by Wendy Lesser
FOUNDING A MAGAZINE
ntil I was twenty-seven, I had no idea I was intended to be an editor. Editing is not the sort of thing they discuss in high school vocational seminars or teach in college courses, and even if they did no one would be interested in pursuing it. It has a kind of indefinability, a behind-the-scenes lack of tangible glamour. One doesn’t naturally absorb dramatic tales about becoming an editor, even when one has read them. Only long after the fact—long after I had become an editor myself—did I realize that one of the formative books of my youth, Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, had been in part about founding a literary press.
My own editing career began without Hogarthian ambitions. I just wanted to take the next step up on the little literary ladder I happened to be occupying at that moment. For a year or two I had been writing monthly book reviews for a local organ called the San Francisco Review of Books, which ranged in quality from the somewhat interesting to the truly atrocious (ranged within each issue, I mean). Like an actor eyeing the director’s role, I was curious to see what editing was like, so I asked the founding editor of the SFRB—a strangely bland, surprisingly unliterary, lackadaisical but nonetheless persistent guy—whether he would let me guest-edit an issue. If some twenty-seven-year-old know-nothing came to me with such a request, I would sputter an indignant no, but this editor was nonchalantly agreeable. He gave me the August 1979 issue, which otherwise wouldn’t have appeared (he always took his vacation in August), and told me to do whatever I wanted.
The first thing I did was to contact a bunch of writers. Some of them were already amply published: Christopher Ricks, who had propelled me in this professional direction; Thom Gunn, whose recent book of poetry I had reviewed for a UC Berkeley newspaper; and my mother, Millicent Dillon, whose two books of fiction were soon to be followed by a highly regarded biography of Jane Bowles. I also borrowed one writer from the SFRB’s stable—the theater critic Irene Oppenheim, whose firmly opinionated columns I had admired. For the rest I resorted to college and graduate-school friends. To read now through that Table of Contents is, for me, to revisit the scenes of my youth. Among the listed writers are two college boyfriends, one of my Harvard tutors, four graduate-school comrades (not to mention my business partner, Katharine), a freelance journalist who was one of my first Berkeley friends, and even a one-time employer of mine from the Oakland Office of Community Development.
I slaved away on that single issue, spending months getting it all in shape. I had never before chosen headline fonts, or proofread columns of type, or done page layout, but I learned on the job. Halfway through the process I discovered that the SFRB editor had no money in the magazine’s budget to print the issue I was working on. Undeterred, I sold ads, raided my savings account, and found a printer who was willing to give me a bargain rate on a tiny print-run. For the last few days before publication I worked in the magazine’s North Beach offices from early morning to late at night, laboriously pasting up each tabloid-sized page on its piece of thin, white, blue-lined cardboard. Exhausted and near tears, I only took a break to eat lunch in a nearby Chinese restaurant, where one of my fortune-cookies carried the disheartening message “For better luck, wait until spring.” (A few months later I told this story to Vikram Seth, who immortalized it in his verse-novel The Golden Gate. But I am getting ahead of myself.)
I was exhausted, but I was also deeply engaged, and by the time the magazine came off the presses I was determined to edit my own literary review. I stole Irene Oppenheim away from the SFRB, alerted all the other writers that I would be expecting repeat performances, and set the beginning of 1980 as the first publication date. I made a list of about ten possible names for the new magazine on an index card, and from among them I chose The Threepenny Review for its obvious Brechtian overtones, and also because I thought it sounded nice. (A few years ago I again came across that index card: among the other names on it were Washington Square—for reasons which will be apparent to you—and Wigan Pier, in honor of George Orwell.) I decided that the magazine would appear in tabloid format because that was the only form I knew how to paste up, and I got it designed, at a seriously discounted rate, by a typesetter I had met on my first consulting job in Berkeley. In those early months I depended heavily on Irene, a veteran of many start-up organizations; together we sent out hundreds of subscription forms and drove around the Bay Area visiting dozens of bookstores. To a certain extent these methods succeeded, and in January of 1980 the magazine was launched.
In literary terms, The Threepenny Review grew easily and steadily. By the second issue I had met Vikram Seth—then an economics student at Stanford—and had published his first poem. Gore Vidal, in response to my importuning letter, appeared in the sixth issue. (With his typical dry wit, he had agreed to write for this nearly in visible publication because he was running for senator from California and needed the visibility.) John Berger, Paul Bowles, and Robert Coles all showed up in the eighth issue; by this time I was paying the princely sum of twenty-five dollars per article. Meanwhile Thom Gunn had become a regular contributor, as had Leonard Michaels, with whom I had taken two courses at Berkeley. The two of them brought in a number of other writers, including, over the years, Robert Hass, August Kleinzahler, W. S. Di Piero, Robert Pinsky, Diane Johnson, and Susan Sontag—each of whom, in turn, drew in friends and colleagues, so that the circle was continuously widening. And mountains of unsolicited manuscripts poured in, from which I unearthed the likes of Lars Eighner, Sigrid Nunez, and Dagoberto Gilb, not to mention already established writers like Phillip Lopate, Mary Gordon, and Vivian Gornick.
