From the Guest-Editor

On the last day of the class entitled "English 459: Literary Journal Editing," the MFA students who’d staffed Natural Bridge, Issue 8, presented the guest editor with a coffee cup and a gray T-shirt that read:

Saint Louis

Gateway to the West

On the back of the T-shirt, the editorial staff had signed their names in permanent Marks-A-Lot below three columns that read:
 
 
 

The inside joke implied in this allegedly democratic tally, the final assessment of the class, was, of course, on me, the teacher and guest editor. Assistant Editor Eric Robinson, who’d often found himself much of the semester voting no when everyone else had voted yes, and vice versa, was as willing to make himself the brunt of the joke as I was in a class that had been as full of laughter as it was of fascinating and serious literary discussion. Then Assistant Editor Beth Mead leaned back in her chair, back of her hand to her forehead, feinting a faint in a room that had been stifling and hot for months, and said, "God, this whole experience has just been so terribly . . . fair."
 

Five months earlier, when I came to the University of Missouri at St. Louis as a visiting writer for the spring semester 2002, I’d announced to the staff of Issue 8 on the first day of class that our single most important goal would be to make our selections of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction for Natural Bridge as democratic as possible, in theory and practice, quality—slippery and subjective as such a term can become—being the primary criterion for accepting work solicited by the editor or work that had come in, as they say, over the transom. I believed then—a belief reinforced by editing this issue of Natural Bridge—that many of the same problems, real or perceived, in writing workshops (as outlined in my March/April 1998 Poets & Writers article, "Toward a More Open, Democratic Workshop") and in literary anthologies (as outlined in my foreword to a 1999 anthology co-edited with Michael Martone, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction) seem to parallel problems inherent in the selection of work included in many nationally distributed literary magazines.
 

Too often, one argument goes, magazine editors can become feudal lords over their literary fiefdoms, dictating acceptances, vetoing and overriding the selections of the editorial staff in favor of their own choices, based upon their so-called "vision" of what their magazines should be, quality and democracy be damned. And too often, the argument goes on, such editors make their selections based ultimately upon criteria other than quality, choosing the work of big-name authors, often authors whom they also know personally and have had cocktails with at last summer’s writer’s conference—friends in the literati and lit biz, many of them other editors—at the expense of potentially better quality submissions in the slush piles by lowly, undiscovered writers and MFAs, often read by lowly, undiscovered writers and MFA editorial assistants; and, in turn, those friends, big-name editors of other national literary magazines, publish the original editor’s work in their issues in a tacit quid pro quo. Such arguments, simplistic as they can be, have just enough truth in them to make some editors flinch. On the other hand—and I’ve sensed a hint of such "elitist" arguments from a few well-known editors—editorial democracy is akin to sanctioning a kind of literary mediocrity, a "dumbing down" as suggested in such controversial (and some say classist, sexist, and racist) books as the The Bell Curve, creating the equivalent of the "McPoem" or "McStory" in writing workshops, a kind of procrustean cutting and stretching to fit that destroys that rare individual spark of creativity necessary to make any real art happen, something akin to the too-often awful decisions academic committees can make just after silencing loud and cranky iconoclasts.
 

Having been on both sides of the writing/editing process—submitter and editor, rejecter and rejected—I’ve been sympathetic at times to both sides: As a writer, I decided for years not to submit work to magazines whose editors I knew, simply to relieve them of the pressure of a potential conflict of interest and to assure me that my work was being accepted on its own merits alone. As an editor, I’ve decided at times not to solicit work from authors I knew or whose work I admired simply to save myself that same trouble. This time, though, I told the staff of Natural Bridge, it would probably be best to subvert hierarchy altogether simply to make such arguments moot. And that, we all agreed, was how we would proceed.
 

