Literary Magazines at the University of Idaho, from Then till Now

Ron McFarland
University of Idaho

Ron McFarland teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Idaho, where he serves as faculty advisor of the literary magazine, Fugue. His most recent books are a critical study, Understanding James Welch, (U. of South Carolina, 2000), his new & selected poems, Stranger in Town, (Confluence 2000), and his stories & essays from Idaho, Catching First Light, Idaho State University, 2001). ronmcf@uidaho.edu

Appearing quarterly during the academic year, between 1946 and 1951, a magazine called Blot was published under the auspices of the Associated Students of the University of Idaho, and it has what periodical scholars refer to as a “slick” format reminiscent of the Saturday Evening Post (it is 8 ½” x 11” and features cartoons, black-and-white photos, eight feature articles, and eight short stories—no poems). The May issue of fifty years ago runs 60 triple-column pages, and under the title on the masthead is the slogan, “The Poor Man’s Esquire.” Earlier issues of the magazine did run a few poems, but they were generally consigned to filler status. The staff of this magazine, which clearly modeled itself after popular mass-market periodicals, as opposed to “literary magazines,” numbers in excess of sixty names, with everything from an editor (Bob Finlayson), to a managing editor, associate editor, business manager, photo editor (with staff), separate editors of features and fiction (no mention of poetry), an art editor (with staff), separate advertising and clerical staffs, and a circulation manager and associate manager (with staff). The lead story is a piece of fiction by Willard Barnes entitled “Pay Day.” A student at the time, Barnes was to return to the university in 1965 as a history professor.

Although Blot was the most ambitious of the literary magazines to be produced at the University of Idaho until the recent evolution of Fugue, it was by no means the first. The university library’s archives list a single issue of a magazine entitled Extravaganzas, edited by English department instructors J. Stanton McLaughlin and Kenneth Collins and published in 1922 as what appears to be the first such effort. This slim magazine (about 6” x 9”) features sixteen prose pieces (fiction and nonfiction), some just a short paragraph in length, a one-act play, and a poem entitled “The English D.T’s,” all the product of UI English classes. The magazine features cover art by Marion Featherstone. Also a single-volume endeavor was a perfect-bound (straight-spine) magazine called Under the Helmet, which appeared in 1929 and was described as “The Literary Yearbook of the University of Idaho.” Published under the auspices of the English Club (the Winged Helmet Literary Society), this magazine features 21 stories, two one-act plays, and five poems, one of which runs about four pages (approximately 160 lines of blank verse by Russell Hodgson entitled “Coronation”). Like Blot, this magazine was student-edited (Helen Kerr) and all contributions were by UI students.

Between these two one-issue magazines, starting in March of 1923 and ending in 1927, several issues of a magazine entitled The Blue Bucket appeared, most of them under the student editorship of Talbott Jennings. The first several issues are saddle-backed (6” x 9”) and run from 32 to 44 pages, featuring a balance of poems, fiction, and nonfiction by UI students. Most of the last dozen issues of the magazine appear in the slick format (apx. 8 ½” x 12”) that was to distinguish Blot.

After Blot’s 1951 issue there is an apparent gap in the literary magazine business at the university until January of 1962, when The I (sometimes known as The Literary I) began its run. The I, which sold for fifty cents, started out as a 7” x 10” saddle-back supported by the Campus Union Party, and the first issue featured four short stories, two pieces of nonfiction, one of them written by foreign languages professor C. L. Iiams, and seven poems. Sponsorship of The I shifted several times during its seven-year run, and the third issue, sponsored by the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, includes a poem by English professor Jan Brunvand, who was to become a respected folklorist. The I usually enlisted the services of faculty advisors like William Tenney and Karen Elwood from the English department. By 1966 the magazine had shifted to a slick format (8 ½” x 11”) with black-and-white illustrations (usually pen-and-ink drawings). The 1967 issue includes more than thirty poems, some of which reflect the controversy over the war in Vietnam, three stories, and an essay. The 1968 issue is dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the fall of 1977, Milo Nelson, the UI head humanities librarian, and I, representing the English department (not that my colleagues were begging me to do so), inaugurated a literary magazine known as Snapdragon, which was to run twice yearly for about ten years and which had an open submission policy, meaning that contributors were not limited to UI students and staff. Patricia Hart served as Managing Editor, and the first issue featured poems by English instructors Tina Foriyes, Joy Passanante, and David Barber. Work by undergraduate and graduate students also appeared in the pages of Snapdragon throughout its run. That issue, which sold for seventy-five cents, includes only one piece of short fiction, the remainder of the space being allotted to poems and two black-and-white gallery sections, which were to be a standard feature of the magazine. By the date of its final number (9.2, Spring 1986), Snapdragon had run poems by such well-known poets as Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Rita Dove, Karen Swenson, Robert Dana, David Wagoner, Marilyn Hacker, and William Stafford, and fiction by Ursule Molinaro, Arturo Vivante, and Ann Copeland. Local and regional writers, many of them UI undergraduate and graduate students, were printed side-by-side with Pulitzer Prize-winners, some of whom had taught at the university as Distinguished Visiting Writers.

In the fall of 1987, soon after Snapdragon faded from the scene, Christine Pakkala, an undergraduate English major at UI, started up Paradise Creek Journal with the backing of the English department and ASUI. Its three-issue run returned the literary magazine to a student-centered enterprise featuring poems and stories by UI students. Published in a 5 ½” x 8 ½” saddle-back format and running from 32 to 46 pages, PCJ may be said to have “filled the gap” between the longer-lived Snapdragon and Fugue, which was to have its inaugural issue in the fall of 1990. PCJ, subsequently edited by John Britschgi, demonstrated the continuing student interest in editing and publishing a literary magazine.

