Spring 2005
New Series · Volume XXVII Number 2

Contents · Contributors · Selections · Editor's Notes & Cover Art

about the cover

Our cover design by Nanette Black features Mt. Takachiho, Lake Miike, Kyushu, Japan (2002), a photograph by Michael Kenna. Kenna, who grew up in England and now lives on the West Coast, is “a diurnal and nocturnal photographer, fascinated by times of day when light is at its most pliant.” More than twenty books and catalogs have been published on Kenna’s work, including Michael Kenna: A Twenty-Year Retrospective (Treville, 1994), Impossible to Forget (Nazraeli Press, 2001), and Japan (Nazraeli Press, 2004). Represented by dozens of galleries across the globe, his photographs are included in the permanent museum collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Patrimoine Photographique in Paris, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. In 2001, Kenna was made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the Ministry of Culture in France. His work can be viewed online at www.michaelkenna.com .

editor's notes

What are the sales of a moderately successful first novel—five thousand perhaps? Even that may be generous. The circulation of an established literary journal might stretch to what—fifteen thousand? Even the venerable New Yorker, flagship of American literary culture, reaches fewer than a million readers. That’s a significant number, of course, yet fairly modest when one considers the nation’s population will soon reach three hundred million souls.

For much of the twentieth century an American middle class was growing rapidly, accumulating reservoirs of money and leisure, and, just as important, defining what it meant to be middle class. The public acquisition of “culture” was widely seen as the sine qua non of that pursuit, a badge of having made it. Like watching fat ladies sing, belonging to the Book of the Month Club, buying the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Reader’s Digest were all part of an education to that standard. Whether or not reading literature was truly seen to matter for its own sake, those nicely bound books in the parlor certainly counted for what they said about their owners.

In our own halcyon days, however, when literacy is all but universal, when many millions have even greater wherewithal and significant leisure, relatively few of our fellow citizens choose fiction and poetry as their favorite means to while away free time, to enrich their souls, to soothe them toward sleep in their beds. The much larger and wealthier middle class of today takes its own status for granted. Great Books, not to mention the good books—the stories, poems, and essays that many of us care so passionately about—no longer represent a golden key to cultural ascendancy. For better or worse, they are but one source of entertainment in our world, in no way privileged above video games or paint-ball tournaments, any more than baseball remains the “nation’s pastime” in any but a purist’s fantasy.

I’m not so sure that the fading of the shallow and naïve social elitism implicit in those older notions is entirely terrible. Nevertheless, I do believe with all my heart that the arts, literature central among them, provide deep, enduring nourishment to our lives. In turn, as readers, writers, editors it is our responsibility to nourish them.

Quite obviously this is a time of enormous change in the literary arts, not so much in the ways that stories, poems, and essays are written as in how they are produced and distributed. We struggle to decipher whatever tea leaves appear in the cup before us, hoping to glimpse the changes in technology that will inevitably affect everything from how ink hits paper to whether we will continue with ink and paper at all, or turn to newer devices, more advanced electronic books that will be as portable and as palatable as a dog-eared paperback.

But what may be far more important is that the literary community itself is changing profoundly. On the one hand, more people are seriously engaged with writing today—much of it exceptionally fine—than ever before in our history. Indeed, this is an incredibly exciting period. The evidence appears in the quickly multiplying M.F.A. programs and newer Ph.D. programs in writing. It appears on bookstore shelves, in catalogs, and on-line, despite all the dire forecasts of literature disappearing from the public realm. Not to mention how it appears in the ever increasing flood of unsolicited submissions that greet the staffs of literary magazines every morning.

But writers are not the same as readers. That’s the other hand. Yes, of course, writers do read. Yet surely every poet, every storyteller hopes to reach beyond her or his peers and colleagues and family friends to those who read for pleasure and stimulation, yet have no particular ambition to take up the pen themselves. It’s developing that larger audience, that significant sliver out of three hundred million that should concern us.

In other words, those of us who edit and produce literary journals or books, as well as the individual writer and the concerned parent—and the already converted reader holding this journal—must begin to think more creatively about nurturing the readers we want to reach. No longer can we simply assume that schools will produce legions of readers with each new commencement, or that these potential new readers will remain passively eager to receive whatever we may produce. Rather, we must be in the business of educating, of proselytizing, of seducing the coming generations into the faith that the act of reading, whether on paper or electronic screens, as well as the engaging of the imagination and intellect and passions that goes with it, is not something that can ever be replaced by video or narcotized games.

Our responsibility is larger than ever—it is to create a new generation of passionate readers for their own sake. And for ours.

~David H. Lynn