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In 2014, Conjunctions and Open Road Media formed a publishing partnership not only in order to release future issues of the journal in ebook form, but also gradually to offer ebook editions of selections from our backlist. On the occasion of the digital release of Conjunctions, Peter Straub and I were asked to have a conversation about the journal, its history, and its publishing mission. Peter is not only a very old friend but a fellow novelist, a Conjunctions contributor, and the guest editor of our landmark issue The New Wave Fabulists. His questions here are, I think, revelatory and provocative in all the right ways. I hope readers will enjoy the exchange.
A word about Conjunctions’ path toward the ebook world.Our first covers were printed on a vintage Vandercook proof press, including the cover for Conjunctions:6, which I had the visceral pleasure of helping to hand-print. The journal’s design and presentation derived to some degree from my early interest in private-press books, their typography and design. Indeed, our first fourteen issues were released as paperbacks as well as hardcovers with letterpress dust jackets, hearkening back to earlier traditions established by New Directions Anthology and others.
As our readership grew, we left hardcovers behind and continued with paperback-only issues whose covers were done in four-, five-, and six-color processes, printed on a Heidelberg press half the length of a city bus. The issues themselves have always been the product of “cold type” and offset printing, although in the late nineties we established Web Conjunctions (http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm), a parallel, online-only production, which was our first foray into electronic publication.
In other words, a progression of printing and publishing techniques from antique to contemporary has always been integral to Conjunctions as it has evolved from issue to issue. While we intend never to abandon paper and ink, we hope this new venture with Open Road Media will bring more readers here and abroad to the work Conjunctions has championed for so many years.
Bradford Morrow
PETER STRAUB: Many of those interested in or even passionate about Conjunctions are probably unaware of two matters related to its beginnings, namely that the journal’s first issue was in the form of a Festschrift for James Laughlin, a publisher/poet who at the time was unjustly overlooked, and that the editor of this issue and every other, the founder of Conjunctions, had already, despite his youth, become a real force among the dealers and collectors of rare books in the area of Santa Barbara, California—that is, in a very tough and sharp-edged world, it was widely understood that your acumen, instincts, and standards were extraordinary. I wonder if you see any connections between these two matters? If so, does it have anything to do with celebration and preservation?
BRADFORD MORROW: In all the years I have been asked about the genesis of Conjunctions, no one so far as I can recall has ever brought up a possible connection between my work as an antiquarian bookseller and the founding of my literary journal. Thinking back about it, there was a connection, to be sure, Peter. I grew up in a household, in Littleton, Colorado, where there were very few books. So, in a way, my deep love of books came out of a background of deprivation. It’s a long story for another day how I journeyed from a time when books were rare in my life to a time when rare books, reading books, books of every stripe, were the center of my life. But, long story short, I left grad school at Yale in the mid-seventies to take a job at a rare bookstore in Santa Barbara, knowing very little about first editions. I was a quick study and before long went out on my own, no money to speak of, just a lot of ideas. I very quickly fell up, if you will, and was soon handling great books and manuscripts by the likes of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Burroughs, and many major writers—some alive, many gone. I can remember with clarity the day I thought to myself: Since I was helping to preserve the literary culture of the dead, why not engage the same energy in preserving, promoting, publishing the work of those who were vitally alive? Modernists like Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and many other writers I admired had all either founded or edited journals, and I hugely admired early literary magazines like Transition and, a little later, Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review—so I thought, Why shouldn’t I give it a try? One key element here was that while I admired a number of contemporary journals, none of them was publishing the fiction and poetry I myself was devoted to as a reader. And so, that first issue, which I assembled with the help of Kenneth Rexroth, whom I had befriended during my years in Santa Barbara, was an acknowledgment of a hero of mine, James Laughlin, whose New Directions had published many of my absolute favorite writers. I didn’t realize until years later that Laughlin had dedicated the first volume of his amazing annual New Directions Anthology to Eugene Jolas, editor of Transition. I had, without really knowing it, connected Conjunctions to a family of venerable predecessors, and have continued with that idea in mind. Conjunctions was meant to map an important literary period central to my own writing life, and in this way has served, I hope, as a preservationist project even as it’s been one that is constantly discovering new writers, agitating aesthetically at the front edges of what’s being written now.