Technically, of course, there is no such thing as a “need” for a literary magazine, whether it exists to showcase student talents in creative writing or to provide them with the sort of learning opportunities to be gained from experiences with editing and publishing. It is, rather, in the nature of what some economists would call a “want-satisfaction.” Literary or little magazines provide what those of us involved in them think of as a vital service for both emerging (young and old) and established writers who have no clout with the big boys. They represent what I think of as an “essential” literary sub-culture made up largely of fellow writers (this is especially true of poets), but of course I have a vested interest in the matter.

When the first issue of Fugue appeared in 1990, it was in a very modest saddle-back format (5 ½” x 8 ½”) under the founding editorship of J. C. Hendee. Other editors were students at the University of Idaho, and I joined in as faculty advisor and proofreader, pretty much reversing my degree of involvement in the editorial process. Whereas with Snapdragon I had had a major voice in the selection of work to be printed, in Fugue I was to be a “silent partner,” asked in by the student editors only when they were deadlocked over a manuscript under review, and I have maintained that connection. Although the magazine operated from the outset on an open submissions policy, most of the work published in the earlier issues was that of UI students and staff. The first number featured four short stories, half a dozen very short prose pieces that Hendee called “vignettes,” thirteen poems, and assorted pieces of nonfiction, including Hendee’s Graffiti column. Funded by the English department, the magazine sold for $3 and was distributed primarily through local book stores. After the Summer 1991 issue (2.2), the editors began numbering the magazines consecutively, starting with #4 that fall. Issue #20 is anticipated in early February 2001. The magazine appears twice yearly.

Fugue: the name is what we literary types would describe as “richly ambiguous,” as it has technical meaning in both music and psychotherapy (in both cases too complicated to elaborate here, but accessible in the dictionary), both meanings being connected with its Latin root in the word for “flight.” We maintained its low-cost format until #13, which appeared in the spring of 1996. Covers for six of the first eight issues were taken from public domain art acquired via the internet, but beginning with #9, and including several of the next five issues of the magazine, when Lance Olsen served as faculty advisor, the covers featured artwork by Andi Olsen. Maximum length of an issue at that time was 48 pages. Over the past four years, with the start-up of an M.F.A. degree in creative writing, graduate students taking a three-credit course in editing and publishing or a one-credit internship have served as an editorial board for the magazine, with undergraduates generally working as manuscript reviewers. All mss. submitted to the magazine are read by at least two different reviewers, and many are read by three or more. Readers and editors screen submissions throughout the year, so there is no deadline for submissions.

Submission policies at Fugue limit prose mss. to no more than 6,000 words (typically, around twenty typewritten, double-spaced pages) and poets to no more than four poems at a time. In addition to a contributor’s copy of the magazine in which the work appears, the editors pay up to $20 for prose and $10 for poems. While the editors realize that the honorarium is small, they are committed to the principle that writers should be paid something for their efforts, and the magazine has paid contributors beginning with its second issue. Funds for paying contributors are derived from sales and subscriptions. Contributors are offered additional copies of the magazine at half price. Presently the press run for any issue is 200-250 copies, and the magazine lists about 20 subscribers. The editors describe their tastes as “eclectic,” which indicates that they are willing to read pretty much anything that that comes over the transom, from mainstream to cyberpunk. So-called “genre fiction,” however, has relatively slight chance of acceptance, as does “light verse,” work showing little regard for craft, or poems indulging in overt sentimentality. Editors report that of the 300 or so stories they will read for an issue, no more than five or six will be accepted, and the odds against any single poem appearing in the magazine are about double that. As odds in the literary magazine business go, however, those (that is, fifty to one) are very good, and as Fugue’s reputation grows, the standards for acceptance will become higher.

Beginning with #7 (Spring/Summer 1993), Fugue began to focus on feature writers in some issues, usually the work of visiting writers at the university. Poets Pattiann Rogers and Stephen Dobyns were the first to be so distinguished; others have included Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delaney, Raymond Federman, Brenda Hillman, Stephen Dunn, Sharon Olds, and Virgil Suarez. Poems by Robert Wrigley will be featured in #21.

Eric Isaacson served as editor of Fugue for three years starting in 1995, and under his leadership, with the assistance of Lance Olsen as faculty advisor, the magazine moved from the inexpensive saddle-back design to the more costly perfect-bound format in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue (#13), which features a color cover. That issue also marks the first in which outside contributors began to outnumber those from the UI community. When I returned as faculty advisor to the magazine with the Fall 1996/Spring 1997 double issue (#14/15) the size was changed from 5 ½” x 8 ½” to the more standard 6” x 9” and the editorial board adopted a standard logo, which now appears as the title and is used on correspondence pertaining to the magazine. Beginning with #17, Ryan Witt served as Managing Editor, with James Mayo serving as his assistant for a couple of issues. The current Managing Editor, Andrea Mason, a second-year MFA student whose undergraduate work was completed at Colgate University, has ambitious plans for the magazine.

Most issues of Fugue now run around one hundred pages, and the price per copy has gone up to $6 at book stores, $5 for subscribers. Subscription rates are $10 per year (two issues), postage paid. Contributors should send their mss. with a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to The Editors, Fugue, English Department, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844-1102.