On Being an Editor and On Being a Scholar

On Being an Editor and On Being a Scholar Douglas Dowland A report from a literature department somewhere in the American Midwest: there is much more to it than scholarship. There should be students in the hallways, classes (save from the occasional session at the pub) in the classrooms, and in the basement a literary magazine just lucky enough to occupy an office, like an inventoried but forgotten accessory ofa machine, like something swept under the couch. In the few years since I've graduated from Michigan State and moved on in my career, I have come to believe that what has been swept under—swept aside, whichever, both are true—still exists, is barely alive because the literary magazine represents something that scholars can't quite rid themselves of. Because the love of literature is a noble and savage love. Noble because those who love it can never quite read or listen in the same way as almost everyone else does, and therefore can't get along sociablywith the world; and for that love one must generally decide between two futures: the savage path of being a writer, or the savage crypto-analytical career in which literature becomes just that. There is the third way, ofcourse. Editing Red Cedar Review provided me with a crux for my love, the commingling ofpassion with some objectivity; as close to equilibrium as the literary species can get without dying, where one can care and critique, where I could read the loved along with the ridiculous . Just like cracking the spine ofa fresh book, I could not tell and I could not judge what was in the day's submissions until I opened their envelopes. It's that first time over and over again that makes it charming. And in such charm there is training, a truer training in literature than any other I've experienced . It has trained me in the simplest maxim ofliterature: that one must read in order to write, and write in order to read. To really edit, one must think of not only what is on the page, but what the author thinks is supposed to be on the page, and what you think is supposed to be on the page, and to relay allthat back to the author. He or she will either scoff, or scoff and revise. And together, literature happens. To be more mystical: literature 4 DOUGLAS DOWLAND takes work, literature makes work. That which we take, we must make back. And repeat. For this lesson, I will always have love for and faith in Red Cedar Review. I have faith in its current and future editors and advisors (they are, simply put, damned-good people), and I know that even if it wanes and misses an issue or two—as it did under my own incommensurable tenure—that such waning will just lead to another renaissance and reemergence. Red Cedar Review will always be that locus of friends who like to read, patrons who remember their student days, departments that aim to educate, and a geography ofloving people who sift back and forth, contributing, editing, delineating . And the occasional stranger who wanders in and proceeds to amaze. Sometimes I wonder, in my becoming a scholar, what is lost being in the company ofscholars and not knowing so many writers. I think ofthe institution I now reside at, and I ponder the slow split that has emerged in recent years between the writers and the scholars. And, having been an editor, I know that ifsuch a split hatches, our department will end up ranking lower than it does now. It will probably attract less students. It will probably be laughed at even more by the medical and scientific and capitalist departments that dominate the university. It will rank worse because the faculty will know that their love—their vegetable love—isn't being nurtured in the next generation of closeted literary-lovers. Undergraduates will show up to orientations and job fairs and the various effluvia ofundergraduateness looking for a literary magazine, an English club, and there will be none, and they will be tempted to go elsewhere. The medical and scientific and capitalist departments of...