About tnr

History

In the Spring of 1966, Louise T. Reynolds and award-winning short-story writer, Sylvia Shirley, Louise’s teacher at Columbia University, talked about co-editing a literary magazine. Both had had stories accepted one year only to learn the next that the magazine had gone belly up; a somewhat common occurrence. A profound commitment by editors, they believed, was essential if a new magazine was to make it through good times and bad.

They were looking for a different tone, a different range, and a different vision from the usual little/literary magazine. Bucking the current trend, they were not connected with a group of like-minded writers or artists and were therefore open to unpredictability and individuality in fiction and poetry, as well as to different sensibilities and cultures. Sylvia contacted published friends and former students, while Louise got in touch with friends, editors in commercial publishing. Before Louise returned to Arlington for a vacation, Sylvia put her in touch with her former Breadloaf colleague, Firman Houghton, the last editor/publisher of Audience, the acclaimed 10-year old independent Greater Boston litmag that Sylvia had briefly been associated with before internal strife led to its demise. Houghton agreed to meet Louise and offered to serve as the magazine’s poetry editor for at least two issues. At that time, Sylvia and Louise planned on four issues during a 16-month period.

From the start, they decided to follow Audience’s policy of reproducing visual art, though they were interested in featuring portfolios of two artists with contrasting styles. They wanted to offer different styles and visions in art and different styles in writing as well, but, most important, they wanted an “open” over-the-transom policy. Another difference was to present bilingual poetry from a variety of foreign languages (then unheard of outside scholarly publications) but they knew that, until listed in market directories, they’d be limited to English-only poetry. They had high hopes, though, of eventually receiving submissions from all over the country and the world.

Although not allied with an advocacy group, they were insistent that each issue led off with an article on a political or sociological topic. Except for ‘60s alternative presses, which often had a political agenda, this was a break from the tradition of little/literary magazines and tnr’s non-literary articles were often controversial and still are. They didn’t want just articles they could agree with or support but rather topics that were important to the time. For them, belles lettres wasn’t enough; they were determined to let in the real world. A diversity of styles, tones, and personal voices in the contents of the magazine was also a must. At first, the magazine would be limited to 64-pages but, by the second volume, they expected it would begin to grow. Each issue was to have its own tone or style, their ideal being that the contents would contrast and compare with one another while, nevertheless, maintaining a overall unity that made the whole more than the sum of its parts.

A friend suggested Discovery as the title or subtitle. They consider it but decided they didn’t want a magazine principally of discovery. It was easier to pick a subtitle, “A magazine of ideas and opinions, emphasizing literature and the arts”; the title itself still eluded them. They wanted it to reflect 1) their respect & admiration for culture of the Past; 2) their appreciation of the challenges of the immediate Present; and 3) their willingness to encourage and accept the possibilities of the Future. At one point, someone suggested “The Three Tenses” but that was rather quickly laid to rest. The pre-planning had taken several weeks and now, in late summer, they were ready to start collecting mss, hoping to publish in the spring. When Louise, who had been reading the essays of G.K. Chesterton, saw the line, “All the men in history who really have done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed on the past. I need not mention the word Renaissance, the very word proves my case”, she knew voila! that was it. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, several readers suggested that we replace the word “men” with “women/men”, “men/women”, or “persons” but we let the quote stand.

In September, Louise phoned Sylvia at the New School to update her on her progress in Boston and was staggered to learn that she had died some 3-1/2 weeks earlier, collapsing in class while delivering her opening lecture. Sylvia would have been 51 that November 7th. Plans for a magazine were forgotten. The dream had come up against reality.

That winter, Jean Raquet, who had signed on as Business Manager, kept prodding Louise to revive their plans. Louise argued that Sylvia not only had connections to students, former students, and published friends but, as a reviewer of the Sunday Book Review of The Herald Tribune (then surviving in Paris) and as an occasional reviewer for The Sunday Times Book Review, she could have gotten the magazine noticed. Louise had no such connections. Jean countered that the idea was itself viable, because its tone and diversity were different; its freedom from the restraints of a sponsoring backer was different; its willingness to take risks on each writer’s vision was different; and its involvement in the whole world and not just its own neighborhood/region, was different. She convinced Louise although with her two editorial friends who had committed to the venture now out of NYC and out of contact, she felt alone.

