When the ground is poisoned or burned, when an ecosystem begins to shut down and simplify, the only species who survive are the “generalists”—those who can eat a wide range of food and reproduce in a variety of habitats. Think of the barred owl, who can nest in a city park or deep in the woods across the US, vs. the northern spotted owl, who can only live in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Or of mice and pigeons, who can thrive in city or country, vs. beavers and moose, who need fresh running water and trees. Sometimes a place is destroyed to the point that only a very few adaptable creatures can make it, like the mummichogs who survived in the Passaic River, even when it was so poisoned by industry that Cory Booker called it “New Jersey’s biggest crime scene,” decades after William Carlos Williams called it “the vilest swillhole in all of Christendom.” 

The same might be said for a cultural environment and the arts. That a depleted, poisoned, or politically unstable environment will have a hard time supporting a great variety of artists and arts organizations—even if it’s not quite a swillhole or a crime scene. Right now the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has more than a thousand magazine and press members, and that’s not even all of us currently active in the US. Literary magazines with broad appeal and relatively large circulation, like POETRY and The Paris Review, coexist with hundreds of small and specialized magazines, serving many different interests, tastes, and demographics—like Alaska Women Speak, for example, or Zig Zag Lit Mag, by and for writers in Middlebury’s own Addison County. Since the end of World War II, the community of lit mags has been steadily moving in the direction of more voices, more specialty—more biodiversity.

A handful of books have documented the history of this proliferation, but The Little Magazine in America, published in 1978 and full of black-and-white cover images and ephemera, continues to be one of my favorites. A sprawling, image-heavy documentary history, it catalogues and celebrates the phenomenon of literary magazines, which had exploded in part due to the new technology of the time—the mimeograph machine—which gave more writers access to each other and their readers. 

I took this book off the shelf recently to revisit a story I remembered that suddenly felt relevant. Michael Anania, once-director of CCLM (our current CLMP), describes an unlikely state visit from a Soviet official, who ends up in the dusty offices of Swallow Press on the outskirts of Chicago sometime in the 1970s. Anania gamely shows him a bunch of literary magazines he’s collected, and piles them onto his desk in a messy stack. The Soviet visitor is puzzled and asks, through his translator, What are these, and why are there so many of them? Does anybody read them? His own literary magazine, the Young Guard, has a circulation of 200,000! Anania confesses to saying a few vague things about little magazines’ place in the history of modern literature, but later he can’t help pondering the question more. “Where I saw freedom (or, at least, license), he saw ineffectual diffusion . . . His questions were not easily dismissed.” 

Anania makes a fair defense of this proliferation of obscure publications—“throughout the century, American literature has taken its vitality from its own extreme edges,” he says. But he’s also wary of the magazine community’s atomization. Maybe they’d be better off making alliances, he says, than making more magazines. He has a point, but if you see magazine publications as an artistic practice that contributes to the literary ecosystem, and if you see them as part of a community rather than as random and unrelated, they look more like a sign of vitality than of diffusion. It’s also important to see the alternative for what it is: the Young Guard was a bureaucratically run monolith. It was the only way for new writers to get published in the Soviet Union. And who controlled it?

A culture in which there are many different magazines with few readers, existing alongside bigger-circulation magazines that appeal to many, seems a truer expression of humanity and a more exciting one. This way there’s room for the local, the idiosyncratic, the mainstream, the rarified, the weird. It’s about species diversification and beauty. It’s about freedom. It’s about having the barred owl and the spotted owl. Our environment is already so depleted ecologically that the generalist barred owl has moved in on the territory of the specialist spotted, to the point that biologists for the US Fish and Wildlife Service are going out and shooting one in attempt to protect the other. If culturally we should go in the same direction—less diversity, less proliferation, less specialty—I hate to think of all that will be lost. 

Bill Henderson, who was only five years into publishing the Pushcart Prize anthology when he was interviewed for The Little Magazine in America, points out the only secret to success for a small independent press is to “publish what you care about.” Now, fifty years later the Pushcart Prize is itself an institution, leaving a footprint in which any number of upstarts might grow, if only the ground remains fertile, the climate stable and intricate enough to support us all. Right now, the New England Review is lucky to be here, publishing what we care about. Hopefully our cultural ecosystem will never reach the point where we have to count on a lone adaptable species like the mummichog to rehabilitate things for us.

—CK

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