New England Review

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Jim Schley on Janey McCafferty

NER 6.4 (1984)

Former Managing Editor and Co-Editor Jim Schley introduces “While Mother Was Gone with 571” by Janey McCafferty from NER 6.4 (1984).

In the autumn of 1979, I’d graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in Creative Writing and Literature and a minor in Native American Studies. I made a list of jobs I would love to have, and working for a literary magazine was on top. I looked around the area where I was living, the Upper Valley region of central New Hampshire and Vermont, and realized that New England Review was right there, just north along the Connecticut River in Lyme, New Hampshire.

I’d taken courses from co-founder Jay Parini, but knew Sydney Lea only through mutual friends; yet this was well enough to write him a letter and ask if I could talk to him about helping with the journal.

From the start, Syd had vowed to read every submission that arrived, with characteristic passion. He was determined that the new journal would be completely receptive to the strongest writing that arrived, whatever its source. By the time I contacted him, there were hundreds of packets piling in every month, which was overwhelming. He asked if I’d be willing to review manuscripts with him for a modest rate, $5 an hour at first.

I started in January of 1980, and from the beginning this was an old-fashioned apprenticeship, as I learned in a bottom-to-top way the craft of editing, which has been my livelihood for most of the ensuing four decades.

Syd encouraged me to take the time I needed to carefully read and think about each piece, to the degree that I thought warranted, then send him with written comments on anything I believed should be given another look. I played this role for two years, even after moving from New Hampshire to western Massachusetts; once a month or so, I’d come north to meet with Syd and Managing Editor Robin Barone and pick up another large box of envelopes and mailers.

In 1982, when Robin decided to enroll in law school, they asked me if I’d be interested in becoming Managing Editor. Within a few months I’d moved to Lyme to take on the whole panoply of tasks involved in running a small but lively and growing nonprofit organization and producing a quarterly publication, as the sole person in the office. I did everything from bookkeeping and bill-paying and keeping minutes for meetings to preparing typed manuscripts for the designer and typesetter, distributing printer’s proofs to authors (always through the US mail), coordinating with the printer and mailing-list service, and continuing to read and correspond with aspiring and accepted authors, and tracking down artwork for the covers.

I learned so much. In those days, typeset copy came back from composition in long strips with waxed backing, which needed to be cut with an X-Acto knife and affixed to the blue-gridded templates created by designer Kate Emlen, who would review, adjust for positioning and typographical nuances, and approve my layout “dummies.” There were three desks and a work table in our office, and I would move from station to station for different duties. After two years, following my editing of the special issue Writers in the Nuclear Age (later reissued as a book Writing in a Nuclear Age), Syd asked me to become his Co-editor on the masthead, and first Mary Moore then Maura High served as part-time Managing Editors; Maura later became Co-editor.

My New England Review work was demanding and constant, but during those years I completed an MFA in the low-residency program at Warren Wilson College, and also worked intensively with the Vermont-based experimental troupe, Bread and Puppet Theater. For several summers I made a satellite office for New England Review in an old school bus at Bread and Puppet’s northern Vermont farm, where we produced the annual Domestic Resurrection Circus that attracted upwards of thirty thousand people for a climactic weekend of performances. By this time the journal had an affiliation with the Bread Loaf conference (and the ungainly moniker, NER/BLQ, which led my friends to jest that I really worked for the rockabilly band NRBQ). In 1986, as plans were being made to move the office to the Middlebury campus, I was invited to tour internationally with Bread and Puppet and decided not to accompany the journal to its new home, though Syd had built my position into the transfer agreement he’d created. I was worn out from reading thousands of manuscripts and wanted to see if I could focus on my own efforts as an artist.

Asked by New England Review’s present editor Carolyn Kuebler to choose a piece from my time as editor with special significance, I knew right away which one I’d name.

In 1983 we received in the mail a story called “While Mother Was Gone with 571” by Janey McCafferty, a writer none of us knew.

