There is More Than One "Lit Mag of the Moment"

Evergreen Review Publisher showcases the many outstanding lit mags of our time

Welcome to another installment of our column on the ins and outs of lit mag publishing. Here, Evergreen Review Publisher John Oakes responds to a recent lit mag profile in The New York Times, The Drift Wants You to ‘Examine Your Ideas’.

By John Oakes

You might not know it if your sole guide to the cultural world is the Times, but if you’ve come across something called the Internet, it’s obvious we’re in the midst of an efflorescence of literary publishing. It’s innovative, energetic publishing at that, and all around us. What a heady time. And yet, out of the zillions of zooplankton swarming the literary seas, there is one—just one—that takes the prize, according to the Times.  

To what do I refer? In this past Sunday’s Style section, Alex Vadukul hailed The Drift as “the lit mag of the moment.” Those are irritating words to read, particularly when the reader feels that his is the lit mag of the moment, and no less irritating when that same reader, having calmed a bit, realizes that there is no lit mag of the moment, there can not be one, because we are living in the aforementioned efflorescence. You can be a cool zooplankton, for sure. But you’re still one of a swarm—and might it even be healthier to recognize that? Maybe there are a whole bunch of outstanding lit mags out there—ones that have a buzz around them?

But then to read that these rebels disdain, in their own words, “little magazines . . . afraid to say anything that could get canceled.” That the Harvard grads (“Harvard” being mentioned no fewer than five times in the NYT piece) are pleased to enlighten the masses who think they “understand the world just because [they’re] woke.” Ah, those tedious woke folk who think they understand the world! Preoccupied with things like bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, and so forth.

Some of us feel the discussion around issues of inclusivity (ten years or so ago, it was tagged as being “politically correct,” now it’s being “woke”) has augmented, not hampered, independent publishing—and that the two phenomena, the explosion in indy publishing and a spreading political awareness, are closely connected.

And those timorous “little magazines.” Show me a little magazine afraid of anything other than bankruptcy and I’ll show you an angst-ridden real estate developer. (They don’t exist.) People create and work for independent publishers precisely because they’re dedicated to exploring edgy ideas and writing. And then to read the magazine in question has a “scrappy staff” and “a penchant for publishing lengthy essays that go through many rounds of editing”—well, at that point I had to run to some of my esteemed colleagues, who surprisingly enough also work with scrappy staffs and do lots of editing.

Was this description as anodyne as it sounds or was I missing the big picture? I wanted their thoughts on the matter. What resulted were far-ranging conversations that often strayed from the topic at hand—I think it was how marketing subsumes substance—and entered into the domain of what they were doing and for god’s sake why, when they could be doing almost anything else and losing less money.

What follows are excerpts from some of the conversations, edited for clarity and brevity.

Jina Moore (editor-in-chief of Guernica):

Guernica has always been a home for voices that question the conventional cultural or political narratives; that’s a throughline for all of our work going back to 2004, when we were founded. We’re women-run and BIPOC-led—not because it’s “woke,” or whatever word the Times likes, but because this is the team that has the ideas Guernica’s leadership believes will advance the work we do, and the work we need to do. In the last two years, we’ve grown the number of writers of color we publish dramatically. . . Has diversity augmented what we do? It is, more indisputably than ever, at the very core of both what we do and how we get it done. . .

The biggest challenge facing publishing is, obviously, money. Everyone’s fundraising has taken a prolonged COVID hit. But personally, I see money as a double-edged sword: of course we need resources to keep the lights on and pay our writers (our editorial and publishing staff is, without exception, all-volunteer), but we’re able to innovate and experiment with content and form because we don’t have a patron with an agenda. We have our readers and our supporters in the wider world of literature and ideas, and they’re incredibly generous. . .

We’ve never been willing to trade freedom of editorial voice and vision—our own and our writers’—for one magical big check, because those almost always come with strings. And the work we’re doing is too big for the usual strings. We’re not just publishing great writers; we’re trying to expand the collective political imagination—to push the boundaries of who is heard and what they're allowed to say, of who is deemed worthy of the creative act of witness, to show what’s needed and what’s possible.

