Foreword

Foreword Authors sometimes want to know what kind of writing the editors of the Missouri Review like. "What kind of stuff are you looking for?" they ask. If they ask me, they are likely to get a vague answer, like "read it and see." A glance into these pages confirms why I may have trouble summarizing our interests—with articles on Boom Boom Mancini and Woody Allen, as well as a fascinating look by Frederick Turner into the classic question of how humans rise above mortality. The issue contains poems by eminent contemporaries like Donald Hall alongside brilliant but largely unpublished younger poets like Jeffrey Harrison (this issue's McAfee Prize winner), and stories both wonderfully strange, like David Ohle's "The Log of the Pipistrel," and fiercely realistic, like Todd Lieber's "Country Things" or Janet Kauffman's "News." Among the stories, as well, we've included a peek at William Burrough's apocalyptic novel-in-progress, Western Lands. The question of what we like, and therefore what kind of magazine we are, is a legitimate one, though, and to try to answer it I might first mention the kind we are not. There is much to be said for literary magazines that boldly strike out on some fixed course in an effort to make a "statement" regarding particular subjects or modes of expression. A few of them have become important sources in literary history: The Dial, which lasted only four years, 1840-44, helped establish Transcendentalism as the central literary movement in mid-nineteenth-century American letters; the same name was used by three separate magazines over the next century, and the third Dial was almost as important as the first, publishing seminal radical social thought and avant-garde literature from 1918 until 1929; The Fugitive, out of Nashville, was a tiny publication that helped spark the formalist revolution in criticism; and the Transatlantic Review was a fine little magazine of playful and experimental fiction. Examples abound of less famous but scintillating magazines, like Krobar or Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts, both from the Sixties. Often these magazines die quickly. It seems almost a principle of little magazine publishing that such "definitive," purposeful little magazines have a natural life cycle which—depending on the pertinacity of their editors and the creative longevity of their circle of contributors—may by nature be short. They are eyecatching, occasionally brilliant, but after a brief time have often served their purpose and either die or are better dead. The few that limp into the twilight, publishing and republishing according to their aging creeds, become less interesting than the rudest upstart magazines springing up around them. The Missouri Review is not the protagonist of any particular literary models or issues. We are less interested in being easily characterized than in our authors being discovered and enjoyed. We believe that the best literary magazines, over the long term, are the ones that promote not their own (inevitably sclerotic) "image" or circle of friends but which remain open to the entire field of writers, without regard to contacts, credentials, or trends. Trends are a subject of continuing fascination to the literary and pseudoliterary industry, and a lot of magazines are as itchy to identify themselves with the supposed up-and-comers as stock market publications are to locate investments with the highest growth potential. The problem is that literature, like the stock market, has a mind of its own, and the latest word or latest ascendant group is always falling away in favor of what actually occurs. Good writing arises from such a complex of unforseeable individual circumstances that it is, for all practical purposes, an epiphenomenon. It seems to just happen, and in the most surprising places. The Missouri Review is happy to publish individual writers who are under the influence of a movement or trend or "school." Writers are always under the influence of something—in fact they are always under the influence of a complex of circumstances, ambitions, frustrations, and other writers. As editors, it makes no difference to us what these influences are—whether the South American novel, the use of history in contemporary fiction, Jacques Derrida, or their...