A Row of Dots: Timothy Schaffert’s Introduction to the Summer 2025 Issue
by Timothy Schaffert
We recently launched our Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 issues. For the Summer issue, which features archival work on the theme Writers on Writing, editor in chief Timothy Schaffert introduces the work by reflecting on the journal’s past and present. Read his full introduction to the issue below.
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A Row of Dots
by Timothy Schaffert
I’m writing this introduction to the summer issue with summer already here—we’re even a week past the equinox [or, as a friend* of mine dubbed it, “Daisy Buchanan Day” (“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”**)]. And I’ve spent all of June trying to move forward by strolling backward, interrogating the almost-one-hundred-year archive of the journal for all it has to say on writers and writing.
Speaking of time, you’ve maybe noticed, if you subscribe, the seasons passing at a breakneck pace, our 2024 and 2025 issues arriving in your mailbox all at once. The pandemic is to blame, having stopped the presses in 2020 and slowing production long enough that it’s been a struggle to get up to date. Some quarterlies are still behind, others ceased publication altogether.
When I took over as the new ed in chief earlier this month, it seemed in my best interest to spend the summer catching up. Jess Poli (Schooner’s managing editor) devised an accelerated production schedule so that the winter 2025 issue will actually pub in (or within proximity of) winter 2025 (and even as I write this, we’re not 100 percent certain it’s altogether doable).
[Note: The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the only time the Schooner has had to weather a glitch. The very first issue was delayed, the student editors having failed to budget the $250 required for the print run (of thirty copies).***]
With the centenary of the journal just up ahead, the archive promised a solution and an opportunity: we can add a special issue to the summer’s production, while also spotlighting the Schooner’s role in literary history, a century of shifting sensibilities and emerging voices, of war and revolution, of advances and retreats, all delivered with the uncommon grace and acuity of poets and storytellers from around the world.
I taught a graduate course in literary editing last spring and asked the students to go spelunking in the Schooner archive and report back. JC Andrews, a PhD student in poetry, presented on the essay “Telling Time” (spring 1988), in which Nancy Willard, concerned about her own literary production compared to Chekhov’s, begins a diary devoted to “how I spent my time as a writer.” This essay proved such a tantalizing portrait of a writer’s varied inspiration (a subway ride, a secondhand shop, “a day of distractions,” a 1936 Smith Corona typewriter) at that particular moment of the twentieth century, I couldn’t resist seeking more writerly reflections from Schooner history.
What did I find? In the journal’s first few decades, writing about writing might be scholarly, comical, patronizing, smugly self-deprecating, or all of the above. And the little magazine’s littleness, meager but spunky in the shadows of literary titans, was both a complaint and a virtue. Here’s Lowry Wimberly, Prairie Schooner’s first editor in chief, in his spring 1946 column, adopting a folksy punctiliousness:
“Seriously, the Schooner has always shied away from innovation and experimentation. It still holds, for instance, to such out-worn practices as printing lucid prose and not wholly unintelligible verse. And it continues to begin sentences with capital letters, to end them with the orthodox marks of punctuation, and to make a distinction between a dash and a period or a dash and a semicolon or, again, a dash and a colon or, yet once more, between a dash and a row of dots.”
So I rescued what I could from that era, including a delightful (nearly giddy) jargon-filled report of a writer-on-assignment, the “amusement editor” for a local newspaper, “I Go For Free” (winter 1937), in which Barney Oldfield notes that he has reviewed “2800 of the Hollywood feature-length pictures, not to mention in excess of 4880 shorts, 76 dramatic stock performances, 117 tent rep performances, 17 circuses, 22 carnival midways, 18 legit shows (in N. Y. C., Chi., Hollywood, and hinterlanding through my home town), and 216 vaudeville bills (units and standard vaude acts).”