Looking back over the Summer 1984 issue, in which we placed McCafferty’s story first in the sequence, I’m enchanted to see the poetry, fiction, and literary prose published that season. Probably most journal editors feel that for each individual issue they are concocting a buffet, with contrasting and complementary elements, anticipating that varied readers will love different pieces, but aiming to bring together a tantalizing combination. That issue included extraordinary Vietnam poems by Yusef Komunyaaka, and poems by the now-deceased (but I hope not forgotten) William Dickey and Jim Simmerman. We featured a gorgeous and precise essay about Elizabeth Bishop by Michael Ryan, a strangely majestic story by Sharon Doubiago, and translations from the Marathi of Mangesh Padgaonkar, the Nicaraguan Spanish of Rosario Murillo, the Quebecois French of Anne Hébert, and the Cuban Spanish of Antonio Benítez-Rojo—and much more, each piece long considered, then chosen and placed. That issue’s cover has a mesmerizing picture of an indigenous Cuna woman in Panama with an albino “Moonchild,” taken by photographer Ted Degener.

There are many works of that I’m grateful and proud to have been part of bringing to the wider world, but the decision to publish Janey McCafferty’s story has made the biggest difference in my own life.

Readers will see that “While Mother Was Gone with 571” is taut, brisk, and hilarious. With a narration that’s audible and bright, in a voice as distinctive as Huck Finn’s or one of Grace Paley’s park ladies but with a teenager’s sass, the story blends shrewdly noticed details of time and locale with smacking dialogue and then climaxes with a rueful discovery. What commences as family slapstick in only a few pages darkens and chars, then concludes with a chill that’s hard to deflect.

After publishing McCafferty’s story, we decided to submit it for a Pushcart Prize, and for the nomination form I needed her date of birth. I wrote to the address we had, and heard back from her mother, since by then she was living elsewhere. The birthdate was within days of my own, and that November I sent her a birthday card out of the blue.

Thus began what has been an almost twenty-five-year pen-pal friendship. We’ve written well over a hundred letters to each other, for certain stretches more than a letter a week (there were times when we wrote every day): hundreds of sheets of notebook paper, and innumerable stamps. Sometimes we spoke by phone, but far more frequently we wrote letters. During these years we confided our work joys and woes, our romances and marriages, the births of our children, and the aging of our parents. One time when I was laid off from a job and felt sideswiped, barely able to speak, part of what got me through the rupture was writing Janey an eighteen-page letter.

But for the longest time, we’d never met—not till the 2008 AWP Conference in New York City, when we made our first in-person rendezvous, with long walks through the streets and bouts of laughter.

I can scarcely imagine being a writer without a friend who’s a writer, and this particular writer-friendship is especially complete. The serendipity of its beginnings is like any chance encounter: miraculous.

In my book of poems As When, In Season, there is a series in an invented form, nine portraits of women who have been my teachers in various ways, partly based on the imagery of the mythological Greek muses. As a child, I’d understood the muses to be not just inspirers of male artists, but virtuosos in their own right, in varied domains. For my evocation of Janey McCafferty and our epistolary friendship, I chose Thalia, muse of Comedy. Here’s the poem I wrote, “For Thalia.”

 

“While Mother was Gone with 571” by Janey McCafferty

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Jim Schley served as Assistant Editor, Managing Editor, then Co-Editor of New England Review from 1980 to 1986. In addition to his role at New England Review, Jim Schley has been a performer and tour organizer for several theater ensembles; managing editor and editor-in-chief for the book publisher Chelsea Green; executive director of The Frost Place museum and poetry center; and since 2008, managing editor of Tupelo Press. He has edited nearly two hundred books in varied genres and fields, and is author of the poetry chapbook One Another (Chapiteau, 1999) and a full-length collection of poems, As When, In Season (Marick, 2008). He lives on a land cooperative in Strafford, Vermont.

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

William Lychack on William Maxwell

NER 16.4 (1994)

Former Associate Editor William Lychack recalls receiving and publishing “A Brace of Fairy Tales” and “Two Light-Hearted Fables” by William Maxwell, from NER 16.4 (1994).

I’d written a fan letter to William Maxwell before I ever dreamed of editing at New England Review, but that job gave me permission to write to all the writers I loved. I remember asking Mr. Maxwell to please send anything to us—that nothing else would make me happy—and one day Toni Best had a manila envelope addressed to my attention from East 86th Street, New York, New York.

I didn’t even open it. I didn’t even take off my coat. I thanked her and ran to the old chapel across the street to be alone with whatever was inside. (How fitting to be in the quiet of a church, the moment still sacred all these years later to me.) I held my breath, made sure my hands were clean, and handled those typescript pages like they were the most precious documents on earth, such were my feelings toward this writer and his work.

