some ideas for future issues...

[job]

I am a long-time fan of Poetry Magazine - espcially in its pre-Lily gilding days when it would thread poem to poem by theme, image, etc. so the whole became a mosaic where each poem was connected to the one before and after. I don't think they do that as much anymore. Still, they are the Arrival Magazine - get there, it has been said, and you'll be having FSG and Norton's knocking on your door. I find that dubious, but I digress... (you still need that Nobel and Harvard Lecture series and...)

At any rate, a few suggestions inspired by some of the things Poetry (and others) has done in the past.

1. A translation issue? - Horace, Sappho, Cervantes, Baudelaire, Rilke, Petrarch, etc. Pick a foreign poet and make a general call for translations of his works. The fiction, essays and art could also contribute to the overall theme in obvious ways . Get yourself lost in transation....

2. Ekphrasis issue? Make a general call for written work on a work of art - (and of course the art work for the issue would be a rendering of something literary!). A lot of possibilities here. A picture is worth a thousand words? - well prove it.

3. Dictionary issue? An issue devoted to the alphabet (perhaps in form and content) - so that the contributions are arranged alphabetically - the first, say an essay, to begin with the letter "A," the second, say a poem, with the letter "B" and so on. See "Milosz's ABC's" and the Polish ABC Book tradition in general. Whose going to be the alpha male (or female)? Who's making a B-line for their keyboard right now? Who sees the letter C as a Comedian? Whose going to get those delta blues? Who's... OK, shut up now.

3. A color issue? Pick a color, any color - and try to compose an entire issue around that one color. (O'Brien votes green, for obvious reasons...)

4. Parody issue? The highest form of flattery and all that - essays could be parodies or on the importance of parody, etc. or on the importance of the importance of parody or on the important importance of importanly importunate parody....

5. (Last one (for now)) The Menippean Issue? The ultimate (and oldest (and most revered ( and most hilarious (and ((.)) and) hilarious most and) revered most and) oldest and) ultimate form of satire.

6. One more - the Cantebury Issue/Ovid Issue/Greek Myth Issue?
a) Canterbury Issue: We all know that Geoffy never finished his Tales (or did he...?) - can we help him out? Poets and fictionists alike could have fun with this one. And essayists - if you want to take a crack at what the parson might have given as a his second "tale".

b) the Ovid Issue: see both Hughes' "Tales from Ovid" and Hoffman and Lasdun's "After Ovid." This could be fun...metamorphorically speaking....

c) Greek Myth Issue. A college professor of mine who was a novelist said, you want to know how to tell a story? retell a Greek myth in your own language. Take a myth and retell it or reimagine it or regurgitate it through a new form, a new old form or old new form. Stand up now, ye gods, for plagarists!

Well, that's enough (for now...) and more than enough I'm sure.

JOB

[dhunt]

This is a bit audacious, since I'm a brand-new subscriber and only quite recently became aware of DT's existence, but this idea sounds rather good. I really like StAR's thematic issues. Maybe something along those lines...?

One thing I'd love to see addressed by either DT or StAR is a "feminist issue." Let me explain briefly: A year or so ago, a friend invited me to visit her Women in Medieval Literature graduate seminar on a sort of informal auditing basis. I read what the students read, listened to their presentations, and I was horrified. It is, I know--or I think I know--due to the new critical approach to literature these days, but the irrational misinterpretation of such writers as Julian of Norwich is apalling. The universal premise is radical feminist, and it did not appear to me that any other approach for analysis was permissible at all. Unable to keep my mouth shut, I stopped attending, and thanked God that I was not a graduate student these days and forced to perceive literature from such an irrational view. The only constructive thing I could do was to pack up all the course materials and send them to a young friend in Illinois. Unhappy in her work as a technical writer and seeking God's will for her future, she decided on receiving the materials that she would go back to school. She's a doctoral candidate now with a declared dissertation study of Medieval Women in Literature.

[bluemaydie]

Dena--

I feel your pain. I wrote my master's thesis in English on a medieval topic, and wading through some of the criticism was terrible (Never, luckily, had a course like you describe, but I was at a reasonable and Catholic school). Yes, DT could definitely stand to do a feminist issue, and I like the idea of themed issues in general. I think it would be a good idea, however, to refrain from declaring specifically Catholic issues as topics. Let's go for the Catholic view on the rest of the world. I mean, seriously, can you imagine a DT issue on Mary? The paeans of praise would get a little repetitive after a while.

[Bernardo]

Hey, good ideas all around! Some of these suggestions could make for really interesting and/or hilarious issues. And yes, Dena, we do feel your pain. Perhaps you read Eleanor's essay. "The Dirty Linen of Literary Studies," in the Advent 2007 edition? At the moment I'm considering options for a Ph.D. and for all I love literature I don't know if I'm willing to sit through years of such outrageous nonsense. I wish good luck to Mary, our editor in chief, who will be starting her doctorate at UCLA in the fall.