PETER STRAUB: “Agitating aesthetically” strikes me as a good, and in fact indisputable, way to describe what Conjunctions has been up to since its inception, and this seems an excellent time to “interrogate” that ambition, as we like to put it these days, with reference to two moments from its history. In the journal’s earlier days, Robert Kelly memorably and in forthright manner wrote, “Everything we do disturbs the world.” As a declaration of the intent to agitate, that can hardly be bettered—it takes agitation to be the common goal, the common ground. Irresistibly, the intention radiates from the poet to the more inclusive context of Conjunctions itself. The second instance took place at night, around a bar table, during a conference at Brown University. An older writer no less distinguished than Robert Kelly said to the three or four people in our group that if he were not published in Conjunctions, he wouldn’t be published at all. He was exaggerating, though not by much. Deliberate agitation brings with it the consequences of ignoring the majority audience’s overwhelming reluctance to be other than soothed, flattered, temporarily and harmlessly diverted. It may be paradoxical, but I think a large part of the reason for Conjunctions’ long survival has to do with its absolute, down-the-line refusal to honor any standards but its own. But how can we understand this? If your editorial stance involves ideational disturbance to the point of publishing the otherwise (all but) unpublishable, what and how difficult are the aesthetics behind it, and how are they reconciled with the constant desire to make your journal a going concern when so many others have disappeared?
BRADFORD MORROW: In all honesty, I have to believe that any of the writers I’ve had the happy honor of publishing over the years could, should, and absolutely would have been published elsewhere. So whether it was Robert Kelly or anyone else, exaggerating or not, who said they wouldn’t have been published without me there to put their work in print, I simply disagree. I have never been an age-oriented editor—we’ll all be ageless quite soon—so I have published the established, such as Robert Duncan, Barbara Guest, James Purdy, even Laura Riding, with whom I had a crazy correspondence. And, at the same time, I have published writers at a moment in their lives when they weren’t well known, were hardly published, if at all. David Foster Wallace was a total unknown when I started corresponding with him, ran one of his earliest stories, “John Billy,” in Conjunctions:12, and then we became friends, and I published quite a bit of his work, including the first-ever passage from what would become Infinite Jest. William T. Vollmann’s first appearance in print in a literary journal was in Conjunctions:11, a long piece called “Scintillant Orange” from what would become The Rainbow Stories, and he and I too became very close buddies, read together, hung out together a lot. Karen Russell, to bring it up to more present times, was a writer I immediately understood to be fresh and unique, a voice unlike others, and Conjunctions was her second appearance in print. She, too, I count among my dearest pals. I do have an aesthetic, and it is constantly evolving—not in a “macro” way, just nuanced and always growing. I don’t have an iron credo (I tried writing one once; it made sense for a day or two, then I got rid of it), but I do have a clear sense of what I personally love and don’t love.
Here, no credo but the best I can do, in short, is what I love. Language that feels as if it’s being discovered for the first time, language that has its own rhythm, heart, music, smarts, and soul. Work that has such an exuberance that it makes the world a slightly or (it happens) hugely larger and more dangerous place, dangerous in a good way, in that it forces me and other readers to reconsider what we’re up to, who we are. This reconsideration may be about looking anew at a word, or rethinking an entire heartfelt philosophical position. When a writer finds her or his deepest voice, manages against all odds to get his or her vision on paper, that is truly a bit of a miracle. Sure, a secular miracle. Those kinds of miracles are what I live for as an editor and as a writer, myself.
Just to switch it up, Peter, you as a writer have also labored in the fruitful fields of editing. The issue of Conjunctions that you edited, New Wave Fabulists, marked an important moment in the world of genre or, I might say, anti-genre. Could you talk about that experience a little, when I invited you to enter as an editor into the Conjunctions fray?
PETER STRAUB: Your reply to that question sort of rocks me back on my heels, Brad, not only because it demonstrates you share my conviction that the art of exuberance, conviction, and sense of discovery has the effect of seeming to enlarge the world, and to increase the stock of what is commonly available to human beings, but because it also stands as a summation of those qualities that have made and continue to make you such a significant, valuable, in fact (if you don’t object) beloved editor. Anyone who can pick Wallace, Vollmann, and Russell out of the submission chorus line must be said to have fantastic taste—that is, rock-ribbed, inviolable, yet wonderfully supple, elastic good taste—and if the same person chooses also to publish Duncan, Guest, Purdy, and Laura Riding (!), we have entered the realm of the spectacularly, almost even supernaturally trustworthy. Very few editors actually have been alert to the phenomenon of “a writer finding his or her deepest voice,” and I suppose most of those, unlike you, Jolas, and Ford (who else? Tambimuttu, Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound, Philip Rahv, George Plimpton?), have been in the employ of publishing houses.