Inside the envelope were the four fables you see here. In fact, that entire issue was, to my mind, truly inspired. William Maxwell, Marianne Boruch, Andrea Barrett, Miller Williams, Alice Mattison, Eileen Pollack, Terry Tempest Williams, Kate Barnes, Phillip Baruth, Sally Ball, Kate Barnes . . .

In his cover letter, Mr. Maxwell invited me to send him a story sometime, if the spirit moved me. I wrote and sent him a group of fables as a kind of response, and we started a correspondence that lasted the rest of his life. In one letter he wrote, in counsel, “Try to listen to your feelings as you would to the sound in a seashell, and then put them down on paper.” So simple, so difficult, such lasting advice that I have been carrying and aspiring toward ever since.

 

“A Brace of Fairy Tales” and “Two Light-Hearted Fables” by William Maxwell

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Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger

William Lychack served as Associate Editor of NER from 1994 to 1995. He is the author of a novel, The Wasp Eater (2005), and a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers (2011). His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and on public radio’s This American Life. He currently teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Jodee Stanley on Michael Russell

NER 21.2 (2000)

Former Managing Editor Jodee Stanley introduces “Smoke on the Water” by Michael Russell, from NER 21.2 (2000).

My discovery of Michael Russell’s story “Smoke on the Water” has become an inspirational anecdote I like to share with my student editors at that point in the reading period when they are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of submissions. The majority of their slush reading is digital, of course, which is not how it was back at the turn of the twenty-first century. Try to imagine it, I tell them: I’m surrounded literal piles of paper, each manuscript packed neatly in a manila envelope so I have to slide the whole thing out and set aside the cover letter in order to get to the first page. Now imagine I have been doing this for an entire afternoon, trying to catch up on my own backlog of reading, just like the backlog you’re facing now in your Submittable account. I’ve read forty-five, fifty stories, maybe more. My eyes are exhausted. My head’s exhausted, and not a single one of these stories has stood out to me—not one has given me the “ping” in the nerves that tells me there’s something special here. I have one final, nondescript manila envelope staring at me—it’s the last one in the pile I promised myself I’d complete by the end of the day. And I’m thinking, can I do it? Should I do it? Maybe I’ve lost it, maybe I’ve worn myself out so much I wouldn’t even recognize quality writing now anyway.

This is the fear: that at some point your eyes are just running across the words, truly unable to distinguish good from bad.

But I’m a little bit type A—I like order, I need closure. So I sigh, and tell myself it doesn’t matter, because what are the odds of finding anything at this point? And I pull out the story, and read the first paragraph, fully prepared for disappointment.

But.

Ping

There is a certain kind of writing—confident but not pretentious, authentic but not sloppy—that quietly grabs you and tugs you into its tale so effortlessly that you don’t even know it’s happening. “Smoke on the Water” is a gentle perfect storm of humor, empathy, and quiet desperation. I was three pages in to it before I realized that I was reading with a fully immersed pleasure—I had forgotten momentarily that I was at work in an uncomfortable desk chair, surrounded by discarded envelopes. I knew immediately that we would publish this story, and that it would forever be one of my favorites.

I have strong, fond memories of several of the wonderful stories we published during my days at NER, but this is the only crystalline memory I have of that breathtaking moment of discovery. But that one moment, that ping, is all it takes to remind myself that this is why we do it—this is the true joy of being an editor.

“Smoke on the Water” by Michael Russell

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Jodee Stanley served as Managing Editor of New England Review from 1997 through 2003. She is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program and Editor of Ninth Letter at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in journals including Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, and others. Her essay on literary publishing, which originally appeared in the Mississippi Review, was reprinted in the anthology Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine (2013), and her fiction has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies and named to the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Stories.

 

40th Anniversary: From the Vault

Lexa de Courval on Carl Phillips

NER 35.2 (2014)

Former Office Manager Lexa de Courval considers the persistent questions and mysteries found in “Beautiful Dreamer,” an essay by Carl Phillips, from NER 35.2 (2014).

“Beautiful Dreamer” demands your attention in the very first paragraph. I admire how Carl Phillips chooses here to write about what is difficult and also very real, and in doing so he creates images we will respond to differently—we might feel uncomfortable, or charmed, perhaps even angry. Regardless, I find myself contemplating the Blue King, and mesmerized by the beauty of his descriptions.

