Even here on the Darkling Plain there are beacons of light that, in their turning, cast rays of sunshine across the wasteland of the Forgotten Writer. One such beacon has just flashed its light across my window pane, and so I’d like to take time out from my usual harangue to pay tribute to a fine old American journal, The Sewanee Review. Published by the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and ably edited by George Core, it is one of the nation’s oldest and most distinguished literary quarterlies. And not coincidentally, I suspect, it is the only magazine that for some years now has seen fit to publish this blogger's serious work. As witnessed by the Spring 2012 issue, which opens with a story by your friend Sinbad the Sailor, writing as usual under the pen name of Thomas Bontly.
The story is entitled "Lightning on the Hill," and it comes from my new novel, Legacy of Dreams, which is now in its final (I do hope and pray) revision. The novel covers five generations (fool that I am) of an American family, but this particular story focuses on one year in the life of a young woman who finds herself stranded on her family’s Wisconsin farm. Longing to escape from her dreary life, Gertrude Lantz dreams of becoming a poet like Emilie Dickinson, a novelist like Emilie Bronte, though whether she has the talent to achieve such goals is indeed an open question. Using excerpts from her diary and a few of her poems, the story portrays a tragic incident in the life of the family that changes them all forever. The incident is based on a story my father told me, a local legend from the little town where he grew up, and I had been trying to find a place for it in my fiction for well over fifty years.
This particular issue of the Sewanee, by the way, is volume CXX, number 2. If I remember my Roman numerals correctly, that’s volume 120, as in 120 years of continuous publication. I don’t know what the first issue looked like, but my guess is that the journal hasn’t changed very much over the years. The current issue has a very traditional look, and one that hasn’t changed since Sewanee published my first submission back in 1996. It has a light blue cover made of stiff paper, bearing the name of journal and a selected table of contents. The interior pages are a non-glossy but bright enough white, the printing (by Johns Hopkins University Press) clear and dark. The editing is superb; you will look long and hard before you find a typo, spelling error, or abuse of English grammar anywhere in the magazine. There are no photographs or illustrations and no advertising, except for a few pages at the very back. It is in all respects a feast of words.
Now it’s true that since creative writing programs got their foothold in academia, many universities and colleges have launched literary magazines, most of them edited by graduate students with the input of a faculty adviser. We have such a magazine at my old program, Cream City Review by name. I helped to secure funding for it, served on its advisory board, even published in it a time or two, as did several of my colleagues. By now it’s had a distinguished run of thirty-six years. Like most such magazines, it affects a modern, or excuse me, postmodern look: lots of vivid art work, lots of experimental poetry and prose. Very highbrow, very stylish, very chic. I feel quite sure such a magazine would never publish one of my old-fashioned stories.
So it’s important that there are journals like the Sewanee, where shipwrecked sailors like Sinbad can send their stories with some hope of finding a receptive editor. My first submission, made through my agent at Curtis Brown, the much-missed Emilie Jacobson, was a chapter torn from a novel on which I’d worked long and hard called Lucky’s Blues. Lucky was an aging, alcoholic jazz musician who tries to escape the downward spiral of his life by learning an "honest trade"–shoe repair. The chapter focus on a day when he encounters his ex-wife–a very bitter hour for Lucky, during which he remembers many sins of his youth. Most of the editors who saw the complete novel said they admired the writing and characterization, but felt the story was just too "downbeat" for the current market. That’s downbeat, as in realistic, honest, and true to life.
After thirty or so rejections, I set about excerpting several chapters I thought might work as short stories. "Lucky’s Blues" was the first of these, and Emilie was delighted when it was accepted by the Sewanee Review. Since the paycheck was modest, her commission even more so, I didn’t quite understand at first why she was so pleased by the sale. Later I learned that Sewanee has a special relationship with its contributors. They tend to appear in the magazine again and again, not to the exclusion of new writers, but with the regularity of old friends. Not everything Emilie sent, or I’ve sent since her death, has been accepted. George Core does have his standards, his preferences, his idiosyncracies of taste, and he complains of getting too many submissions and accumulating too much material, so that publication may be delayed for several years. My next published piece in the Sewanee was a memoir and critical perspective on my old mentor and champion, Wallace Stegner. An admirer of Stegner’s work, George asked me to review the next several posthumous collections to appear. I also reviewed other works of fiction in which I took some personal interest, published another extract from Lucky’s Blues, and three brand new stories, including "Lightning on the Hill." Altogether, that just about sums up my out-put for the past fifteen years. Without the Sewanee, my name would’ve entirely faded from the scene.
The magazine has sometimes been criticized as a "southern good old boys’ club," but not all of the writers to appear in its pages are southerners (I’m certainly not), and not all of them are men. They are good writers, however, and many of us are "old," at least in terms of our approach to the arts of fiction, poetry, and criticism. You will find no experimental postmodernism in the Sewanee, and no critical theorizing. What you will find are traditional stories about love and death, hope and despair, good and evil; surprisingly traditional poems that focus our attention on bits of nature, moments of truth, the smaller miracles of life on earth; essays that genuinely care about the literary object and the mind that produced it, the relationship of the individual to the land, and a host of other subjects distinguished by their intelligence and general interest.
And here you thought such magazines had totally vanished from the face of the earth! No, fellow forgotten writers, at least one survives. And that’s why I urge you to obtain a copy of this latest issue of the Sewanee (the one with my story in it, did I mention that?) and devour its contents at your leisure. You can order single copies or a one-year subscription by contacting the Johns Hopkins University Press/Journals Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore MD 21211. Now whether you, too, will be able to publish your work here, or whether you will need to find your own version of the ideal literary quarterly, I urge you to try. The pay’s not great–you won’t be able to live on it–but the self-respect and gratification you will get from seeing yourself in print, and in such good company, will be sufficient reward. It will be like attending an extraordinary dinner party in the company of scintillating people. After several hours of intensely passionate conversation, you will walk out into the night, guided by the beacons that still light the Darkling Plain, and think strong clean thoughts under a starry sky.
Until next time, mariners.
Sinbad
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