New England Review

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Toni Best on William Matthews

NER 14.2 (1992)

Former Office Manager Toni Best recalls “100 Sentences: An Essay” by William Matthews, from NER 14.2 (1992).

I was working at a temporary position at Middlebury College when I saw a listing for Office Manager at a literary journal that had just moved to Middlebury from New Hampshire. After interviewing with Maura High, I was hired at NER/BLQ.

The first task was to unpack and organize all the back issues into a library. Next was to learn the system for typing the issue, which was entirely done manually back then, and get it ready for editing and, finally, sending to the publisher. Back then our subscriber list was received as a printout that we made changes on by hand.

I took some classes at the college and learned how to transfer our subscription list into an easy-to-search database where I could print renewal letters and labels myself. Next step was going through every issue from Volume 1, #1, and making another easy-to-search database of the contributors and the issue they appeared in.

I really enjoyed building long-distance relationships with some of the writers that we published: Carol Frost, Daniel Halpern, Joyce Carol Oates, Ewing Campbell, George Singleton, Daniel Pearlman, Wendell Berry, Jennifer Egan, Robert Olen Butler, Robert Cantrell, Kate McCorkle, Arnost Lustig, Glen Pourciau, Keith Lee Morris, George Looney, Victor Walter, Steve Almond, Brock Clark, and F. D. Reeve.

During my twenty-three years at NER, I worked with some amazing people: Maura High, Sydney Lea, T. R. Hummer, David Huddle, William Lychack, Devon Jersild, David Bain, Stephen Donadio, Jessica Dineen, Jodee Stanley Rubins, C. Dale Young, and Carolyn Kuebler.

Although I had favorite pieces in many issues, I am unable to recall each of them, ten years after retiring. I leave you with one in particular that stands out in my memory, William Matthews’s essay in entitled “100 Sentences.” I still enjoy some of the humorous and inspirational quotes today.

“100 Sentences” by William Matthews

BUY the BACK ISSUE (14.2)

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Toni Best began working at NER as Office Manager when the journal moved to Middlebury College in January 1988. After twenty-three years at Middlebury, she accepted an early retirement buy-out from the College and has been working in childcare since then. She and her husband of forty-six years enjoy traveling to visit their children in Alaska, Indiana, and Connecticut and recently have enjoyed trips to Hawaii and Italy.

 

 

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

David Huddle on Marie Howe

NER 15.4 (1993)

David Huddle recalls first hearing—and then publishing—Marie Howe’s “A Certain Light,” “How Some of It Happened,” and “Just Now,” which appeared in NER 15.4 (1993).

I knew nothing about Marie Howe until I heard her read a new sequence of her poems at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, in August 1992. The sequence was about her brother John’s illness and death. Though it’s never mentioned directly in the text, a listener/reader gradually comes to understand that the brother’s illness is AIDS. I believed then, and I believe now, that that poetry sequence is among the most important works of art to have emerged from the AIDS Epidemic in the US from 1987 through 1997. In 1992, the year I heard Ms. Howe’s reading, approximately 30,000 Americans died of AIDS.

Gravitas is the word I’d use to describe both the poems Ms. Howe read and the voice in which she read them. Later in the conference, I asked her if any of those poems might be available to NER, and if so, would she please send them to me. They were, and she did. A quarter of a century later, I’m especially proud to have requested these poems from Ms. Howe and to have had “A Certain Light,” “How Some of It Happened,” and “Just Now” appear in the pages of NER. In 1997, the whole sequence was published as part of the middle section of her superb collection What the Living Do.

The poems are descriptive, down-to-earth, and passionate to convey the truth of John, his life, and his illness. They’re among the most tender and powerful compositions I’ve ever read. They’re personal, plainspoken, and transcendently ordinary. Without preaching or speechifying, they’re deeply spiritual and politically electrifying. They are miraculously austere. I’ve read that whole middle Section of What the Living Do aloud with my writing classes maybe a hundred times. I’ve never read anything like them.

 

“A Certain Light,” “How Some of It Happened,” and “Just Now” by Marie Howe

BUY the BACK ISSUE  (15.4)

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David Huddle served as Acting Editor of the New England Review from 1993 to 1995 and as Contributing Editor in 1988. He taught for thirty-eight years at the University of Vermont and has continued to teach at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont, and the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. He has published numerous books of fiction and poetry, including, most recently, the poetry collection Blacksnake at the Family Reunion (LSU, 2012) and the novels Nothing Can Make Me Do This (Tupelo Press, 2012) and The Faulkes Chronicle (Tupelo Press, 2014). 

