Editing Creativity: Journals and the University Creative Writing Program

Once, late in the hot afternoon of a summer day, I looked up from a set of manuscripts to find a stranger leaning against the doorframe. His name was Richard Price, and he’d come to write a magazine article on an aspect of the university’s athletic program. In his off time, he wanted to see the offices of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner. I was pleased to meet Price, whose novels I’d read and liked. He and my family spent an evening together, drinking beer and eating pizza, talking about wrestling, a passion our grandmothers shared. We of the next generations seemed to like to wrestle text. In fact, my passion for editing was one response to the difficult times we discussed. History, I suggested, offers little control to its human witnesses, maybe only the power of retrospective analysis. But art seemed to invite immediate human response. I’d come to believe that we editors, if we worked hard enough, might see some of our writers grow to be famous, as Price was about to become. The family stories we told were an act of friendly exchange. But the occasion for our meeting was very much a by-product of the intensive work of literary publishing, an active collaboration between creative writers and editors that brings art to its audience. Price knew about Prairie Schooner just as we knew about Price.