great German film-maker Margarethe von Trotta, whose film Marianne and Juliane won the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Film and Best Director and whose other films – Rosenstrasse, Sheer Madness, Sisters, Rosa Luxemburg among them – have received numerous international awards. One of von Trotta’s latest feature films, The Other Woman, starring Barbara Sukowa, which has never been released in the United States, will be available as a DVD, sealed inside the special issue of Salmagundi.

BETHESDA, MD (Oct 14) — Poet Lore, the nation’s oldest continuously published poetry journal, marks its 120th anniversary this year.

At a time when many literary journals (and the publishing industry of which they are part) are struggling, Poet Lore, with its distinctive historic look, has remained true to its core value — bringing great poetry to light — and created a proven and lasting nationwide identity. E. Ethelbert Miller and Jody Bolz carefully read every submission they receive, and their work reaffirms the value of poetry in a landscape that often devalues the written word. “Poetry may not be regarded as culturally central,” Jody Bolz explains, “but it’s still what people turn to at the most important moments in their lives. At every life-cycle ritual—from naming ceremonies to funerals—the language of poetry speaks to us and speaks for us. As editors, our role is to connect poets and readers, building upon Poet Lore‘s 120-year-long record of literary discovery.”

That 120-year-long record is what Poet Lore and its publisher, The Writer’s Center, honor. It’s a rich and varied story, and as you’ll see below, the journal has played an active and important role in bringing literary talent to light.

Founded in 1889 by two brilliant, iconoclastic scholars, Helen Clarke and Charlotte Porter, as a journal “devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and the Comparative Study of Literature,” Poet Lore developed an early following among literary societies and later expanded its influence by offering unique features, such as its “Play Series” — which in 1913 was the first to print a complete, English-language edition of Anton Chekhov’s play “The Seagull.” And Walt Whitman, in the final year of his life, ran three paid advertisements in Poet Lore for Leaves of Grass.

During the course of its illustrious history, Poet Lore has played an active role in introducing American readers to the likes of some of the finest international poets. In its early years, in fact, very few American authors were published in Poet Lore. For the majority of its content, Poet Lore set its sights abroad. Among the many authors who were discovered or whose careers on the international stage were advanced by Poet Lore include Maxim Gorky, Henrik Ibsen, Frederic Mistral, and August Strindberg. And it was among the first publications to introduce the work of Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to American readers. In the late 20th Century, Poet Lore published the early work of such remarkable American poets as Mary Oliver, Colette Inez, Cornelius Eady, Carl Phillips, Carolyn Forché, Sharon Olds, Dana Gioia, Pablo Medina, and Alice Fulton, among many others. In recent years, the editors were the first to publish the poetry of Dwayne Betts, who sent his submission from prison.

SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT POET LORE:

Founders Charlotte E. Porter and Helen A. Clarke were writers, editors, Shakespeare and Browning scholars, and literary critics at a time when women in these roles were few and far between. Porter composed poetry, Clarke wrote musical compositions, and both wrote essays and reviews that appeared in early editions of Poet Lore and elsewhere.

Porter and Clarke were both named “Helen” at birth. Charlotte later changed her name from Helen Charlotte Porter to Charlotte Endymion Porter, borrowing her middle name from the Keats poem. The two women exchanged rings in a commitment ceremony and lived together until Helen A. Clarke died at age 65. Charlotte Porter scattered Helen’s ashes by their summer home in Penobscot Bay, Maine.

Whitman advertised his finally completed Leaves of Grass in three 1892 editions of Poet Lore.

Poet Lore was famous in the early 20th century for translations, publishing, for example, an early edition of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in its folios and presenting literary luminaries like Ibsen, Strindberg, Gorky, D’Annunzio, Mistral, and Tagore to readers early on.

The first piece of writing F. Scott Fitzgerald ever placed (outside of school publications) was the poem “The Way of Purgation.” He sold it to Poet Lore in September of 1917, but for reasons unknown to the current publishers, it didn’t appear in the next issue, or any subsequent. It was finally printed in our Winter 1989-1990 issue (Vol. 84, No. 4) with the note: “Poet Lore apologizes for any inconvenience this delay may have caused.”

Poet Lore’s executive editors read all submissions, without regard to the reputation of the poet, year-round. They meet in Washington, D.C., to read aloud their selections and winnow the stacks of poems.