Financially, things were not so simple. At the beginning, every month’s bills caused me enormous angst: I couldn’t see how I was going to go on paying them, yet I couldn’t bear the idea of terminating the infant magazine. But by the end of the first year Threepenny was beginning to get some small grants, and subscriptions had grown to over a thousand. After ten years I got a larger grant which allowed me to pay myself a nominal salary for the first time, and twelve years into the magazine’s history I finally got enough to hire a half-time assistant—a young writer named Lisa Michaels who steered us through the shoals of software and hardware acquisition into the smoother waters of desktop publishing, and who became, in the course of five years, a treasured colleague rather than a hired hand. The Threepenny Review, which now has about nine thousand readers, is still run by a paid staff of only one and a half people; and it still operates out of the apartment I lived in when I started it.
The satisfactions of this work are, of course, balanced by its demands. There is inevitably a great deal of busy-work involved in putting out a magazine—work like data entry, proposal writing, postage metering, package wrapping, trips to the printer, trips to the mailing house, trips to the recycling center—and when the staff is as small as ours is, nobody gets out of the boring jobs. But since it is busywork done for my own purposes, I don’t mind it much. Whenever I have to label and seal a huge pile of renewal notices, I think to myself: Well, it’s better than having to attend a department meeting. In my cheerier moods I can even feel somewhat grateful for the abundance of relatively mindless tasks, which keep me occupied during the hours and days when I’m not up to thinking hard.
Everyone who has ever worked as a literary editor loves the discovery element of the job—those moments when you open an envelope, read the first words of a new writer, and know you have hit paydirt. I too enjoy this, but there are other aspects of editing a magazine that give me, if anything, even more pleasure. I love, for instance, the process of ordering the pieces in a given issue, deciding which ones will come first and last, creating the train of subterranean connection that leads through the issue from one essay to another, from a story to its accompanying poem. And I love the satisfyingly tactile job of pasting up the ads and pictures in their final places, once the desktop-published pages have been run out of the computer. But most of all, I think, I love the actual process of editing: taking a piece of writing t
hat is almost there and making it come clear, like a photographic image submerged in developer. It requires a kind of negative capability that I wouldn’t have thought someone of my character would have. You read the story or the essay (I can’t really do it with poetry) and lend yourself to the effort that the piece itself is making; you discern, within the body of the manuscript, the lineaments of its own perfect form. And then you tell the author, and both of you are pleased.
I suppose I could have been happy with other forms of literary self-employment. (Early in my Threepenny career I cut out a cartoon from The New Yorker that showed a king sitting on a throne and talking to a scribe. “Most of all,” he is saying, “I enjoy being able to work at home.”) But there is something particularly satisfying about the mixture involved in editing and publishing a literary review—a combination of businesslike planning and artistic responsiveness, long-term consideration and snap decision-making, efficiency and laziness, gossip and privacy, reading and looking … It is, in short, a combination of many of the things I like and all the things I am.
DRAFTED
eing part of the underpaid, overworked army of literary aspirants and arbiters entails certain civic responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities, if you have acquired sufficient visibility in your field and insufficient chutzpah to decline the invitation, is service on an NEA “peer review” panel.
For many years I had mixed feelings about the individual literary fellowships given by the National Endowment for the Arts. In this, I was not alone. Nearly all writers in America had mixed feelings about these fellowships, because nearly all writers found that every year, when they read the lists of those given awards, many crucial names were missing—their own names, the names of their closest literary friends, and the names of more famous American writers whose work they admired. Instead, mingled in with a few recognizable names, were veritable legions of total strangers who had each been awarded $20,000 by the NEA. What gave? How did the NEA come up with these cockamamie lists?
These were the negative feelings in the mix. On the positive side was a general sense that it was good for the American government to show its support for the country’s writers, symbolically as well as actually (even if this support came in the form of a literature budget smaller than that of a medium-sized European city like Munich—even if the whole NEA budget was less than what the Defense Department paid for its 102 military bands). Also, we were all forced to admit that some talented people squeezed through the selection process, getting a $20,000 leg up just at the point when they could really use the help. And then there was the fact that conservative congressmen hated the NEA with a passion. Anything that bugged Jesse Helms couldn’t be all bad.
Thus far, my ambivalent feelings about government-sponsored literary grants were probably typical of people in my professional and educational circles. But complicating the mix were other sentiments from further back, having to do with the household I grew up in. From the time I was about ten or eleven, my mother had been a struggling fiction-writer. Before that she had pursued a number of other careers, including physicist, dance therapist, Democratic Party organizer, and freelance journalist. But around the same period when she met my stepfather (a relatively brief presence in our lives who came and went when I was in early adolescence, leaving behind as his only tangible legacy my mother’s new, euphonious, and highly literary-sounding name), she decided to begin taking herself seriously as a writer. By the year I started college she had earned a master’s degree in creative writing, published a book of short stories with Viking, been invited to several writers’ colonies, and begun to be recognized as one of Northern California’s resident literary figures.
