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about the cover
Our cover design by Nanette
Black features a silver gelatin photograph by Ron Guidry entitled
Sand Dunes, Death Valley, CA, taken in 1999. Guidry, who works with
medium- and large-format cameras, has exhibited his work in Louisiana
and throughout the United States. His work can be viewed online
at http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/r/rongui/.
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editor's notes
How much is a fine story worth? What monetary
value does a superb poem possess? How much—and this is the
inexorable point—should authors be paid for their long, solitary
work?
These are neither new nor simple questions, but they certainly are
vexed. As much skill and labor and inspiration goes into a literary
creation as into, say, a more visual work of art, a sculpture or
painting, that can be collected. It may well reach a larger audience
than will come to a gallery. A commercial magazine—one of
the handful that remains—can offer several thousand dollars
for a story. But another piece of equal merit by the same author
will earn next to nothing, or nothing, from a small journal. Even
The Kenyon Review, while struggling toward financial stability,
has been able to offer only fifteen dollars per page for poetry
and ten dollars per page for prose in recent years.
Bite your tongue. It’s not fair, but fairness has nothing
to do with it.
It’s clear, of course, that writers don’t go into this
line of work for the big bucks. They know full well that years must
be spent honing their craft before even modest rewards arrive. A
fiction writer may serve an apprenticeship of sorts by fashioning
short stories (all the while harboring a fantasy of blockbusters
and screenplays down the road). But poets, even the best poets,
daren’t delude themselves in this particular way. A different
sense of reward must suffice. But shouldn’t there be some
financial reward as well?
One of the most significant changes in the arts over the past fifty
years has been the growth of institutional support for writers and
other artists. Instead of holding unrelated day jobs in banks or
insurance companies (though certainly some still do), many authors
today hold academic positions that support them while they write.
Indeed, their promotion in the academy often depends on generating
vitae with lists of publications that otherwise have earned them
little beyond the price of a meal or two.
I’m pleased to say that the trustees of The Kenyon Review
have designated increasing payments to authors as the biggest single
priority for the next several years. This is a direct result of
their leadership in creating financial stability for this magazine
and in pursuing an aggressive endowment campaign, so that such initiatives
as paying authors more can be addressed. Starting with this current
issue, poets will receive forty dollars per page, authors of prose
thirty dollars. Surely a significant increase, but still not a lot—not
what stories and poems may warrant or authors deserve. Yet it is
a meaningful first step. And only a first step.
This is not entirely a matter of altruism, naturally. The trustees
believe—as do I—that paying authors more will be another
tool in making KR a better magazine, one that more and
more readers turn to for the best new writing from around the world.
That’s the goal I’ve been pursuing for ten years, and
intend to continue.
~David H. Lynn |