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Devon Jersild on Arnost Lustig

NER 13.1 (1990)

Former Associate Editor Devon Jersild introduces “Infinity” by Arnost Lustig, from NER 13.1 (1990) 

Until this week, it had been nearly thirty years since I read Arnost Lustig’s story “Infinity,” but I’ve always remembered it—those three young men in a bunk at nightfall in Auschwitz, grumbling, sharing warmth and lice and fear and superstition, anxiously awaiting an event which isn’t named until it happens: the women in another barracks, singing. The Germans will shut the women up by siccing dogs on them or firing a machine gun into the barracks—in a few seconds or a few minutes, depending—and yet the women sing. “The heat from the chimneys gets on some people’s brains,” says one of the bunkmates. “They must all be mad, or they wouldn’t be asking for it.”

In jagged prose, with details never exaggerated and therefore more powerful, his awareness ranging over time and space, yet grounded in the excruciating present, the narrator evokes the women’s singing and the consciousness it liberates in him: and I couldn’t possibly say what that is, because it lives in the artistry of “Infinity.” If you read it, you’ll get a sense of the man Arnost Lustig must have been (he died in 2011) to have psychically survived his own internment in three prison camps, and to share with us the particulars, the despicable and the miraculous, the song and the ashes.

“Infinity” by Arnost Lustig

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Devon Jersild was Assistant Editor of NER from 1989 to 1990 and Associate Editor from 1990 to 1995. She co-edited, with T. R. Hummer, The Unfeigned Word: Fifteen Years of New England Review (1993). She is a writer, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman’s Life (HarperCollins, 2001).

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

M. Robin Barone on Walter Arndt

NER’s first Managing Editor, M. Robin Barone, remembers “Grace-Notes from Sicily” by Walter Arndt, an essay published in NER 1.3 (1979).

I came on as Managing Editor of New England Review when the magazine was little more than an idea. I had never been a managing editor, let alone a founding managing editor, but I had been editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, was getting my degree in English from Dartmouth College, and was too young to know that this project was far beyond my capabilities. As we got the magazine started, working very long hours, often seven days a week, we were helped and mentored by many generous people, especially Paula Dietz and Fred Morgan at the Hudson Review.

It was intense, but it was also exciting and sometimes hilariously funny—like the time we found ourselves trying to convince the United States Postal Service that our IRS 501(c)(3) designation did, in fact, entitle us to the nonprofit rate for mailings. We went to Boston for an appointment with some higher-up at the USPS headquarters on Milk Street and spent hours in that building shuffling from one office to another. The more people we talked to, the more convinced we were that the enormous USPS Manual existed solely to perpetuate itself, and there was no way on earth we were going to get through its maze of rules and regulations to the designation we so badly needed.

Finally, as we were waiting in an empty office for the umpteenth official to meet with us, a sheepish slip of a man we’d never seen snuck into the room, turned the pages of the ever-present Postal Manual, pointed wordlessly to a subsection under a category we had never considered trying, and slunk out of the room. When the official whose office it was joined us, we suggested to him that we had erred in our application, and that this was category under which we should have applied for the nonprofit mailing rate. We were approved, almost unwillingly, and left the building in high spirits. We walked out into the bright sunshine of a suddenly glorious day—and straight into a procession led by a camel! A live camel, walking down the middle of Milk Street, in downtown Boston. Somehow, it just fit with the morning’s events.

Maybe that trip into the bizarre world of the postal service is the reason Walter Arndt’s essay came to mind when I was asked for a particularly memorable piece from the magazine. His “Grace-Notes from Sicily” is a delicious send-up of the Italian postal service in Taormina. He likens the atmosphere in the post office to “the imperturbable, barely undulating calm of a multivascular aquarium inhabited by five grave, not unkindly but profoundly preoccupied fish.”  The essay goes on to describe the various maneuverings of the fish as an unwary client tries to send a package of books to himself in Turkey.

Nearly forty years after first reading it, I still laugh out loud at Arndt’s wonderful prose. Walter was a true man of letters, a world-renowned scholar and translator of German, Russian, and Polish. He could speak more than seventeen languages, and once broke my husband’s heart by telling Sydney—who had gone to Walter for help with learning Hungarian—that no one could learn Hungarian, not even the Hungarians. Walter said he himself had tried, and had failed.

Despite holding post-graduate degrees in Business Administration, Political Science and Economics, Engineering, and Comparative Literature, Walter Arndt was a gentle and humble man. He was sweet and funny and generous to the end of his life, and this piece offers anyone who reads it a glimpse into his very lovely mind.

P.S. Why the camel? It was bearing a sign, advertising the opening of a new Middle Eastern restaurant.

“Grace-Notes from Sicily” by Walter Arndt

BUY the BACK ISSUE (1.3)

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M. Robin Barone, a 1978 Dartmouth College graduate, is one of the founding editors of New England Review, serving as its Managing Editor from 1977 to 1982. After leaving NER, she attended Vermont Law School, graduating summa cum laudein 1986. She married Sydney Lea in 1983; they have five children. Barone is an attorney-mediator, an adjunct professor of law at Vermont Law School, on the board of a number of nonprofit organizations, and Chair of the Newbury Village Trustees.

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