Then she remembered Harry Jackel, Sylvia’s widower (whom she had met but didn’t really know). Harry immediately put her in touch with Sylvia’s agent who sent several of Sylvia’s stories, while Harry located Sylvia’s students, friends, and a few donors (two contributed $200 each, one $150); Louise re-connected with Firman Houghton who put out a call to The New England Poetry Club members. [Later, she learned from the poet, Stanwood Bolton (who would serve as tnr’s Poetry Editor for more than a dozen issues) that Houghton had said: Act quickly. The magazine probably won’t make it to a second issue but even if it does, it won’t make it to a second volume!] The first issue was to be dedicated to Sylvia Shirley’s memory, with a story that Audience had accepted but hadn’t published. As that was the very thing that sparked the magazine, Harry and Louise felt it a serendipitous beginning. Louise then suggested one of her stories (also accepted but not published by three litmags then defunct) as a second story in #1 and Harry agreed. Although they had some success in getting subscriptions, manuscripts, and in accumulating a modest amount of money, Louise realized that, even with a full-time salary, the expenses of living in Manhattan precluded her from funding such a venture. Initially, Sylvia and Louise were to have shared the publishing costs of the first two volumes, using the donated and subscription money for operating expenses.

When Louise returned to Arlington at Easter, 1967, she shared her disappointment with her parents. Her Mother (who, in the late 1920s, had acted locally but, who, after auditioning in NYC , found Broadway rougher and tougher than what she could live with) understood dreams and she and Louise’s Father, Henry, invited Louise move back home to share the family’s expenses, a solution that would make the new renaissance financially viable, at least until through second volume. Leaving NYC, however, was a heartbreaker.

In the Fall 1967, she returned to Arlington and Louise E. Reynolds, taking over from NYC-based Jean Raquet, became the Founding Manager. In the winter 1968, waiting only for Houghton’s overdue essay/review of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, they were ready to go to type (then letterpress). But Houghton, playing possum, stalled and Louise contacted Deac Rossell, the film critic for Boston After Dark, whose essay, “The Children’s Hour”, singled out foreign films like Peter Watkins’s “Privilege” (Britain), Alan Resnais’s “La Guerre est Finie” (France), and non-Hollywood American films “Nothing but a Man”, “One Potato, Two Potato”, and “The Cool Ones”as grown-up films. (Years later, Rossell ran the film program at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts). The leader “The Real Enemy: Black Power and Anti-Semitism” by Mel King, with Bryant Rollins, was equally controversial (complete with threats). In addition to the poets that Houghton had assembled -- Jean Pedrick, Victor Howes, Isabelle Ann L.Kfoury, & Grace Morton -- there were two new poets whose work Louise sent on to Houghton (Sarah Jeffries and Carole Hebald) and a young man from NYC, Bruce Edwards, whom Louise accepted without consulting Houghton.

George Beiers, an Australian Project Director for Geometrics (developers of the U.S. Pavilion at NYC’s Expo ’67) contributed a piece on modern architecture, Level Heads and Level Cities while receiving rave reviews about his summer restaurant, Mediterranee on the Cape. Rounding out the first issue, (a 56- pager) was a review of Father Capon’s book, An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam & The Shape of the World by Neil Hansen who had an abiding interest in the visual arts. We printed 600 copies, selling them at $1.25 each. Now a Collector’s Item, with seven copies remaining, tnr #1 is $38.00 (the current price for a three-issue subscription for individuals).

We began tinkering with the format almost immediately; in tnr #2, adding running heads and feet; an Art Section; and settled down to 64-pages through tnr #4, when we added a slick cover; our first foreign artist, Gustav Wolfe, (with drawings from Fritz Lang’s Die Frau in Mond, thereby winning tnr Lang as a subscriber); and featured our first bilingual poem (“Vies I” by Rimbaud, translated by R.H. Rhodes). Harry Jackel joined the staff after #1’s publication (but self-effacingly didn’t want to be credited and wasn’t until #8); Olivera Sajkovic, a Finnish-born Yugoslav poet/artist, came aboard as Poetry Editor (tnr #3, #4, #6-#9 and later issues, #29, et al).

