If you haven’t read it yet, check out David Oshinsky’s wonderful essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review on the readers’ reports to be found in the Knopf archive housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, which led to rejection letters for such books as The Diary of Anne Frank, Lolita, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, as well as the works of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Ana??s Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”), Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”), Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman. It’s easy to make fun of publishers for their failures of vision in rejecting manuscripts that turned out to be classics, and Andre Bernard has compiled enough examples in his book Rotten Rejections: A Literary Companion to give hope — or at least a self-righteous sense of unrecognized merit — to even the most frustrated author. But there’s a bigger point here for anyone who has ever put in time as an editor or read his or her way through a publisher’s slush pile: the most important question that any editor has to ask when reading manuscripts is, “Am I being an idiot?” (Or, more to the point, “Am I being discerning, or just a jerk?”) A more charitable way to put that question might be, “Am I reading this with new eyes?” That may be even truer for a literary magazine like The Kenyon Review than for a major New York publishing house, because it’s in literary magazines that one can really find new voices, often years before they make it onto the list of a publisher like Knopf.
Every literary magazine faces two important challenges: finding and encouraging new writers and attracting new readers. It’s easy for a magazine to slip into a kind of easy complacency, publishing the same writers issue after issue for the same small group of regular readers. To writers, this can begin to look like a conspiracy of the privileged: editors only publish writers they know, the myth goes, and famous writers get a more generous reading than those who have to fight their way out of the slush pile. There’s some truth to that last part, as we’ve learned from cases of famous writers who have submitted work to magazines under pseudonyms only to see it quickly rejected. But it’s less a conspiracy than a form of intellectual laziness that many of us have experienced when we find ourselves overwhelmed by the endless shelves of new books in our local Barnes and Noble. Famous writers are like familiar brands on a supermarket shelf. When was the last time you bought a book by a writer whose name you didn’t recognize? It takes hard work and an open mind to look beyond the brand names to find the new voices.
And, ironically, that’s the same problem faced by literary magazines in reaching new readers. Given the proliferation of titles in most bookstores (and the scarcity of shelf space devoted to literary magazines), it’s not easy for most readers to find their way to a copy of The Kenyon Review. And even if a reader is lucky enough to stumble across a copy, she needs an adventurous spirit to make it past the table of contents, full of names that might be famous in the world of literary magazines and writing programs, but haven’t yet been “branded” by an appearance on Oprah or other forms of mass media beyond The New York Times Book Review.
So the same problem rules both ends of the process: how do you find new voices and entice new eyes? At The Kenyon Review, we’re exploring ways to do both. In March of 2008, The Kenyon Review will accept submissions for a new short fiction prize (1,000 words or less) for writers under 30 years of age. (Watch for details to be announced shortly.) In addition, we plan to add a “New Voices” section to the magazine that will prominently feature at least one new literary voice in each issue.
Obviously, a few initiatives won’t solve the challenge of finding new voices and enticing new eyes. That still requires determination, hard work, and imagination. And there are ironies here as well: as an editor, one has to learn to read with “new eyes,” and it turns out that the virtue of reaching out to new readers is often that they prove to be those new voices that can change the direction of a journal, a generation, or a genre.
Once readers get an impression of a magazine, it can be hard to change. Does The Kenyon Review publish new writers? The Fall 2007 issue includes three poems selected from among the 1,225 submissions for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. These poems by young writers show terrific promise, but the most important reason to run such contests might be simply to compel ourselves to see with new eyes. When all the voices are new voices, you can’t get trapped by the temptation to read the brand rather than the poem. That’s an important lesson for an editor, but it’s just as true for any reader. New voices give us new eyes, and the most important works of literature are those that teach us how to read in a different way. That’s why literary magazines will always have a place for any serious reader. They’re where we see what’s just appearing on the horizon, discovering the new voices and learning to see with new eyes.