In Conversation: Timothy Schaffert and Jessica Poli
Prairie Schooner‘s editor in chief Timothy Schaffert and managing editor Jessica Poli recently caught up on Schaffert’s new role, the journal’s upcoming centennial, getting lost in the archive, and the possibilities within literary journal design. Read their conversation below.
Jessica Poli: Congratulations on officially taking the helm of Prairie Schooner this past June as our new editor in chief! What most excites you about the history and future of the Schooner, and what impact do you hope to have on this nearly 100-year-old journal?
Timothy Schaffert: To inherit the editorship at this point has been a little weird and a little magical, considering that I first got to know Prairie Schooner in the late 1980s as an English major at the University of Nebraska, and had my first short story published in the journal in 1993: “Sounds from the Courtyard,” an odd little story about a traveling hosiery salesman at a women’s hotel during the Depression. (There’s a tornado.) And though I eventually worked as an editor of various titles under Hilda Raz, running the whole operation was never really an opportunity for me until now. So that’s the weird part—that mix of old and new, of nostalgia—and the magical part is that this is all happening right before the journal’s centennial, when we can be thinking about celebrating this profoundly fascinating archive, while also positioning Prairie Schooner for a new era. I think it’s important to note that, whoever the editor is, a journal is shaped by the writers. I have been soliciting some work, but the voice of Prairie Schooner is really that of the contributors who bless us with their poetry and prose.
And my question for your, Jess: In addition to attending to all the journal’s business as managing editor, you’re also a poetry editor for the Schooner. Based on your own sense of things as a teacher and writer of poetry, and now as an editor, how would you characterize the poetry that’s crossing our desks?
JP: Overall, I see poets in our pages and in the submission queue doing what poets have always done: responding to the particular moment that surrounds them and seeking forms and shapes to replicate that moment—to record the specific details of place, family, culture, love, grief, injustice… all while considering the effects of music, sound, image, etc. The international reach of the journal only adds to this; in recent issues, we’ve published writers from Ghana, Nigeria, Australia, Pakistan, Spain, Colombia, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Palestine, and more. This kind of representation within our pages means that the particular details which make up the poems—language, cultural references, settings, values, and ways of thinking—are wide-ranging.
One thing I’ve found exciting about the work we’ve been publishing lately is how much of it is engaged with other art forms—for example, Brenda Cárdenas writing about the singer Chavela Vargas, Wes Matthews writing about John Coltrane and the R&B group Soul for Real, Felicia Zamora engaging with a piece from Renee Gladman’s interdisciplinary book Plans for Sentences, and Orlando Ricardo Menes writing after a painting by Amelia Paláez. I am excited, too, by poets who are working with form—such as Marilyn Hacker and Deema K. Shehabi’s “Water to Water: A Renga for Gaza,” or Avia Tadmor’s “Ghazal from an Ocean Away,” or Laura Wetherington’s “[tree sonnet].” And there are just as many examples of poets who are playing with form and shape outside the boundaries of fixed forms—approaching the page as a space of play and experimentation. That’s something I’d love to see even more of.
For Timothy: I’m curious about your approach to reading submissions and assembling an issue of the journal. What are you looking for when you’re considering work? What considerations are you weighing when putting an issue together? And what feels most exciting to you about the work we’ll be publishing over the next year or so?
TS: I’ve discovered that the material we receive by way of open submissions suggests special issues as we go along; common themes emerge, shared preoccupations, mutual grievances. We have an issue forthcoming dedicated to desire, one to loneliness, one to the body. We have a nonfiction collection of essays on place and tradition. Joy Castro is putting together a portfolio featuring Latinx flash memoir; Hope Wabuke is editing one on Black nature writing. I think we’ll sometimes look at the forms and trends in literature past and present: our winter issue contemplates the particular narrative qualities of long short stories, for example.
And this is a historical moment for publishers. Never in my adult life have our rights of expression been so under siege, and such cruel and crude sentiment central to national discourse; so many of the leaders of our institutions have grown giddy as a schoolgirl at the opportunity to erase history, to censor, to threaten and scold, even as they frame their immorality as a moral high road. The poet’s voice, the artist’s perspective, has always been integral to celebrating beauty and joy, to promoting honesty and humanity, but especially so in the face of the loathsome rhetoric of oppression. Literary journals, in this fraught era, have their work cut out for them.
For Jess: Let’s talk about design… about the journal as a visual and tactile object. We bat this subject around in the office a lot. Again, as a poet yourself, and a reader of lit journals, what are your thoughts about the role of design in publishing literary work?