But anyway, getting back to all of your ideas, I agree that there is a lot to be said for having themed issues. There is, however, a lot to be said against it, which is what I propose to do now. Here are some of the issues:

1) Having themed issues might make it difficult to publish the best writing and art that is available to us. If we have to take the theme into account when making decisions about a piece, then we might have to let less-than-excellent pieces get through only in order to match the theme. While the number and quality of the submission we are currently receiving is enough for putting together a publication we can be proud of, we are still not getting enough that we can afford to reject, or even delay publishing for long, a solid short story or essay only because it doesn't fit the current theme.

2) Having a theme might affect the number and quality of the submissions we get. Admittedly, this could go both ways: announcing a theme might encourage people's creativity by focusing it, or it could discourage good writers from making submissions if they don't believe they can speak competently about a particular subject. Not sure which way this would go.

3) It would require a lot of publicity to get enough people writing on a particular subject. Most of the regular publicity we do is through blogs and our own listserve, but I doubt blogs would be amenable to publishing our calls for submissions every three months. That would seem to restrict our publicity efforts to what we can do with our own website and listserve, and I'm not sure if that would be enough.

4) A lot of people might find the themed issue format interesting... others might prefer the variety of our current approach. What if I'm a reader who can't stand Chaucer and does not care to read about him or anything in the style of his Tales? We want to challenge our readers, but we also want to please them.

Anyway, those are just some potential issues that would need to be worked out. I very much like your ideas, but I think such concerns would need to be addressed. Perhaps we could work on a sort of "hybrid" basis that combines both approaches? We have actually been considering a "gay issue," by which I mean one that featured articles by such writers as Eve Tushnet and John Heard, who are smart young Catholics trying to live the truth of the faith regarding sexuality even as they struggle with same-sex attractions. In any case, I would love to hear your ideas for how we can work out some of the kinks mentioned above.

[bluemaydie]

Bernardo--

Good points, all. It might be possible to compromise: have only one or two of the year's issues be thematic. And I think it would help the submission rates, as far as firing creativity goes, to announce that theme WELL in advance--say, six months before the deadline. Time enough to write a poem or an essay, at least. But you're right: Four themed issues a year is probably too much for DT's current state. But that will change...

Plus, I can recommend the ENglish faculty at the University of Dallas for being distinctly not crazy. Except in that tweed-wearing, pike-smoking, I-know-it-all-because-I'm-smarter-than-God sort of way. Which is really more of a mere annoyance when compared with the ravages of postmodernist crit.

[job]

Bernardo,
Thank you for your kind words regarding my ideas. I wouldn’t even think them worthy of defending – except that you’d invited me to do so. And so here it is – although I preface all I say by noting that it’s not the ideas themselves but the idea behind the ideas that I am defending. I believe these or something very like these may have a positive impact on Dappled Things – which is my only motive in proposing them in the first place and in now defending them.

Let me see if I can take your points one at a time, starting with the last, although I don’t think you meant to mean it as a point at all: the “gay issue” (and by extension, with all due respect to Ms. Hunt, the “feminist” issue.) You’d expressed a concern for how this will effect your writing pool. I think that if there’s anything that’s going to turn a writer off it’s a set “theme.” (e.g. Ms. O’Connor we’d like you to write a story which addresses Civil Rights/communism/fluoride in the drinking water. Mr. Heaney, we’d like you to write a poem about the Troubles/ capitalism/fluoride in the drinking water… etc.).

When I started running through ideas, I assiduously steered clear of anything that would smack of a theme as such (i.e. the high school, “OK, for your next essay, I’d like you all to write a theme on [fill in the blank]). Rather, I tried to present ideas which would stimulate not the philosopher but the poem writer or story teller. (I might add, even the formless, as Eliot and more recently Gioia point out, have form.) The sky’s the limit when it comes to forms – and unless the writer is willing to come to terms with forms, and realize that the greatest artistic liberation is in forms (the tabernacle, I like to think, is the Catholic writer’s model for writing in forms (infinity confined…)), then he will continue to write in fantastic spits and farts, - or is it spastic fits and starts? No matter –

Now, let me address your first point. You want the best writing available? Then go out and get it! Only the Venus flytrap gets what it wants by waiting. The frog gets out there and sticks its tongue out at the rest of the world and makes a damn fool of itself – but it gets as many damn flies as it wants. You guys have a good thing going here – turn the heat up. MAKE writers take notice. I’d say if you tried a “theme” issue in the past and it didn’t work, you might have a frog leg to hop on. My apologies (again, I’m new to DT, so don’t know if it’s been tried already in a past issue) if you have. OK, so you make a call for the Chaucer tales – in doing so, you give DT a selling point (for readers) which is also its buying point (for writers). Send us a retold tale, a story about vermillion, an ekphrasis, etc. Seems to me that can only interest reader and writer, for different though related reasons. If it doesn’t work? Well, at least you can say, it didn’t work (and, good going JOB!). As for forecasting whether something works, well, I tend to think they only count with financiers and fisherman.

