Editor's Notes - Issue 2
Welcome to the second issue of Stone Canoe, significantly bigger this year—an attempt to accommodate the enthusiastic response to our call for submissions. 350 individuals submitted work for consideration (over 800 individual pieces), and 98 are represented in this issue. As the accompanying map shows, most of our contributors are fairly well distributed across Upstate New York, with a few from New York City or elsewhere who have ties to the region.
What the collective work demonstrates is that the arts are alive and well in Upstate New York—not that those of us who pay attention to such things had any doubts. Yet we citizens of the region are used to being somewhat defensive about its reputation as “the land that time forgot,” to quote Lewis Menand from a recent New Yorker review of Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs. Russo’s novel is set in a small upstate town, the “sort of place” says Menand, “where people think of moving to Schenectady as making it.” How benighted they must be! Even Russo’s protagonist, with a certain amount of self-awareness and a good upstate sense of humor, admits that his natural inclination is toward “inertia rationalized,” and acknowledges that his memoir might appropriately be titled “The Dullest Story Ever Told.” Henry Allen, Washington Post writer and contributor to this issue, admits that, as a young New Englander, he thought of Upstate New York as essentially devoid of culture, “the hell to which Dick Diver was condemned in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.” Then there is the variation on the old joke about what Americans think of Canada, courtesy of a New York Times writer who shall remain anonymous. Question: “What do people from New York City think of upstate?” Answer: “They don’t.”
So Stone Canoe’s editorial stance may admittedly be a bit combative. We see ourselves as awakening the general reading public to the news that the art and writing produced in our corner of the world is second to none, and deserves a larger audience than it has historically enjoyed. We try to pick work that “makes the local place nationally available,” as Paul Gray says Philip Booth’s poems were always able to do. The reception to our first issue has so far been encouraging. A bronze medal in the 2007 Independent Book Publishers competition brought us wider recognition, and two Stone Canoe readings at the New York Public Library, sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, yielded critical praise from audiences as well as from fellow journal editors.
That said, however, Stone Canoe faces the same challenge all arts journals face: finding a good audience. The cliché is that Americans in general have not much interest in the arts or literature. Certainly book sellers will tell you that literary journals are not a big inventory item. But this then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the same book sellers will often not feature these prominently on their shelves. Readers of the New York Times Book Review may remember an essay on the subject this past fall by Stephen King, who talks of literally having to get on his hands and knees in the aisle of a large bookstore to unearth the few literary journals in stock from under piles of commercial magazines.
Fred Muratori, poet and bibliographer at Cornell, congratulates Stone Canoe on making it to issue number two, which he says puts us ahead of 90 percent of the literary journals produced in this country since WWII. His tongue is in his cheek here, of course, but I take his point. Those who put out journals that do manage to survive have an obstinate faith, with Saul Bellow, that “there are millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind...a crowd of (serious readers) too large to be hidden in the woods.” It is heartening to see a small but growing number of Stone Canoe readers emerging from the upstate woods, so to speak, as well as from the larger urban forests. Our mission is to continue to offer them not only good things to read, but also an enhanced sense of community, a chance to come out into the open, as it were, and compare notes.
This enhanced sense of community hopefully extends to our contributors as well, particularly the less experienced ones who may be working in relative isolation, perhaps unsure of their audience, perhaps unable to establish the sorts of networks enjoyed by their more established colleagues. One writer offers “heartfelt thanks for giving the artists of our area such a splendid forum,” one that gives him “an encouraging sense of belonging to a chorus of voices here in Upstate New York.” He also singles out certain contributors to our first issue as people he would like to meet. What could be better? Another writes to say how much he has longed for a community-based outlet for his work, and is excited at the prospect of “contributing to a journal that celebrates Upstate New York’s plentiful creative talents.” We think there are lots of these folks in the woods also, and look forward to getting to know them better as they respond to future calls for submissions.
As with our first issue, the range of theme and subject matter in Stone Canoe Number 2 is impressive. Some contributors do indeed have a regional focus—the pulse of daily life in upstate urban centers and small towns, the look of our road signs, back yards, train tracks, and woods, the effect of place on personality—yet manage to wrest universal significance from their materials. Others tell us firsthand what it is like to be incarcerated; to cope with suburban life after combat in Iraq; to undergo rehabilitation from war injuries; to lose a best friend to AIDS; to be of mixed heritage and unsure of one’s rightful place in the world; to triumph over the challenges of autism, to name just a few of the pieces found here. Still others remind us of the implications of our global citizenship, connecting us in new ways with the lives of Holocaust survivors, West Bank villagers, residents of rural India, or recent immigrants to the U.S., trying to make sense of their new and utterly alien surroundings.
At this stage in our development, it is hard to predict what Stone Canoe’s ultimate legacy will be. For the moment, though, Henry Allen’s reaction to our first issue is worth quoting briefly:
I began reading Stone Canoe, whose mission seems to be in considerable part the reviving of the thereness and placeness of Upstate New York, which I could never quite understand when I was young, since I was from New England with all its sly self-consciousness. Anyway, Stone Canoe made me think of Upstate, and shows me hints of a very different self-consciousness. Good luck with it. |
Might there be a unique Upstate New York sensibility, one that can perhaps be distilled from the best writing and art to come out of the region? It is a tempting thought. In his final book, Upstate, the distinguished scholar and critic Edmund Wilson struggles to articulate his feelings for Talcottville, his chosen place of retirement. Despite complaints about the harsh weather and “cultural poverty,” he admits the area has captivated him since childhood, and talks of “a certain romantic attachment which the North Country generates for its addicts.” Edward Root, the distinguished art collector and historian based in Clinton, has described the Mohawk Valley as “a country to be born in, to live in, to die in; to arouse indeterminable desires and bestow sensuous delights—the proper nursery for the poet, the artist, and the man of thought.” The poet Susan Deer Cloud describes her surprise at how she misses her upstate home when she is away, “for who hasn’t cursed the darkness in Binghamton, or Syracuse, or Ithaca?” How, if at all, are these disparate observations related? To steal a metaphor from James Joyce, the snows of upstate have fallen on all of us. What are we to make of this? Perhaps cumulative issues of Stone Canoe will begin to suggest some answers.
Thanks to all our contributors for sharing their artistic gifts with the rest of us, and congratulations to the 2008 Stone Canoe prize winners, who impressed the editors as deserving special merit. Thanks to our distinguished editors, Paul Aviles, Michael Burkard, David Lloyd, and Marion Wilson, without whose expertise and selflessness Stone Canoe would not exist. Their profiles and comments can be found on pages 361-362. Finally, thanks to the Stone Canoe staff, whose insistence on precision and adherence to deadlines triumphed over countless small disasters and my own worst administrative impulses.
Robert Colley
Editor, Stone Canoe
Syracuse, New York
December, 2007
