Oxcart
“Thirty Cents A Copy”
Reading the Journal
What I Knew I knew when I assumed the editorship of “Prairie Schooner” that I would learn a great deal as I did the job, and much of what I would learn would have to do with my personal view of literary journals. While I have subscribed to many journals over the years, I have come …
The Advent of Digital Publishing
A senior library director in Jamaica sent me a fascinating note reflecting on the impact of digital publishing on the life and world of libraries. She has a historian’s knowledge of the history of the modern library—the shift from the library as a kind of museum, a keeper of great books not readily or easily …
VALUE OF DELIGHT
There is a view abroad that writing poetry is more a hobby than an occupation. Hobbies, as it happens, are lovely things we do in our spare time, but only in our spare time. Some quite established writers have described art and literature, especially, as a kind of luxury, not essential, and only to be …
LIE TO ME
There are lies we writers have to tell ourselves to keep on going. The beauty about these lies is that they are not complete lies. They are like the television evangelist with a viewership of five million people who gets a “word of knowledge” that there is someone out there, a man, even, who has …
An Introduction
As I began to plow through old editions of the Prairie Schooner and to read everything I could find about the journal and its history, I ran across this interesting tidbit: for a few decades the founding editor, Lowry Wimberly, wrote an editorial called, inevitably, the Oxcart. “Inevitably” because, if nothing else, the Prairie Schooner …