Summer/Fall 1999
New Series · Volume XXI Number 3/4

about the cover

Our cover design by Nanette Black features an image from a series of photographs by Gregory Spaid on the architecture of Nantucket. This photograph was made in 1994 in the small village of Siasconset on the east side of the island. Spaid's work is in the permanent collections of such public and private institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Chase Manhattan Bank. Spaid, a professor of art at Kenyon College, received a Fulbright research fellowship to Italy and numerous fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council.

editor's notes

In a moment I will announce some very good news for KR in its sixtieth anniversary year;and yet I feel slightly abashed in doing so, for it concerns our finances. It would be delightful if such matters could operate discreetly, smoothly, in the background. These notes would then be dedicated entirely to issues literary. But divorcing art from finance is all but impossible in contemporary America. Fund-raising, budgeting, office management play as much a part of an editor's duties, sadly, as reading manuscripts, soliciting new work, or collaborating with an author to make a promising story or poem even better.

The good news: the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded The Kenyon Review a grant of sixty thousand dollars;the single largest NEA award ever committed to a literary magazine. We are gratified and honored. (Thank you, NEA.) With the energetic guidance of KR's trustees, we are launching a campaign to match this grant with three dollars for every one from the NEA, on our way to an initial endowment of one million dollars. This will broaden KR's fiscal stability and bring us closer to financial independence. An ambitious goal, yes. But one critical to the enduring legacy of a magazine as vigorous in its sixtieth year as ever, and eagerly looking to the future. Gifts from you, our readers and most loyal supporters over the years, will be welcome indeed.

The nature of this challenge, raising money for a literary magazine, is rather peculiar. In part, that's because the delight one experiences in reading a magazine such as The Kenyon Review is, quite obviously, a solitary one. True, when we are swept up in the beauty and power of a fine story or poem we feel in contact with the imagination and intelligence of the author. And as I have argued in these pages before, we also become part of a larger conversation among readers, authors, and critics that plays out across time and space. Yet, in the moment of reading we are by ourselves, with no one else to admire our discrimination or our wardrobe.

I make this point because, typically, literary magazines have a much tougher time raising money than do museums, orchestras, and dance companies. We don't;we can't;regularly draw people together in the same ways. We don't occupy (or even wish for) a beautiful edifice that will add charm to a neighborhood. International in scope, KR nonetheless quietly speaks to individual readers, no matter their locale. Thus, making the case for benefits to a specific community, the focus of most individual giving, is far, far harder than for other arts organizations.

And too, gone are the supposedly halcyon days of the 1940s and 1950s when, amongst the so-called "New York intellectuals" (and many, many others around the world), the belief abided that literature mattered to the non-literary community as well. The Kenyon Review, The Partisan Review, and a few other such journals influenced conversation and debate far beyond strictly literary circles. Literary criticism seemed to hold keys for interpreting not just literature but the larger, often threatening, political world as well.

To be sure, today's community of writers and readers is larger and probably more vital than ever before. At the same time, however, American culture itself is also fragmented more deeply, and literary magazines lack the larger reach, for better or worse, of those earlier years.

No matter, our passion remains. So too our determination. Fine writing will, as it has for centuries, continue to make a difference;large or small, now or later—in a changing, sometimes troubled, always exciting world.

— DHL