Editor’s Notes

In the fall of 2018, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman wrote to us to say that River Teeth needed a new home. They wanted to know whether we would consider joining them on the masthead and making Ball State University the magazine’s institutional headquarters.

We’d all been colleagues in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program, both of us were long-time readers of River Teeth, and Jill had published several essays in the magazine, experiencing Joe and Dan’s editorial brilliance and kindness firsthand. So our first thought was: “What? River Teeth? Here? That would be amazing!” We felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude that the two of them would trust us to take on a project they had nurtured for twenty years and built into one of the most important and respected literary magazines on the planet. As far as credentials go, Jill had her long career as a writer and teacher of creative nonfiction, and Mark had years of experience working on literary magazines that went back to his grad school days. There would be a lot to learn, of course, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up, right?

Our second thought was: “Hell to the no. Nope, nohow, not gonna happen.”

The doubts began to pile up. What about our kids, our demanding jobs, our own writing projects that so often were pushed to the side by other responsibilities? And weren’t print magazines dying anyway? Weren’t universities slashing budgets for the arts? We’d read the headlines: “Legendary Literary Magazine to End Print Run” and “Literary Magazines Are Born to Die” and “On the Decline of Print Magazines.” Plus, there was the hubbub about the decline of serious reading; these days, we’re told, people are reading and writing more than ever before, but attention spans have been reduced to a mere handful of characters at a pop. Was 2019 really the best time to adopt a literary journal with a perfect binding and no word limit?

Mostly we worried about the magnitude of the responsibility. In addition to being a magazine we loved built by humans we loved, River Teeth was an institution. A place that had helped define the landscape of creative nonfiction for the entirety of the century in which we found ourselves. What if we screwed it up?

If you’re reading this, you’re likely holding a physical copy of the issue in your hands, which means you are an unusually devoted member of the nonfiction-reading public. You love essays enough to seek them out, sit with them a while, and take the time to listen to what their authors have to say. You share our desire for the kind of true stories that help us find meaning in a world that seems, most days, to have lost its collective mind. And you realize that, although every medium has its uses, some stories come across much better on the printed page.

We get it. We share your commitment to language and stories, and we’ve been around long enough ourselves to know that if we want the things we love to thrive, we have to work for them. This rule applies to nearly everything—African violets and prickly teenagers, stray dogs and old houses, friendships and democracies. Without hard work and care, these things will wither, turn sour, disappear.

So, with the support of our generous colleagues, administrators, and friends, we navigated a few roadblocks and found our way to a yes. Yes, we would love to work with you, Joe and Dan. Yes, we are excited to share this experience with our enthusiastic and talented students. Yes, we know it’s going to be hard some days.

Now we’ve taken on not just a magazine, but a full-fledged literary platform—print journal, annual book contest, the weekly online Beautiful Things, book reviews, social media, et cetera—and already our students have brought a fresh perspective and mad technical skills to a decades-old magazine. They have helped us with everything from logo art and website design to social media (we’re...