About The Writer’s Center: Since 1987, Poet Lore has been published by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. The Writer’s Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. As one of the premier centers of our kind in the country, we believe the craft of writing is open to people of all backgrounds and ages. Writing is interdisciplinary and unique among the arts for its ability to touch on all aspects of the human experience. It enriches our lives and open doors to knowledge and understanding. The Writer’s Center is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization. We are supported in part by The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The newest Burnside Review breaks away from it’s trademark 6×6 format for a special “All-Oregon Issue.” According to its publishers, “With the prize money from last year’s Literary Arts publishing fellowship, we decided to give back to our state. The special edition is a truly Oregonian creation; cover art by the Mercury’s art director Justin Scrappers, design and printing and stiching by Pinball Publishing. The issue features 33 of Oregon’s finest writers, including, Willy Vlautin, Kevin Sampsell, Vern Rutsala, Mary Szybist, Michele Glazer and Floyd Skloot.”

The MacGuffin, housed by Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, is celebrating its 25 anniversary this year. Indeed, a publishing and readership milestone worthy of celebration.

The current issue of Cave Wall, adorned by Deborah Mersky’s “New Frog” on the cover, opens with some thoughtful considerations by Editor Rhett Iseman Trull on the nature of saving and preservation: “We can’t protect everything all the time,” she begins. “I used to think I could prevent accidents by performing rituals, like counting my steps or touching the lamps in a certain order I tried to freeze the good times… But we cannot remain in one place. The circle of life keeps turning. In memory and in our art, however, we can revisit a moment, letting it touch and change us anew… Perhaps every poem is a kind of elegy: a song for what cannot last. But each song here is vital, at least to me, in this moment.”

While I am aware of the controversy regarding Antioch, I am certainly not “embroiled” in it as many must be. Still, I found myself deeply interested The Antioch Review Editor’s comments about a particular aspect of his work at the college. Robert S. Fogerty, in the latest issue (Fall 2009), titles his editorial “Young Man Geertz” after Clifford Geertz, a returning vet who was a senior at Antioch in 1949.

Fogerty has gained access to almost 400 “Senior Papers” – a graduation requirement dating back to the late 1920s. His plans are to write a “prosopography” (collective biography) for which select papers will comprise the focus of his work. In his editorial, he offers selections from a numbers of these, considering what might have happened had Antioch shut its doors for good (it will resume 2011) to the very experiences written about in these essays. In just the small sampling he provides, it is clear that these papers are rich with period perspective, of young people writing of their own time of change, of the future they lived through, the history we look back on, and the Antioch that was: “Utopian, experimental, nonconformist, painfully earnest, desperately intense, and filled with political radicals and and aesthetic free spirits (or were they aesthetic radicals and political free spirits?), it was counter-culture before its time.”

Clifford Geertz went on to win a National Book Critics Award as well as many more distinguished awards in social sciences and was honored by numerous universities. His “Senior Essay” is included in this issue of The Antioch Review.

In the Fall 2009 issue of The Kenyon Review, Editor David H. Lynn takes on the issue of “Print vs. Internet: An Ongoing Conversion” in his consideration of where to submit his most recent story – to a print publication or to an online publication. Of course, the fact KR has started its own online edition – KRO – is thrown into the mix, as well as a status check on the professional perception of online publications.

Lynn is troubled by knowing that “Some writers…especially those who have passed through the opening thresholds of their careers, already have a book or two but have not yet been tenured or feel professionally secure, might not even submit their work to us any longer. They worry that if we chose a poem or story for Internet publication instead of print, they wouldn’t want to have to decline the offer and risk offending.”

I would respond that there is a change underway, and it will continue as more of those of us in-the-know about online publishing find our ways “in” and put ourselves in positions of making decisions and flexing the standards. I have participated in numerous hiring committees at various colleges where I have worked and continue to educate my colleagues as to the value of reputable online publications.

An interesting paradox I have seen already is the professional value placed on a self-published, POD book, while a peer-edited, online publication is dismissed. It’s not enough that we read and write and publish. We also need to involve ourselves in the work that makes professional change “institutional.”

Issue #37: The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3, the third annual collaboration between CNF and W.W. Norton, is now available.

The Iowa Review will enter its 40th year of publication in 2010. To mark this milestone, they are holding a competition to redesign their cover. The new look will be implemented beginning with the April 2010 issue. The winning entry will receive $1,000, as well as acknowledgement in every issue in which the designer’s work is used. The new print design will be coordinated with the redesign of The Iowa Review’s website, which also will launch in April 2010. Full contest details here. Deadline: October 19