Issue 8 of Natural Bridge is composed partly of standard submissions and manuscripts sent in as the result of a call for manuscripts in Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle and partly of work I solicited in the spring and summer of 2001 from a fairly large database of writers and poets, many of them fiction writers surveyed to nominate stories for inclusion in the Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. As much as possible, the staff gave all solicited and unsolicited manuscripts similar scrutiny, and every published selection received at least a two-thirds majority vote by all staff members present, including the guest editor, who could be—and often was—in the minority. (I remember with some difficulty more than a dozen rejection letters I had to write to literary friends and respected and well-known authors whose manuscripts I’d solicited and wanted to accept.) And that is, I believe, as it should be.
 

Unlike the topic-oriented issues of Natural Bridge nos. 7 and 9 that sandwich this issue, Natural Bridge 8 is an organic outgrowth of subconscious connections made conscious only after months of thoughtful editorial discussion, in much the same way writers and poets discover their subject only in the process of writing. Like Mark Gottlieb’s memorable cover photo, which seems less like a cane field in Maui than a shuck-whispering field of harvested cornstalks in Dorothy’s sepia-tone Kansas just before the tornado touches down, this issue is composed of mysterious presences and disturbing absences—"the absences of things lost," as Assistant Editor Jim Mense calls it—disquieted and disquieting relationships and memorable moments rendered in image and line and scene that stay in the mind long after reading: all these turn and churn beneath the surface of these pieces like strong eddies, an undertow that pulls the reader under and in.

The vortex of this issue might well be Lee Martin’s essay, "Sorry." In it, the author, the son of an Illinois farmer crippled with missing hands lost in a corn-shucking accident, must bear up, helpless, under his father’s repeated beatings and the violence of his own hands when he strikes out trying to protect a girl he cares for, much as he must bear witness day after day to his father’s terrible helplessness:

Children, too, are mysterious absences everywhere, as women and men struggle with all the failures of nature or nurture, all the ironies of wanting children and not being able to have them—such as the wives and husbands in Dan Pope’s "House on Goose Pond" and Jennifer Haigh’s "Cutaway"—while others must choose the opposite, like the narrator in Tammy Pavich’s "The Vanity," who is haunted by the loss of a child and who, like Annie in Susan Hubbard’s story "The Queen of Saginaw," must find "a place to nurse her sorrow."

Loss—the loss of children and lovers and fathers and uncles and mothers and friends—runs all through this issue, yes, but so do moments of gorgeous presence and grace, pure sensuous and sensual delight, as in James Charlesworth’s "Souvenir," when two lovers, after years of coming together and apart on a cold bench in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, scramble together again across the cobalt blue expanse of an Alaskan glacier, or as the narrator of Wendy Bishop’s "On Orange" remembers "orange pleasures/as I suck life from the smile-slices/left in this afternoon’s refrigerator," or as Christine Boyka Kluge’s speaker in "Satin Lining" remembers the lining of her lover’s coat, "rustling as she walked,/its silk of shivery talk/whispering/under her ear," while the narrator of Margot Schilpp’s "What I’ll Know" reminds us all what we already knew but had perhaps forgotten, that "couplets . . . are a natural/choice for the love poem."

I’d like to thank the staff of Natural Bridge for making me feel so much at home during my St. Louis sojourn: Editor Dave Carkeet for his guidance and smart editorial suggestions; Managing Editor Ryan Stone for his tireless work on the day-to-day business of the magazine; and Assistant Editors Denise Bogard, Trysh Brown, Allison Creighton, Eve Eldred, Patti Jackson, Beth Mead, Jim Mense, and Eric Robinson for their hard work and good humor, their dedication to making this the best possible issue. I’d also like to thank the English and MFA faculty at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, especially Dave Carkeet, Mary Troy, Steve Schreiner, Howard Schwartz, and Eamonn Wall, for making my stay at UMSL an enjoyable and memorable experience.  

For anyone wishing to argue that a democratic selection—one that works against hierarchical editorial control—creates lower literary quality, the entire staff of Natural Bridge and I offer this issue as evidence to the contrary.

—Lex Williford