Call this an endorsement for another member of the publishing community. I’ve been reading Prairie Schooner for about thirty-five (of their nearly 90) years of publication, and I still open each new issue eagerly, always ready to be instructed and delighted. One of the facets of the journal that has long engaged me is its non-partisan approach: there’s no other journal, so far as I can tell, more open to new writers, and none that publishes as wide a variety of modes, forms, tones, themes and voices as this quarterly journal from Nebraska, long edited by Hilda Raz with the help of a variety of student and professional staff members. Origins, politics, tribes and agendas of writers, especially poets, played a very small role in Hilda’s editorial approach. The one “extra-literary” item on her menu was that she seemed determined to feature voices from unheard or seldom-heard minorities of all sorts. Under her guidance, Prairie Schooner became a rainbow coalition that operated without any quotas or trepidations. Thinking back on issues both recent and ancient, I recall poems by Linda Pastan, David Kirby, Donald Platt, Clairr O’Connor, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Lucinda Roy and Lynne Potts, as well as stories by Melissa Yancy, Alice Hoffman, Owen King and Katie Wudel’s short short story”Bad Aim.” More important than any Who’s Who, each issue radiates craft and the electricity we often call inspiration.
Understandably, I was afraid that PS might might become less reader- and writer-friendly once Raz decided to step away from the wheel to concentrate on her own writing. I’ve seen several long-term editors resign or retire in my years of editing, but only a few like Stan Lindberg of Georgia Review and George Core of Sewanee Review stamped the journals they edited (and Core still edits) as strongly and gracefully as Hilda did. Needless fretting, however. When Kwame Dawes was named to the editorial post, I just grinned and said to myself, “It will be different but still exciting.” Dawes’ work has appeared in Shenandoah, and his poems and essays have long been widely admired. Now he has been running PS long enough that I can feel confident my premonition has been fulfilled.
The PS website prairieschooner.unl.edu offers plenty of treats, including Oxcart, currently a rumination by Dawes on why some manuscripts are declined by editors. There’s also a wonderful audio section, Air Schooner, currently featuring an interview with two writers about literary experimentalism.
The next issue of Prairie Schooner, due to hit the stands and the mail next March, will feature poems by Shenandoah contributors David Wagoner and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers and fiction by Roxanne Gay. “How to Own a Building,” Natalie Vestin’s essay which won the first PS creative nonfiction contest, will also appear. Here’s a passage from it to whet our appetites:
“. . . The problem with ownership is destruction, the constant play of the second law of thermodynamics, everything heading toward entropy. Destruction forces transformation. It craves something new and replaced. Something that tastes like memory and habit rearranged. Memorial, museum, open space, preserved, conserved, something was here, owned by a heart. In some instances, a building becomes an event. Flames on the wall, remnants of what has past, pieces and stories hustled inside. people encouraged inside the event-building to live a story told by a journey from room to room. To be someone or something else, to have memory and emotion implanted in a bare space. . . .”
I can think of no better way to end this than to saying: Live long and prosper.
