The Believer was once at the top of the literary magazine game.
The Believer’s shuttering isn’t isolated. Across the country, universities are slowly, quietly, cutting funding and shutting their literary publications down. Even magazines not connected to universities are closing their doors or changing publication strategies — a trend made worse by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Colleges everywhere are cutting lit mags
Literary magazines aren’t exactly flashy — they aren’t covered in photos of beautiful people draped in designer clothing; they don’t contain the latest celebrity tell-all.
But in the world of literary arts, they’re essential. For early-career poets, essayists and fiction writers, these magazines are a way to get published, find an agent and get paid. They serve as a stepping stone — no one, after all, just jumps into a book deal. Credits through literary magazines present a pathway.
In Jamison’s tribute to The Believer, for example, she thanked the magazine for publishing her landmark essay “Empathy Exams” when nobody else would. (CNN reached out to staff at The Believer and Black Mountain Institute for comment, but did not receive a response.)
It’s not just about career building, though. The magazines are a runway, where new literary styles are tested and emerge. New voices break through. If only large, established magazines continue to exist — like The Paris Review or the New Yorker — the diversity of the literary world will suffer, as Alaska Quarterly Review co-founder and editor-in-chief Ronald Spatz told CNN.
The Alaska Quarterly Review was not spared, Spatz said, noting that while he had some money stockpiled from fundraising, the magazine still had to lay off its only employee — who still stayed on as a volunteer. (The magazine’s staff is made up of volunteers, he said.)
“As soon as the pandemic hit and as soon as everything was cut because of the pandemic, I needed to kick it into high gear,” Spatz said.
“We are fighting for our survival,” he said. “The situation right now is only going to get worse for us.”
CNN reached out to the University of Alaska Anchorage for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
An issue of The Antioch Review is seen on February 7, 2022. Publication of The Antioch Review has been on pause during the Covid-19 pandemic. Credit: Austin Steele/CNN
The need for money is never going to end, Spatz explained, and AQR isn’t the only small literary magazine that doesn’t have enough. Eventually, there won’t be enough to go around.
“My personal feeling is that the Sycamore Review is in great danger,” Chernin said.
CNN reached out to Purdue University for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
How lit mags went from being coveted to abandoned
“There’s no money in lit mags,” said Travis Kurowski, a professor at York College who has studied literary publishing and its history. “Someone has to do it for the love of it.”
New students flooded universities after the implementing of the GI Bill. Here, a new crop of ex-soldier students receive supplies for a term. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images
For a long time, this was a positive relationship, Kurowski said. Universities would fund these magazines, lengthening their lifespan, while adding a jewel to their theoretical crowns.
Most magazines were never long-term profitable, though some — in a time before television — did have high circulation. But with the advent of the internet, Kurowski said, came the expectation that writing should, and could, be free. Why pay for a literary magazine when you could read things for free online?
This brings us to the current moment. Whenever institutions need to scale back budgets, a literary magazine is an enticing thing to cut. These same conversations were happening during the financial crisis around 2008, Kurowski said.
And literary magazines aren’t like murder mysteries or other mass market stories with broad appeal — they don’t fund themselves, Spatz said. There’s an idea rising in higher education that the market should decide what gets funded, which then leaves more artistic pursuits like literary magazines out.
“There is an absolute lack of understanding as to how essential the arts are, and the literary arts especially,” Spatz said.
The cruciality of literary magazines — and literary arts in general — cannot be overstated, he argued.
“[The literary arts] are so essential to just about everything. How we think, how we speak, who we are in terms of identity,” Spatz said. “And to let the market decide … would in fact eliminate all kinds of diversity and stories and narratives.”
Change could be good for lit mags, others argue
Even as magazines close, others argue that this moment isn’t necessarily the end of literary magazines. Writing — good writing, beautiful writing — will always exist. We need it, said Elissa Schappell, who co-founded Tin House.
“Human beings are animals that live through narrative. Nothing is going to replace that experience, that intimate relationship you have with a story or a poem or an essay,” she told CNN. “That’s how we need to experience the world.”
And who hasn’t had that experience — of a word, or phrase, or passage burrowing itself deep? The written word carries weight.
Given that, the idea that literary magazines will simply cease to exist is not one that Schappell buys. Culture changes, and it reinvents itself. At one time there were gramophones; now there’s streaming. But music never went away.
“Literary magazines need to change, they need to reflect the era we’re living in,” she said. “But I don’t think anything is ever going to replace that experience that happens between the reader and the text.”
Vanesa Londoño, Elissa Schappell, Sigrid Nunez, and Tayari Jones attend The Ucross Foundation’s Inaugural New York Gala & Awards Dinner at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2018. Credit: Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
Maybe, the loss of the old doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Schappell said, if it makes room for different communities or smaller groups to be heard.
And more and more, small online-only literary magazines like CALAMITY or X-R-A-Y pop up, looking specifically for all things weird and quirky.
The issue, of course, still lies in the money. Many of these smaller corners of the internet can’t afford to pay writers, like a larger magazine with institutional funding can. And writers have to eat and pay bills, too.
Through crowdfunding, Protean is able to pay its contributors as well as keep its content free. But investors aren’t always delighted by that business practice.
“The path forward for independent magazines is to build a society that can offer a path forward for independent magazines: i.e., a society not monomaniacally driven by profit,” said Tyler Waliceck, co-editor-in-chief of Protean, via email. “Devaluing the labor of writers, editors, and artists — and continuing to subject all but the most fortunate to a grinding, alienating existence of low wages, high rents, and marginalization — will ensure that the culture remains deprived of their contributions, and that media priorities continue to be determined by elite interests.”
But in the grief, there’s excitement, too, Schappell said. Even without a traditional literary magazine, there is still the continued discovery of new and emerging writers and ideas.
Just as the end of the gramophone didn’t represent the end of music, the art will continue. It might even be better.