In tnr #7 , we offered a long bilingual poem, Lorca’s “Ode to the King of Harlem” (a non-academic translation by D.M. Pettinella); an English writer, Sheila S. Thompson (James Mason’s former sister-in-law); a Ukrainian, Helen Kotsiumbas (writing in English); our first long fiction (“Elements of the 10th Mountain Infantry Reconnoiter” by Gordon Weaver, then just beginning to be widely published and nationally awarded); and Tom Wallace Lyons’s pioneer piece on “Libel [as it applies to fiction]: Names Will Always Hurt Me”, in an 80-page issue that was dead on arrival until a year-and-a- half later, when, after exhibiting at the Small Press/Litmag Festival in NYC Clearing House at Battery Park, sales and even a long denied CCLM Grant came in, along with dozens of renewals and new subscriptions, partly the result of being highly touted on Lou Ehrenkrantz’s hour-long radio show, “The Wonderful World of the Little/Literary Magazine”.

When we published tnr #8, it had been 2-2/3 dry yrs. between issues. Its controversial leader, “Frontier Mentality: A Right to Bear Arms”, won the applause from three members of the U.S. House’s Judiciary Committee, then conducting hearings on gun control; introduced the first American publication by the Hindi writer, G.P. Vimal, whose fiction had already been acclaimed throughout England & the Common-wealth; our first story by an Irish writer Barry M. Lally (on religion, which got us a fair amount of invective; our first prison poet (Tambuzzi); and Louise’s controversial essay (later anthologized)“The Age of Mediocrity: Applying Gresham’s law to literature”.

By Vol. III, we were publishing three issues of 104 – 120 pp. per volume during a 20-month period, more or less our current schedule (which has settled in as 144 – 184pp). tnr #10 was an outstanding success, with 600 copies ordered by President Carter’s Commission on Mental Retardation and 100 copies each ordered by the Commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia, because of its controversial, ground-breaking leader, “The Family Papers: A Return to Purgatory” , an expose of “the sordid side” of state institutions that housed, with “unmitigated horror and cruelty”, mentally retarded people. Joseph McNally’s photographs, capturing the miserable and isolated lives of those individuals, were searing, as were Nancy Grossman’s drawings and sculptures “of callous brutality... cruelty to the point of sadism … her theme is man as the victim of forces that brutalize and madden him.” (John Canaday, Art Critic, The New York Times). Since tnr’s outstanding difference from other litmags, quarterlies, etc., lies in its editing and the way that various pieces resonate and echo with others in a single issue -- without, how- ever becoming a “theme” issue -- we thought that the inhumanity expressed in Grossman’s work would also indict those who oversee the “secret world of torment”, represented by the McNally’s photos. The theme of man’s inhumanity to man was echoed in Joan Colby’s poem, “The Fairy Tale”; in Ripa Wygra’s poem, “Despair at the Blackstone Hotel” (the only poem that has generated a dozen letters from prisoners); and “Just One G-Shot” by a prisoner, Carlos Jordan, about a junkie, released from prison only to hit the same mean streets and for the same mean hit, this time a righteous nodding that would be the end of him.

With tnr #11 -- the first to display our tnr logo -- we were praised by The Boston Sunday Globe’s Robert Taylor who said our leader, ‘Afghanistan: The Key We Threw Away” was a piece that, “The Atlantic or Harper’s might envy” -- a recommendation that didn’t cut any ice with talk-show host, David Brodnoy’s producer, who, after Louise phoned about a possible interview, said “You and I know where Afghanistan is but nobody else in the country knows or cares.” That leader, which predicted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by some 11 months, got us a spate of single sales and subscriptions after the “surprise” invasion by the Soviets. The short story by Alan Hoey, “Spanish walking in a snow storm”, earned tnr the first of its precious few Honorable Mentions in The Pushcart Prize. Amazingly, the very good short story, “Some Time Ago” got us a round of jeers and condemnations by Catholics and non-Catholics alike for having as major characters, a priest and a seminarian (nor was allowing religion in fiction a first for us, see “The Mission” in tnr #8)!

