David Lynn is fond of saying that we live in a golden age of letters, with more diverse voices and more superb literature, finding audiences through more outlets, than ever before. As Lynn prepares to retire as the longest-serving editor of the Kenyon Review, admirers point out that much the same could be said of the Review itself.
Over twenty-six years, Lynn has transformed a print journal with an august history but shaky finances into a thriving, multifaceted literary-arts organization. KR publishes two distinct journals—the print magazine and the digital KROnline—while hosting popular workshops for both adults and high school students, a reading series, contests, a major lifetime-achievement award, an annual literary festival, an apprenticeship program for “student associates,” and a fellowship program that boosts the careers of emerging talents. From its home base on the Kenyon College campus in the rural village of Gambier, Ohio, the Review has also expanded its worldwide audience through podcasts, blogs, social media postings, and web features.
Lynn, sixty-five, announced his retirement this past summer. A 1976 graduate of Kenyon who returned to the College in 1988 to join the English faculty, Lynn will remain at Kenyon to teach some classes and to develop programs that promote literary writing in fields such as the sciences. A search committee has been fielding applications and hopes to choose his successor by next spring.
“Kenyon and the American community of letters owe David a debt of gratitude not simply for saving the Kenyon Review when it was on the verge of closing, but also for his visionary leadership in making KR a model for literary publishing in the twenty-first century,” wrote Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, the journal’s associate editor and an English Department colleague. “Most importantly, David has always emphasized the idea of creating and sustaining a thriving literary community . . . an extended literary family.”
Reflecting on his leadership style, KR Managing Editor Abigail Serfass echoed others in praising Lynn for his gift in empowering staff members and for his humane spirit. “When you work for David, you fall under the umbrella of his care and concern. You feel always supported. If you are within his orbit he will stand up and fight for you.”
Writers and editors, KR colleagues and board members, and former students have written tributes to Lynn, describing him as a meticulous, open-minded, and encouraging editor; a caring mentor; a boss who treats his staff like family; a big-picture thinker, unafraid of mounting ambitious initiatives and giving colleagues the freedom to shape them; and a fiercely loyal friend. A compilation of the tributes can be found here.
Two factors led to his decision to step down, said Lynn, who throughout his career has remained active as a fiction writer even as he taught creative writing courses, read journal submissions, cultivated writers, maintained a network of “editors at large,” worked with a board of trustees and an advisory board, and supervised a staff in Gambier. After a “glorious” sabbatical in Oxford, England, in the spring of 2018, “I realized I just didn’t want to be in charge any longer, to be making decisions constantly,” he said.
He added: “The literary world, as well as the larger world around us, has been going through a period of enormous strain and change and generational transition. It now seems to me that it’s time for fresh eyes and fresh energy and fresh sensibility to be guiding KR in the years ahead.”
Lynn will personally curate the contents of the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the print journal, showcasing some of the many writers he has brought to the Review over the years. Meanwhile, the mark he left will be recognized permanently in the title of the post he filled for so long. When the Review’s editorship was endowed in 2006, it was named for David F. Banks, a leader in saving the journal in the early 1990s, but only as a kind of placeholder pending Lynn’s retirement. Future editors will hold the title of David H. Lynn Editor.
If Lynn has juggled multiple roles and added an array of programs to the Review, observers point out that a single commitment underlies everything: the desire to foster literary excellence. When Kenyon College President Sean Decatur attended his first meeting of the Review’s board of trustees, he was surprised to discover that Lynn opened the session with a mini-seminar focusing on a poem or story from a recent issue of the journal. “It’s telling, and fitting,” said Decatur, “that when the stewards of this organization gather, they begin with a literary discussion rather than going right to the spreadsheets.”
In Decatur’s view, Lynn’s greatest accomplishment may well have been “securing the place of the Review and its relationship with the College. No one in the Kenyon community now can really imagine a Kenyon College without the Kenyon Review. That was not the case when David came in.”
Although the journal rose to international prominence during the two decades after its founding in 1939 under its first editor, John Crowe Ransom, financial problems pushed it into decline, and it ceased publication in 1969. During David Lynn’s four years as a Kenyon undergraduate, there was no Kenyon Review. It was revived in 1979. But by 1988, when Lynn returned as an English professor, the journal was again foundering. The Kenyon administration saw it as a drain on the budget; professors and students had virtually no connection with it, if they even knew it existed.
By 1994, the Kenyon board was on the verge of shutting down the Review for good when a small group of trustees—self-described “dissidents” seeking to protect the College’s “crown jewel,” in the words of David Banks—came up with a plan. Cost-cutting measures would be implemented immediately, and the Review would work toward financial independence through its own separate board. The Kenyon trustees agreed to give the plan a try, and Lynn—who had earlier served as acting editor for year—agreed to take the helm.
“He took off at warp speed, surpassing all our goals within two years,” said Banks in a tribute co-written by Paul Healy and Victoria Douglass Kingdon. “He made the dissidents look like wizards.” Other key supporters at the time included Jacqueline Dryfoos P’92, Jean Graham, Alva Greenberg ’74, James Niederman ’46, Don Zachariah, and Matthew Winkler ’77—a college friend of Lynn’s who became the founding editor of Bloomberg News and who continues to serve on the KR board.
Initiatives that have transformed the Review under Lynn’s leadership include:
- The summer writing workshops—Young Writers and Young Science Writers for high school students, and the Writers Workshops (in a range of genres) for adults. Once seen as ancillary, a source of income, the workshops have become central to the Review’s mission. Their “generative” approach—participants throw themselves into creating new work, rather than bringing in old work for critique—has made the workshops tremendously energizing and popular. Young Writers has grown from twelve to more than 200 participants every summer; the Writers Workshops from forty to 180.
