They read page after page. At times, they have even feared they might drown in paper.
No, they are not the Middlebury Admissions Committee.
Literary magazines, which work as a kind of combination networking tool/self esteem booster for aspiring and established writers, are always overwhelmed with submissions. The College-affiliated New England Review (NER) receives roughly 4000 manuscripts annually, 2000 for poetry alone. The work must be sorted, weeded and pruned to fit the confines of a quarterly publishing schedule.
In a publishing landscape that is constantly changing, it is important to recognize the constants: writers published in NER have regularly received prestigious awards including the Pushcart Prize, O’Henry Prize, and selection for Best American anthologies.
NER is over three decades old. Along with the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, it has put this College on the literary map. Even so, longevity and prestige do not necessarily equal sustainability; the magazine will need to meet its own financial needs by the end of 2011, when its subsidy from the College runs out. The ultimate goal is to raise $100,000 annually, thereby increasing the magazine’s endowment to $2 million. The staff remains optimistic.
- For more than 30 years, the New England Review has published a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction pieces in their quarterly journals.
“We are in significantly stronger position now than we were a year ago,” editor and Fulton Professor of Humanities Stephen Donadio said. “Subscriptions are up 40 percent compared to last year. We’ve been actively engaged in fundraising and have made some real progress. Financially we’re on much more solid ground.”
Efforts have also been made to create greater visibility, with appearances this summer at a New York City book fair — think of a large room of publishers and writers shopping samples of as many literary magazines as they can get their hands on — and a reading at the Donald E. Axinn ’51, Litt. D. ’89 Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Starr Library by faculty and alumni, including Jay Parini, D. E. Axinn Professor of English & Creative Writing, and Robert Cohen, Professor of English and American Literatures.
One change, long debated, is the move to an online submissions option, with a small fee attached. In many ways more efficient, not to mention a fundraising opportunity, the decision also represents another stage in NER’s ongoing exploration of the Internet, a technology that opens up as many doors as it closes. The magazine has made portions of each issue available online to read.
“Editors need to think about how much content to make downloadable without destroying the magazine so that there’s no reason to buy it,” Donadio said. “The work must be accessible to an audience at a price that is regarded as reasonable.”
Which is not to discount the magazine’s most basic function. “It’s sort of what they’re for,” managing editor Carolyn Kuebler said. “Once a writer either graduates from college or an MFA program they’re facing an entire world. They need to find a community to send work to and get it commented on. Literary magazines serve as a community for these people. Writers look to magazines for people to read their work outside friends and family.”
Donadio agrees, noting that it is rare for writers not published early in their career to go on to have a career at all.
“Editors at publishing houses can’t just publish manuscripts thrown through the window,” he said. “Appearing in a respected literary journal gives writers a kind of claim.”
It is possible to think of magazines like NER as incubators for the future big names on bookstore shelves.
As summer intern Juan Machado ‘11 puts it: “In class you read about writers who’ve been dead for a long time. But there’s a whole world of writers working right now who you can meet. Contemporary writers come from literary magazine backgrounds; it’s where they’re made and discovered.”
