New England Review Tops the Charts

Most people on campus can tell you that the old yellow and green houses you pass on your way to the Snow Bowl are home to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. But not as many people can tell you that across the street from Alexander Twilight Hall, in a converted pediatrician’s office stands the headquarters of the New England Review, one of the country’s top-ranked literary magazines.

Headed by Editor Stephen Donadio, Managing Editor Carolyn Kuebler, and Poetry Editor C. Dale Young, the literary magazine is sponsored by and strongly associated with the College. The magazine is a quarterly, and, as Donadio said, “an unpredictable magazine.”

D. E. Axinn Professor of English & Creative Writing poets Jay Parini, and Sydney Lea founded the New England Review in New Hampshire in 1978 with the vision of starting a magazine that was different from other literary magazines. And they have accomplished this goal; the Review contains work by both fresh new writers and older more established writers and features a variety of literary genres.

Parini, decided he wanted to start a literary magazine during his time teaching at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. When his friend and fellow poet, Lea, who was teaching at Dartmouth at the same time, had a similar plan, they decided to create one together.

At the time, numerous literary journals and magazines represented the literature of the Southern U.S., but few publications printed work by writers from the North.

“Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Frost — all of these writers [are] from New England, but there was no review,” said Parini. It was the drive to fill this void that inspired the name of the magazine.

Parini described it as “an attempt to tie back to the core values of the American Renaissance,” and celebrate the New England roots of some of the most distinguished writers in history.

After collecting money, manuscripts and possible designs, Parini and Lea opened their first office near Hanover and began publishing. A few years later, in 1982, Parini and Lea both moved to Middlebury to teach, bringing the magazine with them. For a brief time after the move, the publication’s name was changed to the New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly; however, it was soon changed back, dropping the phrase “Bread Loaf Quarterly,” so as not to discourage lesser-known writers by explicitly associating the publication with Bread Loaf School of English’s lofty status.

The vision of the two professors from Dartmouth became a reality, and the magazine flourished. As the magazine gained recognition, so did many of its writers. Louise Erdich and Mark Doty were published in the Review before achieving international success.

In 1994, Donadio, who was teaching at the College at the time, took over as editor.

As Donadio sees it, the New England Review is “intended to present readers with a range of different kinds of writing and voices.” It primarily publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry, but the content varies from translations to historical memoirs to literary critiques.

There is no set standard for what might be published, just the prerequisite that it be “something that startles you,” as Kuebler, a graduate of the College, put it.

Every year, the magazine receives around 6,000 submissions from writers across a wide spectrum of experience and recognition. The editors, along with a handful of readers, select pieces by writers of different tiers and publish them alongside each other.

It is a magazine that challenges the norms for literary magazines, and is thus regarded among the best in the country.

‘They care about writing,” said Kuebler of the College and its relationship with the Review.

With one of the strongest undergraduate programs in creative writing in the U.S., “Middlebury is a place where literature is central and it’s celebrated,” Parini said.

The magazine remains a major facet of the College’s strength in literary studies and “reinforces, in dramatic ways, Middlebury’s presence in the literary world,” said Donadio,

Though seemingly under-recognized by the student body, the Review has maintained an important role in the College’s English and Arts programs and has contributed in myriad ways to the College’s literary prestige.