JP: For as long as I’ve worked on literary journals, I’ve been interested in the design side of things. When I served as editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal, choosing artists for the cover art was one of my favorite parts of the job. I also founded and edited the online journal Birdfeast, which ran from 2011-2022, and featured some fantastic cover art by artists who were kind enough to work with me even though my budget was $0 (I paid for everything out of pocket from my slim grad student stipend for most of those years). Design was ultimately a significant part of why I stopped publishing Birdfeast; I was coding the HTML myself, and in the span of time the journal was publishing, the world and language of web design outpaced me. The journal was not mobile friendly. I didn’t have the time, resources, or money to devote to a full redesign, and ultimately, I felt that continuing without addressing the major design flaws would be a disservice to the writers I was publishing.
I think it can sometimes be easy to think of design as being merely about making something eye-catching, but good design, at its core, is about conveying information not just beautifully but clearly. I’m most drawn to design that doesn’t call too much attention to itself—design that allows language or artwork to be the central focus. A great designer will make it look easy, but there are dozens of small decisions and adjustments that contribute to the final product—from font choice to margin size to stylistic standards that create coherence across an issue of the journal. As an editor, most of my responsibilities are in service to the work we publish, and working with our graphic designers is an important component of that.
At the same time, I think literary journals hold a great deal of possibility for interesting, fresh design work. Each semester in our undergraduate internship program, we take a close look at other print journals to study their content and editorial decisions as well as their approaches to design. Some journals the interns are regularly drawn to for their design work include Ninth Letter, A Public Space, North American Review, and F(r)iction. And, as you know, we’ve been passing around issues of McSweeney’s, which is always doing really innovative design work.
For Timothy: Given that design is something we’ve been discussing a lot lately, especially with the approach of the journal’s centennial, I’d love to hear your own thoughts on literary journal design.
TS: I began learning design in high school and college, late 1980s, early 90s, when we were using T-squares and protractors. Paste? Blue pencils? I can’t quite remember. (I found some old meeting notes in the PS cabinets from around 1991, when Hilda was petitioning the English Department for a computer to aid in typesetting.) Before I joined the faculty, I had a whole other career in newspapers and magazines, which I’m sure has informed my sensibilities for Prairie Schooner. From the 1920s until the 70s, Prairie Schooner had a common design from issue to issue, with just the title, date, a listing of content; that particular scheme changed a handful of times, but Bernice Slote was the one who started incorporating artwork on the covers, which was the journal’s approach for about the next 50 years. The cover became an ongoing gallery of compelling work by photographers, painters, illustrators. While special issues had covers that corresponded with the theme, most of the time the cover art wasn’t directly related to the content. But the result is a rich, vibrant archive of captivating artwork; for the journal’s 75th anniversary, the Sheldon Museum hosted an exhibit of the journal’s “visual culture.”
I’m applying a different approach, but hoping also to maintain that commitment to a visual culture, to an ongoing gallery of striking covers: I want the cover to convey something vital about the content, but prove inviting in its own right. In some regards this approach is with practical intent: in distributing thumbnails of the cover images via social media and other avenues, and in promoting back issues, the cover can do more for the journal and its authors if it tells you something, at a glance, about what’s inside. But it’s also just kind of how my brain works — as the book comes together, images and approaches suggest themselves. For the fall 2025 “desire” issue, we have the classic Peter Hujar photo from 1973, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, while the winter issue has graphic designer Ashley Muehlbauer’s typographically elongated approach to one of the issue’s features: a consideration of the long short story.
But yes, I love the play of design and typography, of classic art and new, not only in terms of the cover, but in the book itself; I anticipate some innovations in format, in the interior, in digital components of the print editions. I want to be open to poetry and fiction that pushes at the boundaries of typeface, margins, even paper and ink. As I mentioned, the winter issue features long short stories, and by contrast, we’ve introduced a new space for the very, very short short story: we’ll be running miniscule pieces of writing on the spine.
For Jess: What are you thoughts on the journal’s centennial?
JP: It’s a privilege to be a part of such an enormous moment in the journal’s history. From an editing side, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the archive and to consider how the journal has been shaped by many hands over the decades. From a business side, I think it’s a useful moment to slow down and recognize the significance of the hundreds of behind-the-scenes decisions and tasks that go into producing each issue of the journal. This work often feels like running a marathon every day, and it can be easy to get lost in that. I think milestones like this one can be helpful points to anchor oneself to and remember why we do the work we do.
For Timothy: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the centennial as well. Is there anything you can share yet about how you’re approaching it? What might be in store for this new era of the Schooner?
TS: So many mysteries to solve. I’m a little addicted to the archive, so there will probably be a lot of looking back as we look ahead. I’ll find an author I’ve never heard of, then lose a few hours piecing together what I can, and either a literary life will start to emerge, or all my investigation will just stir up more questions. But so many authors from the past lead us to a lost era of other literary magazines, novels out of print, publishers out of business. There’s a divine contradiction at the heart of it: for all that seems ephemeral about the creative work in a literary journal, so much of it still echoes with relevance, calling for attention, speaking to our own preoccupations.
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.
Jessica Poli is the author of Red Ocher (University of Arkansas Press), which was a finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, North American Review, and Poet Lore, among other journals.