Conjunctions, therefore, has an unusual weight and gravity, which accounts for my initial hesitation at your offer of guest-editing an issue devoted to writers of what John Clute calls
“Fantastika.” Despite our long friendship, I was more than a little intimidated. Then I thought about the matter a little more, began to see what we might accomplish, and before much more time had passed signed on. I started to feel a bit messianic about it. Here was an opportunity to do two opposite but complementary things at once: to demonstrate to a deeply informed literary audience that writers marketed by their publishers and even self-classifiedas genre authors often and as customary practice produced work of what we might as well call genuine literary merit, deeply felt, on the outermost edge of what can be expressed, in fact partially through the best aspects of their genres (we’re not having any nonsense about “transcendence” here); and to make as clear as possible to both audiences—for snobbery is alas universal—that it is as mistaken to suppose genre is identical to commercial as to identify the literary with laziness, self-involvement, and tedium. At its best and in its best hands, genre fiction is to be distinguished from literary fiction only by its general reliance on certain kinds of narrative structures.
The merit of every issue of Conjunctions,like that of every journal and anthology, depends on its submissions, so I solicited work from the writers whose work I found to be the most substantial and exciting—you know, whose work would best prove my case. I’m grateful to be able to say that you backed me completely right from the beginning, and that your commitment and enthusiasm were well rewarded when our first submission, John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” came in. I think no claim made for this story can be overstated, that it is simply one of the greatest works of shorter fiction to have been written in the past fifty years. It bowled both of us over, as did the final story to come in, Kelly Link’s “Lull.” In fact, the issue really began with approaches to Crowley and Link and opened outward from them. The issue was widely reviewed, very quickly imitated, much talked about, and I’m pretty sure led directly to the Library of America’s inviting me to edit a sort of family-sized, two-volume New Wave Fabulists called American Fantastic Tales.
And yet I was somehow hoping for more. Too many readers still think work of the sort included in The New Wave Fabulists is tarred with the genre brush and ultimately, therefore, is of no great actual significance. I couldn’t make a dent because a dent can’t be made; the wall is too high, too defended, too reinforced by instinctively prejudicial thinking. At least you tried, and I tried, and we saw some spectacular stories into the world. So I cannot refrain from asking, how do you see this issue? You have done a fascinating job of integrating elements of mystery fiction in The Diviner’s Tale and the forthcoming The Forgers, yet no one could mistake them for mystery novels. You do, however, seem to me to be able to smile down upon both sides of the wall.
BRADFORD MORROW: Oh, I think The New Wave Fabulists made a dent and then some. The Library of America anthology alone proves that. It’s interesting, this question of some readers being unwilling to venture out into appreciating genre writing because of, as you say, “prejudicial thinking.” At the same time, I can easily imagine some hardcore readers of fantasy, horror, or science fiction refusing to engage so-called literary fiction or experimental poetry, readers who maybe picked up The New Wave Fabulists and liked what they read there but didn’t go on to explore any further issues of Conjunctions, because they perceived these writers to be tarred with the dread “literary” brush! At the end of the day, to each his own taste. I myself think Conjunctions:39, The New Wave Fabulists had an enormous impact and generated a lot of vibrant discussion. It was one of our best-received issues, going into a second printing, and even led me to do a kind of follow-up issue, Betwixt the Between, coedited with Brian Evenson, which mixed work by well-known fantasy writers such as Elizabeth Hand, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, and Jonathan Carroll with folks like Stephen Wright, Ben Marcus, Karen Russell, and Shelley Jackson. Conjunctions has continued to publish some of the writers you introduced to us, so the impact of this issue certainly goes on in our pages—and, as you noted, in other anthologies such as those published by Omnidawn. If you think about it, some of the greatest canonical writers from Shakespeare to Swift, Dickens to James, have all drawn from elements of the fantastic. My long-held embrace of the Gothic comes through in novels of mine going back to The Almanac Branch and Giovanni’s Gift, and certainly fantasy and mystery commingle in The Diviner’s Tale, as you say, while aspects of the thriller genre inform The Forgers. So much of how a book is defined, genrewise, by readers, is out of the author’s hands that I don’t spend too much time worrying over it. These books are literary primarily because of voice and narrative strategies that may be atypical of traditional thrillers or mysteries. No matter how you parse it, though, it’s undeniable that there are astonishingly good stories in The New Wave Fabulists and together they had a synergy that altered the intellectual weather patterns in many a reader’s mind.
