LITERARY MAGAZINE REVIEW
On October, 2002, Natural Bridge was
reviewed in Literary Magazine Review, a quarterly review of literary
magazines that is published at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
The reviewer, John McNally, is the author of a short story collection,
Troublemakers, and the editor of numerous anthologies. His
review appears in its entirety below.
Natural Bridge: A Journal
of Contemporary Literature
Number 6 Fall 2001; David Carkeet,
Editor; Natural Bridge, Department of English, University of Missouri-St
Louis, 8001 Natural Bridge Road, St Louis, MO 63121; 280 pages (this issue);
$8.00 per copy, $15.00 per year (two issues).
I have to come clean:
I've grown tired of looking at literary magazines. I've spent nearly twenty
years reading and collecting them, but something has happened in the past
few years that's made me grow weary at the mere sight of them. Maybe this
happens to all writers at some point; I don't know. I can't pinpoint a
single reason. Part of it is that I'm tired of picking up certain magazines
and seeing listed on their tables of contents the exact same names that
were listed when I first began picking up the magazine two decades ago.
(I won't name magazines here, but if you follow them, you can probably
plug in the applicable journal titles without much trouble.) I'm also tired
of magazine editors who publish only their friends, and whose friends go
on to win the magazines' annual awards and then get to submit their grainy
(sometimes eerie) photos to Poets & Writers--editors of supposedly
esteemed
journals (though, in truth, the reputations are often due to the magazines'
longevity or to the hard, honest work of editors now long-dead or retired).
I'm tired of new, small magazines that publish only established writers.
("What's the point?" I want to ask these editors.) I'm tired of all the
new "hip" journals (often, though not always, located in or around NYC)
whose editors become mini-celebrities for the parties they throw, or for
the trust-funds they have, or for the "edgy" writers they publish, all
those postmodern writers-du-jour (the same dozen or so names), and whose
editors then go on to land six-figure contracts for their own hip, postmodern
books. In short, I'm tired of staleness, of shams, of hype. And, who knows,
maybe I'm jealous. Maybe the truth is that I'd like to be at the
helm of some venerable magazine and publish the same dozen writers for
the next thirty years. (That would eliminate the hard work of reading the
slush pile.) Or maybe what I want to do is start a magazine so that I can
publish all of my friends or publish other editors for a little quid
pro quo. Or maybe I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of filling
my brand-new journal with nothing but safe bets so that the grant money
will continue pouring in. Or maybe I'd like to be a mini-celebrity with
a trust-fund and a shiny new book contract. I'm almost willing to concede
to all of that, to type it up, put it into an envelope, and hand it over
to you as my final confession. And as an editor of several anthologies
and as a fiction writer myself, I may very well be guilty of some of the
above infractions (except for having a sweet little trust-fund).
But then I run across
a magazine like Natural Bridge, and I remember what it was like
when I first discovered literary magazines, and I realize that I'm not
tired of literary magazines at all. What I'm tired of are editors who've
lost their way, editors who've forgotten (or never knew) the function of
the little magazine.
In an introduction
to his magazine MSS, John Gardner wrote: "All of the fiction in
this first volume of the new MSS is by relatively unknown writers,
some of them previously unpublished, some just beginning to be noticed.
My chief concern as fiction editor is to print, not the work of the already
famous--they have outlets enough--but the work of writers who, in my opinion,
promise to be the beloved and admired writers of the next generation. If
sometime in the future I publish fiction by someone with an instantly recognizable
name, I will do it with reluctance, only because I like the story so much
that I cannot stand not to publish it even though doing so means robbing
space from some little-known writer who needs and deserves it." Gardner
goes on to admit that his taste isn't everyone's, but that should go without
saying. If an editor is guided by Gardner's criteria of finding the deserving
unknown, then at least the editor can securely bring to that magazine a
true vision. The vision may not succeed, but so be it. At least the editor's
attempts would be honest.
So far as I can
tell, honesty is the guiding light of Natural Bridge. You immediately
get a sense of fair-play in editor David Carkeet's foreword. In it, he
acknowledges the editorial assistants (MFA students, I'm assuming) who
found and championed certain pieces that eventually made their way into
the magazine. (I can name a few magazine editors who would rather jump
off a cliff than give credit to a student.) And in the rarest, most telling,
of gestures, Carkeet credits another magazine for publishing a story that
had slipped through Natural Bridge's hands while they "dithered,"
as he puts it. He wants readers of Natural Bridge to read the story
that got away, and he isn't afraid to direct them to that other magazine.