Of the many treasured pieces we published during my years at NER, I am still drawn to this work because I feel that it is courageous, and it came to me at a time when I was questioning the world around me on a deeper level. Our lives are filled with experiences that require us to rely on our instincts while sorting through truth and myth. Recently I have reflected on what it means to be human today, and how social media has created another layer to living behind a mask. We are not always how we envision ourselves, and at times are warriors within our own lives trying to heal and find our inner beauty. Asking probing questions and taking risks can be like being on a battlefield, particularly with the unsettling challenges in our current world.

For decades I have adored poetry, spending hours rereading intriguing lines to ask myself: Have I missed the point? How do I know this isn’t my selfish interpretation of something I need to happen in this work? Phillips comforts me in this as he writes about his own poem “Beautiful Dreamer,” and in response to poetry.

For months after having written the poem, I in fact found it difficult to know with any certainty, if not the poem’s meaning, then at least the meaning to which the poem might be gesturing. Many poets write toward a chosen subject, but I’ve always been the kind who writes from a supposedly clear space into a space of surprise, that is, where I find myself surprised—and not so pleasantly surprised, more often than not, surprised instead into a heightened awareness of something troubling.

We are often troubled by the page and how real it can be; we know what our hearts feel, yet we sometimes question our innate being. Poetry can take us down a dark alley, but we are compelled to know what we will find there. Is it real or is it a dream? Are we hiding behind a disguise of what we imagine? This essay will challenge you to face your dreams and desires.

Was it Dante’s Inferno or The Iliad of Homer that first brought forth the expression to eat one’s heart out, which appears here in Stephen Crane’s rather bestial stanza of a creature eating his own heart? Is it power we seek when we punish or are punished—to claim one’s glory and revel in someone else’s doom?

I enjoyed Phillips’s selections from Shelley and Crane reflecting on power, and on how for some, punishment can often become as addictive as pleasure. “We can never really know another’s heart,” he writes. But if it is our own heart, we are compassionate, and “it’s better to eat of what we know.” He quotes from Crane’s Black Rider series: 

“But I like it
Because it is bitter
And because it is my heart.”

Phillips brilliantly describes how a poem is an “interior dialogue we have with our other selves,” how we “write in response to being human.” “The poem is a form of negotiation with what haunts us,” he writes, “. . . insofar as what haunts us is, in part, who we are.”

 I was the Blue King. I led the dance.

One might have chosen to skirt the encounter in the park with which Phillips opens this essay, yet he chose to look it in the eye and be mystified, and to attempt to clarify for himself what he really saw. Phillips challenges us to seek understanding in the world around us and be surprised. He continues with the subject of loss in “Untitled,” a poem by Lorine Niedecker. We feel emotion for the subject that is difficult to put into words—Paul / when the leaves fall. Is there beauty in mourning?  We do not want to live our lives alone, but sometimes to be human is to feel very alone as we face death and hardships.

Phillips invites us into the work of these other writers, and into their stories, as he brings them into his own exquisite writing. Writers are compelled to record these times, and we relive each day through the histories of others as we create our own moving pictures. What is real and what is a dream, history or imagined, heroic or heartbreaking? Phillips encourages us to write, to seek meaning and confront the challenges in our everyday lives.

Having worked at NER and Bread Loaf for many years I have been continually inspired by authors like Carl Phillips and by their presence in my own life. I remember seeing John Ashbery, whose passages Phillips describes in his final page, surrounded by young scholars in a crowded room. I remember reading Seamus Heaney from a hefty Norton Anthology in college and then what an honor it was to meet him in person and receive his poem, “Du Bellay in Rome” for NER’s 34.2. I cherish the sound of Julia Alvarez lecturing on little children saving the world through medicine. People and place are life and these surroundings make up who we are and how we live.

Phillips leaves us with provocative questions: Are we living, dreaming, or haunted by the moment? What is beauty and how do we make peace with our own inner demons? Admittedly, I cannot know Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or the Blue King of “Beautiful Dreamer,” though I can come to know them through Phillips. While pondering these alluring pages ahead, I hope you will keep dreaming and be enchanted.  And, are we not most beautiful while we sleep?

 

“Beautiful Dreamer” by Carl Phillips

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Lexa de Courval was Editorial Assistant and then Office Manager at New England Review from 2009 to 2016. She is currently the Academic Coordinator at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College. She previously worked in local museum education programs at both Shelburne Museum and Henry Sheldon Museum, and for the Bread Loaf School of English.

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