Who Wants Contributors?

139 WHO WANTS CONTRIBUTORS? Jack Garlington I might begin by reminding my audience that, contrary to general belief, editors are people just like anybody else, only—as the joke goes—more so. It would be nice to think that they have had as much special framing as plumbers or space-engineers, but the truth is, as often as not, they merely happened to be standing around in the hall when the duty-roster was made out. If they are in the universities, they teach Freshman Composition or Twentieth Century Literature, but they have one additional qualification: they are abortive writers, and have accumulated their quota of rejection slips. So as you can see, they are eminently qualified to give other people advice on how to submit and be published. Now I feel it advisable to remind the audience that all the unimags (may I call them that?) are "little magazines ," whatever their pretensions may be. We editors are like the girl supine in the canoe in Eliot's Waste Land: "humble people who expect/nothing." The magazines themselves are small, the budget small, the physical assets unimpressive. The editor's office is the same he would have if he were not editor; just last year we got our own telephone; and for a long time the chief fixture in our office was a sink—a vestige of an earlier day when the cubicle served as a dark-room. As for the readership, few editors are certain of its extent. In the spring of 1966 the Caneton Miscellany published a symposium of some twenty editors of little magazines, and I'm sure we were all amused. Most of the editors were euphoric—felt tiiat the little magazine was literature's greatest hope since the Lyrical Ballads--but a few were notably doubtful. Robert BIy, for example, felt that we editors should start using restraint—first cut down on the size of the issue, then cut out an entire printing: with luck we could kick the habit altogether. It is true that magazines like tiie Western Humanities Review—or the New Mexico Quarterly, the Colorado Quarterly, or the Arizona Quarterly, to name some others in the area—are in na anomalous position. We are not quite sure what we are, why we're here, or what we should do. We were founded through some prehistoric departmental pride or folly; we exist through the absent-mindedness of the university; and, as for our readers, it is difficult to discover their identity. We have none of the apparatus of the mass magazines—no polls, questionnaires , no Nielsen ratings: all we have is intuition, based on a word dropped in the hall or a note appended to a letter. The result is that all we know about our readers is that they are few in number, polite, and that they seldom send us anything but manuscripts. Most of our readers, of course, are browsers. Of the total printing of WHR about a third goes to libraries. With a father's sly love I have checked at various places around the country, and while I can attest to never having caught anyone in the act of reading a copy, I do know that the magazine is usually found in the browsing room, somewhere between Wee Wisdom and The Winged Word. About two hundred copies go out on exchange, usually to editors of other magazines—and since most of these men are as busy with their teaching-and-writing as I am with mine, a quick glance at one of the poems is probably all we are granted. And we pick up some readers through the subscribers. We do not pay—I have repeatedly asked the university for such funds and the university has repeatedly refused—so the only gratuity we offer is twenty-five free off-prints, in addition to which the au- 140 RM-MLA Bulletin December 1967 thor can buy as many as he wishes. I've never been certain how diligentiy we read our friends' work—the dividing line between loyalty and intimidation may lie in this vicinity—but we may gain an occasional customer here. And some seventy copies are "complimentaries ," sent...