While on the one hand, we have a colorful monologue (by way of an interview) with Sarah Lindsey Coleman, aka O. Henry’s widow, who was nonetheless a writer in her own right, we also have a few sharp-tongued literary critiques from the Wimberly years, including “Psycho-pathological Fiction,” which takes novelists to task for their “chaoticism,” for their “morbid class of fiction” with “no voice of gladness or eloquence or beauty; there is no humor, and there is no courage.”
Despite the hundreds of writers published in the Schooner’s first fifty years, the archive is nonetheless haunted by conspicuous absences: Black writers are most often mentioned in reference to how they’ve inspired White writers; folklore, ballads, and performance are from time to time cited by White writers as literary sources (the fourth issue includes a portrait of the poet Carl Sandburg, with mention of his “deep and serious study of negro folksongs . . . when Sandburg sings them they seem to lose their coarseness and come to you not as gutter crudities but as things that are crude by virtue of their elemental state”). Bertram A. Lewis boldly addresses White perspectives on Black writing in his essay “The Envied Ones” (spring 1939), eloquently calling out White writers for their envy of Black experience.
“That is current,” Schooner editor Kwame Dawes commented in a segment on Lewis and “The Envied Ones” in the Nebraska Public Media series Lost Writers of the Plains. “I get this all the time. . . . ‘I wish I had some of your experiences because it would give me something to write about . . . my life is so dull, so uninteresting and I can’t write about my mother and father because they were so nice to me.’ . . . This is the complaint. So the person who writes about suffering is sitting there going ‘Are you kidding me? Do you think I would have chosen my suffering?’”
This issue also includes three new pieces in a special section on craft and instruction, including Chaun Ballard’s “The Complexities of Personhood” on the subject of soul in Black art, an essay that parallels some of Lewis’s assertations eighty-five years later.
But most of the work here was originally published by editors Hilda Raz and Kwame Dawes; they regularly included poems and essays that fall far, humbly, from some of the authoritative and exasperated views of the literary writer’s plight in earlier issues of the journal. These later works require no explanation on my part; they are honest and deeply personal meditations on how life’s intrusions—illness, disability, heartbreak, trauma, family, career—can starve you of your time for writing even as it feeds your impulse to write everything down.
Hilda positioned the journal for the twenty-first century, during an era of progress, and Kwame has steered it forth in an era too often inclined toward regress. This summer of 2025 seems “out-worn,” to use Wimberly’s words, following months of cuts to the arts and humanities and to higher education and threats to literature and libraries and scientific journals, personal expression, identity, protest. The archive’s World War II–era commentary aligns eerily with today’s editorials.
We most often write to be read, so that our voices might harmonize with the like-minded, or might influence those we oppose, for our own memories to become interwoven with the memories of our readers. With this summer introduction (that you’ll read in autumn), I feel every word I write is already an echo, another voice in the chorus and cacophony of the archive.
I’ll conclude with Willa Cather’s comments on memory and writing, originally published as part of a 1921 profile in The Bookman:
“I’ve always had a habit of remembering mannerisms, turns of speech. The phraseology of those people stuck in my mind. If I had made notes, or should make them now, the material collected would be dead. No, it’s memory—the memory that goes with the vocation. When I sit down to write, turns of phrase I’ve forgotten for years come back like white ink before fire.”
*Daniel Lewis, Marshall University
**The Great Gatsby
***The Prairie Schooner Story: A Little Magazine’s First 25 Years by Paul R. Stewart (1955)
Timothy Schaffert is the author of seven novels, most recently the USA Today bestseller The Titanic Survivors Book Club, which is the third in a trilogy of historical novels about war and entertainment. He was born and raised in Aurora, Nebraska (as was one of the Schooner’s founding members, Edward Stanley, who also wrote historical fiction), and his first national publication was in Prairie Schooner, a short story titled “Sounds from the Courtyard.” He is the Adele Hall Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNL, and the co-editor of Zero Street, a series of LGBTQ+ literary fiction with the University of Nebraska Press.