Jonathon Sturgeon (editor-in-chief of The Baffler):

I think there is a lot of good energy in independent publishing, and I think there has been a lot of good energy since I first came here in 2007. What you have in between now and then is the rise and fall of an ad-driven web editorial factory that briefly offered a fantasy of individual employment to a generation of writers and editors fucked over by the financial crisis. And I guess when that dream died, really for good at the beginning of the pandemic, a certain sense of responsibility was reborn. And that’s not a recipe for the “literary” in “literary magazine” because those aren’t conditions—the platform economy—under which literature is valued. So I think there is a strong push to recover literature and fight over what it means—or even to slow down and consider it. 

I don’t think it has anything to do with woke culture or cancel culture, and I’ve written about that for the magazine. I think the energy is against the consensus-building nature of the fairly large media outlets that remain, and, again, the tech platforms and social media networks, which by design make consensus by gaming reputations. And obviously no one needs a civics lesson from David Brooks or interpersonal guidance from The Ethicist, but that’s what we were left with in a way. And Twitch.

It’s not just the young, though. Much of the most radical and original—and literary—writing we’ve published during the pandemic has come from Gen-X writers, who use a kind of militant nostalgia to go after new and useless forms of consensus.

Rick Whitaker (founder and editor of the late lamented Exquisite Pandemic, “archived for posterity” at www.exquisitepandemicarchive.com):

I started Exquisite Pandemic one night in the fall of 2020 because I realized that many of the writers whose voices I wanted to hear were excluded from existing publications due, I suppose, to their marginality or perhaps I could say to the relative poetry of their work in contrast to the mainstream’s relentless prose. . . .

During the pandemic, at least early on, in 2020, it felt to me like there was a palpable need for a venue where more or less ordinary people could be heard—people who don’t claim to have big solutions to big problems, but who have seen something, or felt something, and have troubled themselves to make of their thoughts a piece of work they’d like to share among friendly fellows out there in their quarantines and lonely rooms.

Publishing E.P. online felt a bit like what happened each night at seven o’clock: we all leaned out the window and hollered at each other and felt a little less lonely (and gave the doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers a well-earned round of applause). The noise one made—the message one sent—could be anything at all, and I was touched as much by the meager handclapping from one flight down, where old folks live, as I was by the noisy whistle- and trumpet-blowers down the block. . . There were times when I was riding my bike or scooter at seven, coasting down West End Avenue, and out they’d come, the skillet-beaters and drummers and clappers and hooters, and it was tempting to feel like they were making their noise for me, for all of us. That’s what I wanted E.P. to do for its readers.

Susan Zakin (founder and editor of Journal of the Plague Years):  

I’ve deliberately refused to engage with that kind of pseudo-intellectual debate (cancel culture etc.) and focus on what really moves people—including us. I think there’s a hunger for a general interest magazine, only redefined. . .

Clearly the revenue model for magazines is broken. There’s not much argument there—a few traditional magazines are hanging on. There are structural and cultural reasons for that. Magazines used to be instruction models for America’s new middle class to learn how to be genteel. And where is the middle class now?

So when we started, we viewed the Journal as an improvisation, because we didn’t think a new revenue model had emerged. We really started as a spontaneous response to the epidemic, and at first we felt we were knitting socks for the war effort, because we just jumped in: that’s what writers do…

Our mission is to revive the concept of the political novel, to make journalism not boring. What we’ve done is to hybridize MFA nonfiction: if it were an animal or bird or plant we’d say it has speciated. All the innovation has been in the academy because journalism has been under seige. I think of innovative forebears like the 18th century English cartoonist William Hogarth or the 19th century French caricaturist Honoré Daumier. We felt there is this incredible toolbox to talk about the events of the day, and it wasn’t being used…

I also feel that in the ’90s we really lost out when the state religion in American literature became minimalist. That went along with that the idea that political art is didactic and second-rate, which is wrong. . . I think there’s a flowering of publications. I think what these magazines are trying to do, with less focus on the revenue model, is to experiment. The Defector, for example, is not something that can necessarily translate to other publications—it’s an ESOP, everyone owns a piece, and these models are really interesting. All these shit-disturbers are going at it a little bit differently.

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Of course there are scads of quirky, even essential lit mags out there, as readers of this feature well know. You're welcome to list some of the ones I didn't have a chance to mention in the comments below. 

John Oakes is the publisher of The Evergreen Review and co-founder of OR Books. He is writing a cultural history of fasting.