I call this rare because I've heard numerous horror stories of writers
who, after withdrawing their story from a magazine, have suffered consequences--getting
their manuscript back from the jilted magazine, only to find it shredded;
being put on a magazine's notorious "black list"; even receiving menacing
phone calls from the pissed-off editor. These are true stories. Even magazines
that accept simultaneous submissions do so begrudgingly. Natural Bridge
accepts simultaneous submissions, and they admit that losing a piece is
one of the realities of this policy. But to credit the magazine that beat
them to the punch is unheard of.
Issue Number 6 of
Natural
Bridge, with 114 pages of fiction, 19 pages of poetry, and 113 pages
of essays, has a healthy heft to it. (The genre of each piece is identified
in the table of contents, unlike some magazines which prefer being coy
with this information under the guise that "good writing is good writing"
and that its genre doesn't matter. Call me old-fashioned, but it matters
to me and I suspect it matters to most writers.) The fiction and essays
are of average length (probably fifteen to twenty-five manuscript pages
each), and the poets, with one exception, are each represented by a single
poem. An attractive cover--a color illustration of a cat tiptoeing across
a high-wire with a book in its mouth--binds the work together.
The work is, by
and large, traditional. You'll find no cheap pyrotechnics here. About the
closest thing to postmodernism (or post-post-modernism, or, as the self-declared
hip sometimes call it, "po-po-mo") that you'll find here is Joseph Doyle's
poem "Ggfddfg," followed by Brian Doyle's amusing three-page essay "Notes
on the Poem 'Ggfddfg' by Joseph Doyle," the critical analysis of a "found
text" (the text having been written with one finger by his three-year-old
son, Joe Doyle, while his father, Brian Doyle, folded laundry). The analysis
opens as follows: "It is the quasi-Welsh motif sounded tersely in the opening
line that
rivets me first in this recent effort by
the modern American poet Joe Doyle, and then, of course, the e.e. cummingsesque
gleeful and joyous sliding note of the twelfth through fifteenth line (e/e/e/eee),
a lovely example of the poet's use of typographic creativity to make a
poetic statement, in much the same manner as the concluding line of the
poem."
The truth is, Brian
Doyle's essay isn't so much postmodern as it is classic parody. Like most
good parody, it's short. We can enjoy it for what it is, and then we can
move on.
What I like about
Natural
Bridge--one of its many strengths--is that it has a sense of
humor. The short story "Big Mike" by Darren DeFrain is one such example.
In synopsis, the story is anything but funny: an alcoholic is coerced into
taking his son to a father/son "Indian Guide" outing. Big Mike, the alcoholic,
is the story's foul-mouthed narrator, and while the reader may not like
him, it's possible for the reader to empathize with him along the way and,
even, be amused by his observations. Time and again, as much as I resisted,
I found myself on Big Mike's side, as when he heads out into the Michigan
winter morning and observes several fathers chipping a hole into an ice-covered
lake: "I'm next," Marty says from right next to me and he takes his coat
off. But he doesn't stop there. He takes off his shirt, and his undershirt,
and his boots and socks and his pants and his underwear. His headband is
the last to go and he lays this down on his pants next to his bare feet.
His dick looks like a circus peanut in the cold and I can't believe he's
not embarrassed by it."
Naked, Marty then
jumps through the hole and into the icy water. Big Mike, unable to find
anything remotely communal about the experience, thinks they're all nuts.
By the story's end, however, Big Mike attempts his own spectacle. It's
the sort of ending that I love: there is no dramatic character change,
no turnaround, but rather an image, or series of images, that exposes a
character's vulnerability, showing us a dimension we haven't yet seen,
an attempt on the narrator's part to stake a claim, to make his
mark, for better or worse.
Author DeFrain is
just one of the many accomplished newcomers in this issue.