Finally, with a designed cover (one that still works for us), and a logo, in tnr #12, we settled on a format. The issue opened with a leader, “A Cliché Comes to Life”, exposing the murderous rage of Cambodia’s Pol Pot’s, complete with harrowing photographs; eight reproductions on dull glossy paper of George Tooker’s Magic Realism, chronicling the isolation and resignation of 20th-century America, paired with Nona Hatay’s eight photographs of Jimi Hendrix’s troubled, down-at-the-heels Harlem; two in-step poems by a black prisoner from the South, Melvin Miller; a poem, “Black Woman, Black Woman” by Harlem’s George Lathan; followed by Stan Bolton’s review of the prisoner, Tambuzi’s first chapbook.

By tnr #14, we were publishing bilingual poems regularly and, in fact, since 1969 have published poems, fiction, and artwork by contributors from more than 40 foreign countries in more than 35 different languages, and eight different alphabets. In a controversial issue, tnr #18, featuring all-Turkish poetry, embellished by photographs of beautiful Turkish mosques, we angered local & regional poets who accused us of preferring foreigners to “our own”.

In our early years, we published established and emerging writers, heavily but not entirely East Coast, (Stanwood Bolton, Harold Bond, Emilie Glen, E. J. Neely, Jean Pedrick, Deac Rossell, Helen Sorrells, Thomas West, Jr., others), pairing them mostly with Gr. Boston & NYC artists (William Christopher, Nancy Grossman, Margo Krasne, Marilyn Powers, Donald Reichert, Nicholas Solovioff, others). In addition, in our first two volume, we introduced writers early in their careers (Ruskin Bond, Madeleine Costigan, Ruth Feldman, Kinereth Gensler, Elizabeth McKim, Bill Meissner, Frances Webb, et al.).

Beginning with tnr #11, we began featuring established and celebrated American and foreign writers, including: Rolf Aggestam (Erland Anderson & Lars Nordstrom translations), John Bovey, Joan Colby, Carole Dunne, J.B. Goodenough, John Hanley, James Hearst, Barbara Holland, David Hopes, Juan Ramon Jimenez (Mary Rae translation), Jane Mayhall, Bruno K. Oijer (his own translations), John Reed, Hillel Schwartz, Jesse Thoor (Gary Sea translations), Margot Trestle, B. Wonger, Eugene Zamyatin (Michael Kossman translation), and many others.

We’ve also published early in their careers: Agha Shahid Ali (translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz), Julia Alvarez, Fr. Benedict Auer, Joe Bolton, Bennett Capers, Mitch Evich, Allen C. Fischer, Ethan Gilsdorf, Hal Sirowitz, Valerie Hobbs, Roald Hoffmann, Robert Kendall, M.E. McMullen, Stewart O’Nan, Joseph Queenan, Kay Ryan, Marian Steele, Ann Struthers, Marcia Tager, and others.

tnr began as an all-volunteer effort, which it remains to this day. The magazine was first published out of Louise’s home at 9 Heath Road and, since 1997, has been published out of her much smaller apartment at 26 Heath Road. For nearly ten years, our filing system consisted of numerous shoe boxes, the bane of “kitchen table publishing”. As evidenced by our all too-frequent “dry periods”, tnr lives from hand-to-mouth. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, major NEA grants helped us expand and improve, but the funding from the NEA and the MCC (Massachusetts Cultural Council) and, earlier in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the CCLM , was never consistent nor, except for the NEA, never large enough for us to develop the publicity and expansion that our maverick approach to litmags required. Now, with the NEA’s new requirement (a $50,000 budget), ensuring that those with the most resources will receive the most funding, tnr can’t even apply for their grants.

Being off-center has strengths and limitations. Defying the odds, we’ve continued publishing for nearly 38 years, with consistency of excellence and designed unpredictability. tnr’s diversity, range and quality allow for the very risks that define the world of independent litmags. Homogenization had already set in 1968 when we began and, now, it is rampant, with the dumbing down of popular culture and the indifference of the under 35-generation to literature, even to reading. Challenges and difficulties continue for us and other independents. That’s as it should be. The arts are special and rewarding, not because they’re popular and accessible (though they may be that, too) and certainly not because they’re mainstream -- but because they’re challenging, demanding, profound. They may entertain us but art goes further than that: it shows us a side of humanity we hadn’t known about or couldn’t articulate, or something that we now see in a new light. Literature shouldn’t trouble itself at being considered an outsider. That’s what art is.