Second point: How could one of these issues affect the number and quality of writers except positively? By asking your creative pool to come up with something that will challenge them – and undoubtedly, if they’re worth their salt, your writers will surprise themselves – you’re asking them to do what they do best: write. Faulkner had knocking around his head the image of little girl’s soiled bloomers hanging out of a tree – and once he did something about it he built a little story out of it called “The Sound and the Fury.” He started with an image and wrote it into immortality. What will prompt this generation? We are image wrights – smiths – meisters. This is what we deal with. Commission an image and the artists will come. It’s not a matter of “speaking competently” – it’s a matter of seeing the convention, form, parameters as both a challenge and a liberty for composition. It’s also a matter of the writer having faith in the tradition in which his individual talent works.

Third point: I can’t really speak to the how and wherefore of publicity – that’s a journey, unfortunately, an editor has to make on his own. But I will say this: that by the very nature of the “theme” – color, Greek myth, etc. – you fit your appeal to the package, not the other way around – this means that your able to publicize to classics departments (Greek myths/Ovid), medieval studies departments (Chaucer), language departments (translations), or any other market which DP may not yet be hooked into. Which isn’t to say you’re going to necessarily find the best writers, but you will find a potential audience.

Fourth point: If you’re a reader who can’t stand Chaucer, then don’t read the “Chaucer Issue.” I’d like to think that the majority of DT’s readers don’t think Chaucer sucks, but, OK, I’m ready to face the cold hard reality: some people just prefer “The Handmaiden’s Tale” to “The Miller’s Tale.” On the other hand, as you’ve probably already noticed, a majority of people out there are readers who can’t stand reading… Thus the proliferation of USA Today and Time magazine… I don’t think the DT is in danger of dying on the vine, if it comes to that. I do think that abstracting about what you’re readers might or might’nt like is very much like the bachelor who won’t date because he’s afraid his wife won’t like the way he cooks her eggs…

Well, I hope I haven’t stepped on any toes – amphibious or otherwise. To be honest, the idea of a “theme” issue doesn’t appeal to me either – but I make a distinction: the ideas I proposed (which, by the way, are not the last word – and if you use none of them, it’s no epidermis excised from my proboscis!) have as their principle of unity a prompt more than a theme – compose a sonnet, translate a some Frenchman's ode or short story (frogs again!), write a poem or story in the spirit/style of Chaucer. Hell, here’s another one, add a ring to Dante’s Hell, one that he didn’t think of – at any rate, the idea I had in mind was to connect to the larger tradition while at the same time adding to the fine and growing tradition of excellent work which is putting Dappled Things on the cultural radar.

Well, there’s my 2 cents on the dollar.

Best,

JOB

P.S. I second bluemaydie’s notion – a good lead time on the theme issue is prudent to say the least!

[meredith]

New to this discussion.... new to this forum, actually....

But some poetry mags put out calls for submissions on a particular subject here:

www.newpages.com/literary/submissions.htm

[Bernardo]

Hi Meredith! Welcome to the forums and thanks for pointing out this pages. I'm sure we can put it to good use. And so let's resurrect the old topic: could we perhaps do some more brainstorming here about potential "prompts" or "subjects." What sort of things would you all find interesting from the perspective both of the writer AND the reader?

[jwalker]

This isn't the first time the concept of a "themed" or "prompted" issue has been introduced and it always seems to generate a lot of interest. Perhaps a compromise might be reached in the form of an annual "prompted" issue. This would not only allow time for submissions to be called for and created, but would also allow time to generate a design for the annual and for unifying illustrations to be produced.

There could be a full-fledged advertising campaign to generate interest in the issue -- and maybe we could even do the whole thing in 4-colors!

Just a thought...

janice

[dhunt]

Janice Walker seems to have a good compromise idea here: an annual themed/prompted issue. I remember thinking a long while back that themed issues like StAR might be a good idea. However, as time passes and I receive these issues, I recognize that I'm eager to dig into those issues whose theme particularly interests me, while those that do not have instant appeal are often put aside. I return to them only much later (if at all), directing my attention instead to things that *do* have immediate appeal. The theme idea is attractive, maybe editorially creative, so to speak, but the reality is that the reader makes one overall choice on an entire issue, based solely on the chance of that one theme holding personal interest value. Not true universally, of course; nevertheless, I think I'd recommend caution on such a decision---