At the same time, what I remember about my childhood is that we were always short of money. We were by no means poor: we lived, after all, in the upper-middle-class splendor of Greenmeadow, where we had access to a membership-only community pool and an array of neighborhood services. My sister and I were always given music lessons, dance lessons, art lessons; our house was filled with books, and we were even taken occasionally to the theater (a luxury that now seems prohibitively expensive to most professional-class families). For any kind of art, that is, money could usually be found. But for the more routine pleasures of suburban existence—eating out in restaurants, going on vacations, buying a new car—there was never quite enough. This probably had more to do with the fact that my mother was a single parent, back in the days before divorce was common in California, than with the fact that she was a writer; even my father’s generous child-support allocation was not enough to bring us up to the income level of our white-collar, intact-family neighbors. But in my mind the two struggles—my mother’s struggle to make a career in literature and her financial struggle to make a life in our expensive surroundings—became joined together. It was therefore impressed on me, powerfully if subliminally, that writers needed and deserved a handout.
With something like this complex of feelings bubbling around in me, I agreed in the spring of 1993 to serve on the selection panel for that year’s round of NEA poetry fellowships. Clinton had recently been elected to the White House. Bush’s puppet arts director had resigned, and the search was on for a strong-minded, highly visible NEA director (which they soon got, in the form of Jane Alexander). Recent NEA panelists had made it clear that it was unacceptable for panel selections to be overturned for political reasons. The signs all seemed to point to a new and improved NEA, which perhaps explains why I so readily accepted the invitation to serve on the panel—that, and the $6,000 they offered me to do the job.
It turned out to be a well-paid but hard-earned salary. Over the summer of 1993, when most of my work took place, I put in the equivalent of a month’s work (that is, twenty-two or twenty-three full, eight-hour days) reading and commenting on poetry manuscripts. Overall, the NEA had received nearly 2,500 applications for fellowships that year; they came from all fifty states, plus the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Americans living abroad. The poetry submissions amounted to about half that total—1,247, to be exact—and my share of these initially included more than four hundred manuscripts, each consisting of up to ten pages of poetry identified only by application number (no name recognition allowed). I had to select from these enormous boxfuls of material the sixteen manuscripts I liked best, which would be forwarded to an October meeting for full-group discussion with my eight fellow panelists. I also, in the next phase of the operation, read and commented on about fifty more manuscripts which had already passed through someone else’s Phase One approval, but this was a much less onerous task, mainly because I did not at that point have the weighty responsibility of eliminating people from the final round of discussion.
I am not and have never been a poet. My qualifications for serving on this panel stemmed from my thirteen years of editing The Threepenny Review, which published, and still publishes, a healthy selection of poems in each issue. “Healthy” in my view means more than the sickly few—two or three at most—offered by a general-interest magazine like The New Yorker, but fewer than the dangerous overdose you are likely to get in a purely literary magazine like American Poetry Review, Pequod, or the Spoon River Quarterly. To arrive at my healthy ten or twelve a quarter, I read at least five thousand poems a year. I like and sometimes even love good poetry, as an amateur; but I hate bad poetry with the zeal that only a professional reader can command.
On average, my batch of NEA applicant poems were at a noticeably higher literary level than the unsolicited manuscripts I read each week for Threepenny. This should come as no surprise: to apply for an NEA fellowship, a poet needs to have published in at least five different magazines over the previous several years, whereas to send work to Threepenny you need only have a postage stamp. (Actually, two postage stamps: one to send the manuscript, and one to get it back.) But even with the quality assurance, there were still quite a few dazzling blunders in the NEA group. And even among the patently good poems, it became hard,
after about the hundred-and-fiftieth manuscript, to evaluate the work’s originality or conscious allusiveness or metrical skill or metaphorical inventiveness. I was beginning to feel that I just didn’t have enough in me to cope with appreciating all these different styles; unlike Walt Whitman, I do not contain multitudes. Besides which, they were all beginning to blur together in my mind. “If John Keats were in this pile, I would miss him,” I announced to my husband one evening. “The NEA could save a lot of money by just throwing all the manuscripts down the stairs and rewarding the ones that get to the bottom.”
That was the low point. Once I got to Washington in October, for the three-day meeting with my fellow panelists, I realized that I had actually been accomplishing something during those solitary weeks and months. The batch of 144 manuscripts that we were to discuss together was markedly better than my own unsorted group had been; some of my favorite poems were things that had not even been in my initial batch, but had been rescued by someone else. And I was relieved, when I met my fellow panelists, to see that I needn’t have worried so much about my biases and innate preferences, for their approaches to poetry were various enough to counter my own narrowness of taste. In fact, we had all been selected for our differing biases and innate preferences.