- The KR Associates program, engaging the talents of some eighty Kenyon undergraduates, who serve as apprentice staffers of a sort, helping to read submissions and to organize and publicize events.
- KROnline, the digital journal, which effectively doubled the amount of writing KR publishes, while expanding the audience and raising the Review’s profile internationally. In both the print and digital journals, Lynn and his team have sought out work by writers from groups previously underrepresented in the publishing world.
- Blogs, podcasts, the KR website, and regular postings on Twitter and Facebook, all of which make KR a lively, relevant presence in a literary world where digital connections are vital. The Review has 48,400 followers on Twitter.
- A major redesign of the print journal. Originally a quarterly, then a tri-quarterly, KR now publishes six issues a year. The change allows for more special issues and guest-edited sections along with striking covers by contemporary artists. It also enables the editors to work on three or four issues at once, with the result that they can provide more balance within and among issues.
- A reading series that brings award-winning writers to the Keyon campus throughout the academic year.
- The annual Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, which has honored such writers as E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Colm Tóibín, Hilary Mantel, and Rita Dove. (This year’s winner is T.C. Boyle.) The award is given at a gala dinner in New York, which also serves as a fundraiser, providing scholarship funds for Young Writers participants.
- The Kenyon Review Literary Festival, an annual fall celebration in Gambier including workshops and readings, and culminating with a lecture-reading by that year’s winner of the Award for Literary Achievement. A community outreach program called “Knox Reads!” provides free copies of a book by the award winner and sponsors discussions of the book.
- Contests in short fiction and short nonfiction, as well as a poetry contest for high school students.
- The KR Fellows program, in which rising young talents in the literary world come to Kenyon to teach and work with the Review while pursuing their own creative projects.
Lynn credits the seven full-time staff members of KR for making these initiatives realities. “We work well together, we like one another, we bring out the best in one another. There’s a real esprit-de-corps.”
He also depends on a group of non-staff editors, both in Gambier and elsewhere, for introducing new writers to the Review. “People will send me things and say, ‘This may not be to your taste, but it’s really good and we should publish it.’ And most of the time I go along. These other editors have a big role in broadening the range of what we do.”
For their part, colleagues say the Review’s success reflects Lynn’s ambitions for the organization, his openness to new ideas, and his trust in others’ abilities.
“David has taught me the value of dreaming big,” wrote Anna Duke Reach, director of programs. “Without such high goals, KR would not be thriving as it is today. He’s great at delegating and trusting staff to get a job done.”
“So much of David’s legacy at KR proves that what he finds most rewarding is seeing people discover their talents and achieve their greatest potential,” wrote Tory Weber, associate director of programs and fellowships. “He strikes the perfect balance between knowing when to lead and knowing when to let others steer. He entertains every idea with an open mind and isn’t afraid to be proven wrong.”
Kirsten Reach, a former student of Lynn’s who is now the Review’s fiction editor, wrote: “David has been a remarkable mentor to me when we have a story to talk through: whether it’s worth the deep editing required before publication because it’s important to publish, or whether it’s something we ought to let go. He is quick to scythe the wheat from the chaff, and in his hands we’ve wrought a leaner, sharper magazine.”
Colleagues also note that “family” is not a cliché under Lynn. Meetings are convivial affairs. Bureaucracy is nonexistent. Children and dogs are welcome in Finn House, the Review’s headquarters. The seasons are punctuated by social gatherings.
“He gets to know you, and he lets you play to your strengths,” said Alicia Misarti, who was hired as the operations manager, handling office administrative responsibilities, but who rose to become the director of operations and marketing after Lynn recognized her professional background. “David is a commanding figure but treats people like human beings; I think this is a rare and special thing.”
Writers have been especially grateful. “David’s counsel is always spot on,” wrote Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a poet and a KR critic-at-large. “Though I am an African American woman and, well, David isn’t, he truly gets my artistic vision like very few others. It’s impossible to convey what he has meant for me and my creative journey.”
Longtime poetry editor David Baker described Lynn’s outreach to writers as “one of his great skills.” He continued: “People feel part of a bigger important thing. That’s especially important and rare during a cultural moment when so many forces are hoping to make us more divisive and combative.”
For Lynn, one of the greatest pleasures in leading the Review has come from his contact with students, both the undergraduates (the students in his classes, the KR Associates and interns) and the high school workshop participants. “They’re talented, hungry, warm inclusive—fabulous writers and fabulous people,” he said. “They help make Gambier a place where literature matters, with excitement and passion.”
Students, in turn, express gratitude for Lynn’s attentiveness and influence. “I was struck by his willingness to let me know my voice was one worth honing and amplifying,” wrote Claire Oleson ’19. “He engaged with my work at the level of the word.”
Tyler Guerin ’19 recalled an advanced fiction class in which Lynn emphasized emotion over thinking, because “sticky human feelings” make for good storytelling, not themes or symbols. “‘Those things will naturally arise later,’ I remember David telling me once.”
Lynn was “a steadfast example for us all of the courage necessary to live an artistic life,” wrote Aaron Davis ’19. “Of all the lessons David taught me, the most important is still that very first one: don’t flinch.”
Danielle Bishop’11 echoed others in remembering how, in training KR Associates, Lynn would assert that good writing should inspire “surprise and delight.” She wrote: “This phrase became a kind of gold standard among student readers and, coincidentally, has informed my choices of many things in life: which books to read, which opportunities to take, which friends to make, and more.”
Many of Lynn’s students, Lobanov-Rostovsky noted, “have gone on to careers as writers, editors, journalists, and teachers, inspired by his vision of how a well-told story can change the world.”