Speaking of readers, you have been associated with Conjunctions for a long time now, Peter, as a contributor, a guest editor, but also as a very close, superastute reader. Which issues over the years had the greatest impact on you, I wonder? Which have meant the most to you as, to paraphrase William Burroughs, a creative reader?
PETER STRAUB: Of course the issues in which I appeared all strike me as particularly cool and dandy, but even if I were not in The New Gothic, Tributes,and Cinema Lingua,I would find them extraordinary—yet I don’t think I really should list these among my favorites. There are, happily, many other issues that have meant a lot to me. I was impressed, in fact completely delighted, by Conjunctions:15, which published a beautiful John Barth story, an unusually expansive story by Lydia Davis, and four startling, lovely, unsettling stories by Diane Williams, but is mainly taken up by what amounts to a breathtaking anthology of the most important poetry being written in this country. Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Barbara Guest, Ronald Johnson, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Ann Lauterbach, Charles Bernstein, Martine Bellen, Marjorie Welish, Peter Gizzi . . . even now, twenty-four years later, the contributors’ list could hardly be bettered.
The Twenty-FifthAnniversary Issue also means a lot to me, and I had decided to make it one of my choices before I realized that I was in it. Well, I’m going to mention it anyhow, for the wonderful celebratory tone of the enterprise and the strength of its individual pieces, particularly those by Jonathan Lethem, Ann Lauterbach, C. D. Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White, Lynne Tillman, and Rick Moody. Twenty-five years was a significant milestone, and this issue marked it in a manner both joyous and clear eyed.
Finally, I want to point to Not Even Past: Hybrid Histories. The great Duncan Hannah paintings on the front and rear covers suggest the theme by depicting a closely observed past that never in fact existed. This theme can be restated to fit the Faulkner apothegm that provided the issue’s title, namely that the past is never dead; it’s not even past. The Barney Rosset memoir of Beckett, the relentless and very Eliotic (on Lambeth Bridge and down below . . . /and who cries long ago . . . /and who remembers me . . .) long poem by Thomas Bernhard, and the brilliant, spinning, tragic Robert Bolaño novel fragments that start the issue off make it an instant landmark. Francine Prose and Paul La Farge’s contributions are particularly brilliant and so moving they could easily be called heartbreaking.
I have to wonder, Brad, how you manage to invent such ripe, glowing themes to center issue after issue. It seems almost miraculous. The one time I asked you how you pulled this off, you uttered something modest and I guess I could say, “numinous,” which immediately, courteously closed the subject down. But now that we are out here in public, so to speak, I want to ask you about your process. Does a theme ever come to you from submissions you have either just read or installed on the sidelines to await their turns?
BRADFORD MORROW: Mine is an every-which-way process, just as it should be, just as it is for me as a novelist. Ideas for Conjunctions come to me much the same way that ideas for my stories and novels do. I’ll hear someone say a random phrase, and that will generate a narrative. I’ll read something by another writer, and that will prompt an initiative, a consideration. None of this is derivative, and more often than not my ideas for Conjunctions themes come straight out of a curiosity about what I would like to spend the next half of a year thinking about, as an editor, exploring, investigating, living with day to day. In this, it’s truly so much like the creative process of engagement I find myself involved with as a writer. Writing is a form of reading, and reading is a kind of writing, as everybody knows. So themes, like waves, roll toward the shore, all of them magnificent, some of them dangerous, every one of them its own force. There have been moments when a writer sent something in that made no sense for me to include in the issue I was currently working on, but was so damn great I found it impossible not to arrange a theme around it. Two come to mind. One by the quite famous John Barth, who sent me a novella, “It’s Been Told: A Story’s Story,” which prompted me to develop Conjunctions:44, An Anatomy of Roads, one of the coolest issues ever, to my mind. The second, and this one I truly adore, was when I received an unsolicited manuscript by a writer named Karen Hays, a writer unknown to me and not widely published, but it was a work of such manifest brilliance that I had to build an entire issue around it, Conjunctions:57, Kin. Usually, though, some words come to mind. An idea. Some of the excellent people I work with here, Micaela Morrissette and J. W. McCormack, for instance, toss superb ideas of their own into the dialogue. One of the things I have done most right over the many years I’ve been editing Conjunctions is to embrace others. I have been blessed to work with so many hugely inspired and inspiring people over time. Makes sense, though. From the first, I called this project Conjunctions. And so it has always been and will be.
