The Literary Review Interview
The Ultimate Emeritus
by Elizabeth Bernardi
An Interview with Walter Cummins of “The Literary Review”
Walter Cummins is Emeritus Professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University as well as editor emeritus of The Literary Review. He has published approximately 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly, Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Confrontation, and on the Internet. His story collections are titled Witness and Where We Live. Early in his career, two novels, A Stranger to the Deed and Into Temptation, came out as paperback originals. He also has published memoirs, essays, articles, and reviews.
EB: First, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. TLR was founded in 1957. You were editor at TLR for 18 years – from 1984 to 2002 – and since then you have served as editor emeritus. That’s quite a percentage of the review’s existence – and this review has quite a long history compared to many others. How was TLR founded? How did you come to TLR and what made you stay for two decades?
WC: TLR was founded in 1957 at Fairleigh Dickinson University by Charles Angoff, who was a novelist and an editor of H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, and by Clarence Decker, who previously had founded the University of Kansas City Review, now New Letters. Decker was there for the early years and Angoff for the first 19. When he retired in 1976, TLR came to our campus of the university, but I had no formal involvement beyond contributing one story and several reviews. About three years later, I became associate editor and in 1982, editor-in-chief. I stayed on all those years because we kept developing compelling projects for special issues and discovering new writers. Editing was too interesting to stop. But when I decided to retire from full-time teaching, it also became time to find a replacement, and we were fortunate to get René Steinke.
EB: What sorts of changes have you instituted and witnessed during those 20 years? How does TLR differ from its appearance and content when you arrived? How has the literary community changed around you; how has TLR changed with it? What kind of flexibility and foresight is necessary to stay alive for nearly 50 years in the literature world?
WC: Physically, the look of TLR is very different, having gone through several designs to give it what we thought a more attractive, more readable look, including four-color covers. Our own tastes changed to lead us to variants of new typography and layout. But, more significant than appearance, are the changes in content. Part of that resulted from the changing backgrounds of the editors and part from the innovations being made by writers around the world. Our tastes developed as we discovered the new possibilities for prose and poetry. That’s not to say we’ve accepted every new approach. The flexibility a magazine needs is to stay current and open while maintaining its own personality and style.
EB: According to your web site, TLR seems to place an emphasis on “special issues,” on calling attention to international fiction in other languages and among underread writing populations – some of these issues have focused on North Africa and Iranian exiles, for example. How and when, exactly, did these issues come about? To what extent is the promotion of international fiction an important part of the mission of TLR?
WC: Since its founding TLR has emphasized both fiction and poetry from throughout the world, often with issues devoted to a specific country or region and occasionally to writing in a language or from Diasporas like the exiles you noted. An initial reason for this focus was Fairleigh Dickinson’s long-standing interest in global education, which continues today. From a specifically literary standpoint, TLR filled a need that some other publications have also come to address, but none as consistently or as comprehensively. One point of pride for TLR is the number of Nobel Prize winners who have appeared in it long before they received international recognition. Of course, many other world-class writers received their first English language exposure in our pages. One of the great satisfactions of editing such a publication is the opportunity to be in touch with such a breadth of talent and read much that others never know exists.
EB: It appears that TLR has embraced the Internet. Your web site has several pages dedicated to e-chapbooks, poets discussing their sources, and even a site that publishes material that wasn’t put in print. Can you talk about the effect of the Internet on your publication and what TLR sees as its relationship to the web? TLR existed for quite a long time without the Internet; was adapting to it a challenge?
WC: TLR was one of the first publications to join Web del Sol because we recognized the potential of the Internet to reach a much wider audience than our printed issues. Even though TLR is in libraries throughout the world, such access is only a fraction of that available on the computer. The e-chapbooks and our Web-only outlet, TLRWEB, allow us to publish much more than we could accommodate in print, especially the opportunity to give an in-depth view of a writer’s work. Adapting to the Internet was more of a technical than a conceptual challenge; we had to learn how to format in html. But that familiarity brought an additional benefit because we felt comfortable enough to begin doing our own typography and layout in PageMaker and Quark.
EB: You are a writer yourself, with, I believe, more than 100 stories published. How would you describe your own stories, poems, and essays? Is there any particular style or form that moves you in reading a story? How do either of those answers compare with what you would describe as TLR’s literary aesthetic?
WC: TLR and I share an attachment to place and its influence on people. Because of TLR’s global outlook so much of the work printed in my time has evoked the details of a city or countryside. And I like to travel and find inspiration for stories in a character’s relationship with the same kind of details. As a reader of manuscript submissions, I gave special attention to works that took a similar approach; that is, what I wished I had been able to write.
EB: The TLR web site features a Writer’s Choice section. Well-known authors suggest names of lesser-known but talented writers – this pages offers stories by the latter group. Is this part of a general project by TLR to call attention to writing (such as writing from other countries) that might be easily overlooked? Is Writer’s Choice -or will it be – an ongoing project?
WC: One of the richest pleasures of editing TLR has been discovering important new writers. As I mentioned, that can mean never-translated writers from around the world, or it can mean American writers early in their careers. While TLR does receive and accept submissions from established names, we deliberately want to avoid being another quarterly that cycles work of a predictable group. Some of the writers who came to us early on are now members of that group. And we continue to take satisfaction in the number who win awards and include their TLR contributions in book-length collections.
EB: What is the future of TLR? How do you see the magazine growing, changing, developing over the next few years? What can readers expect from TLR in the future?
WC: In the brief time René Steinke has been editing, TLR has had a major redesign and looks better than ever. Doing our own in-house typography and layout has reduced those costs to allow more pages per issue so that we can offer more work by more writers. In that sense TLR will grow. Readers also can expect a continuing commitment to issues that feature new writing from around the world, new special issues with inventive themes, and a continuing discovery of new writers, many of whom will take innovative approaches to prose and poetry. Much of the future is beyond prediction, other than the promise to seek that which is fresh and exciting.
About the Interviewer
Elizabeth Bernardi is the Interview Editor at Portal Del Sol. She can be reached at elizabeth.bernardi.1@bc.edu