Dan Pope is another,
weighing in with "My Brother's Apartment," a story that is reminiscent,
in a good way, of Michael Cunningham's much-anthologized "White Angel,"
both of which chronicle a younger brother's wide-eyed awe of an older brother
who has broken from (or attempted to break from) his parents' domination.
Jennifer Haigh's
"Princess Palm" begins, "For the fourth Monday in a row, Len Stusick was
driving to Sarasota, putting a hundred miles on his dying Ford Festiva
so his wife could covet his sister's house." Len and his wife, Mimma, are
retirees living in Florida. Mimma's sister and her husband are having the
expensive home built in Sarasota. During their weekly trip to check in
on the house, making sure that everything is okay, Len begins vandalizing
it when his wife isn't looking. What makes the story fun to read is that
Len is as surprised by his actions as the reader is.
Among my favorite
essays is Sybil Smith's "In Praise of Chickens," a short piece about the
author's lifelong fascination with this bird, which she has kept, off and
on, as pets. "Why do they mean so much to me?" the author asks. "They're
only chickens, after all. I can't tell them apart. I haven't named them.
They are simply `the girls."' I have to confess that by the end of the
essay, I too wanted my own chickens.
An alcoholic goes
on a reading bender in "My Last Great Reading Binge." Unlike "Big Mike,"
whose premise sounded grimmer than the story turned out to be, Robert H.
Kneib's personal tale is indeed grim in parts, but it is not maudlin or
self-pitying, and the author ties together two obsessions (reading and
drinking) with great skill.
Poets may feel they've
been given the short end of the lit stick. The sheer volume of prose practically
swallows the poems. Fear not: it appears that the editor changes from issue
to issue, and like Ploughshares, which is sometimes dominated by
the genre specialty of the guest editor, you're likely to see the proportions
shift from issue to issue.
Among the "big names"
in Natural Bridge are Harry Mark Petrakis and A. E. Hotchner, but
these are not your usual lit mag "big names." If anything, these are writers
who probably have been hurt by New York's killing off of the mid-list,
those books that generate modest sales. ("Modest," by New York publishing
standards, is anything under 20,000 copies.) It's a pleasure to read new
work by them. For the most part, however, the writers in Natural Bridge
are a mix of newcomers (Kathlene Postma, John Dalton, etc.) and writers
with a book or two under their belts (Elizabeth Oness, Jim Ray Daniels,
William J. Cobb, etc.).
I've been writing
for Literary Magazine Review for over a dozen years now, and I'll
he honest: I have no idea who its target audience is. I'm hoping, however,
that it is acquisition librarians, because, having worked in the acquisitions
department of a large university library, I'd like to make a small plea.
Cancel your subscriptions to the those old, moldy lit mags whose heyday
is long behind them, those stale magazines who now charge usurious institutional
rates, and then subscribe to something fresh, something good, something
willing to take risks on new writers. I realize that libraries desire nothing
more than to have complete sets of an individual magazine, but it's this
obsession with complete sets that keeps the life-support system plugged
into some of these dull or, even, corrupt journals, and it's one of the
reasons why some editors, with their bloated salaries, can afford to publish
only their friends or publish only other editors or publish the same dozen
writers, etc., etc. Meanwhile, new magazines that are honest forums for
today's best writing struggle to keep afloat. An editor of a new magazine
told me that he had sent 200 copies of his journal to universities that
have writing programs, and only one subscription resulted. That's a success
rate of one-half of one-percent, which is half of what I'm told the success
rate is for cold call solicitations. So, if any librarians are reading
this, please (please!) consider substituting some of the subscriptions
that you have. It's time to air out the stacks!
In their introduction
to the first issue of transition, published in 1927, the editors
wrote, "Art has never confused itself with commerce." In 2002, when lit
mags compete for big-money grants, wealthy donors, subscriptions, and shelf
space at Barnes and Noble (or at any bookstore, for that matter),
few editors can make that claim with a straight face. Better, it seems
to me, for a magazine that hasn't confused art and commerce to last for
only a few seasons than for a magazine that sees no difference to continue
on, year after year, churning out the same soulless commodity. Fortunately,
for readers and writers alike, Natural Bridge has survived for at
least six issues. If you're going to subscribe to one new journal this
year, subscribe to Natural Bridge. It's good enough to restore your
faith in the little magazine.
