Kwame Dawes: Foreword to the New Fusion Issue
The new issue of the Schooner has landed in our office, and we’re excited to share it! Featuring selections from the Digital Schooner Global Fusion Series curated and edited by Kwame Dawes, the Summer 2024 issue includes selections from eight of the twelve digital issues of Fusion.
Begun in 2012, Fusion is an online collaboration which brings together work from the Schooner‘s archives alongside new work by international writers. This print issue features work by writers from Australia, Botswana, Macedonia/The Balkans, India, Singapore, Việt Nam, Uganda, and Palestine. Guest editors include David Prater, Tjawangwa Dema, Nikola Madžirov, Sudeep Sen, Alvin Pang, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.
In his foreword to the issue, Dawes writes about what it means to bring selections from this series to print. Read the full foreword below, and order your copy now!
Buy NowForeword
by Kwame Dawes
One of the great challenges that presented itself to me when I assumed the editorship of the Schooner was to build on the remarkable work done by Hilda Raz to expand the range of writers who would appear in the journal and to consolidate successful efforts on her part to make the journal one of the more influential sites for women writers in the United States. There are a number of ways to expand the content of a journal, and none of them are fast and simple. The reason is not complicated. The content of a journal is dictated by the submissions that come into the journal, and submissions are dictated by the perceptions held by the potential contributors about what kind of work the journal will publish.
At multiple AWP sessions every year, when a panel features journal editors, the dominant question is: “Could you tell us what type of work you like to publish?” This question is repeated at booths throughout the bookfair as well. And, of course, the usual stock answer that editors give is: “Read the journal before you send work to us.” If the questioner has a specific set of anxieties that they are concerned about, this approach may not be helpful for them or for the journal. If a journal, for instance, has been fairly monolithic in the cultural and racial identities of its contributors, and if editors would like to change that, then asking the potential contributors to review the journal to see what they publish will not be especially helpful. Enterprising editors will try other tactics. They will solicit work from writers and expand their list through direct requests. This has limited potential, as it is not a sustainable way to ensure new and exciting prose or poetry. Others will devote several issues to social subjects that can target groups, styles, or any area that shows a deficit in the normal run of things. The problem there is that this is not sustainable for a journal that seeks to rely on new work and to build its readership. The effect is to create another monochromatic set of issues that may not be ideal for the journal.
When I became editor in chief, my hope was to increase the international profile of the journal and to invite contributors from around the world. A few things conspired to make this a feasible goal. In 2011, our submissions were almost entirely by mail. We were lagging behind many journals that had started to experiment with online submissions. The staff at the Schooner had already been talking about moving to an online system, and I was enthusiastic about making this happen. The year I joined the journal, Timothy Schaffert had been handling the digital side of the publication, and this groundwork made the move to online submissions possible and, maybe, inevitable. We hired a web editor whose tasks involved managing a new website and implementing a new online submission system through Submittable. We retained our submission-by-mail option for writers, and that has not changed in the thirteen years that I served as editor. Gradually, though, online submissions became the mechanism of choice for our contributors. Within a few years, our submissions ballooned in numbers. I will not rehearse here why this would be the case, but it was. Before long, our readers and editors were in a constant state of catching up. This, of course, was a good thing. For our part, we would soon be able to say that our acceptance rate was at three to five percent. It is impressive, even if we allow for the other factors of simultaneous submissions and the proliferation of literary journals that accompanied the emergence of submissions systems like Submittable. The year I joined the Schooner, the first issue that I ushered into print with a new design, new logo, and much else was a special Irish issue edited by then-interim Editor, Professor Stephen Behrendt. It was international in scope, and it set the stage for much that followed.
The emergence of a newly designed and enterprising website led me to imagine a special corollary to the print journal: an online series featuring international poets from all over the world. We named it Fusion, and it brought together some of the key features that came with expanding the face of the journal—solicitation and special issues. But Fusion was characterized by another key desire of mine, which was to celebrate and make known the rich and brilliant history of the journal. The truth is that the Schooner has a rich history of publishing work against the grain of society and being progressive in its willingness to publish the voices of queer writers, writers of color, and women writers, among others. One of the first things I did when I assumed the editorship was to read virtually all the back issues of the journal. In my office, all the issues dating back to the 1920s were lined up on the shelf, so I could do this quickly while pausing in awe of the many surprises. It occurred to me that our archives were abundant and complex and could be an incredible source of reflection on the nature of US-American literature over the last century. Fusion would bring together my interest in international writing and my strong belief in the excavation of archives to discover both the beautiful and ugly things of the past.
Thirteen years ahead, it is easy to take certain things for granted. As late as the early 2000s, it was radical and venturesome to even pursue projects through entirely digital means. There was Skype, and there were phone calls, and email, but these were still emerging as ways to connect without seeming like fleeting innovations. Fusion could never happen without the global internet, and it was built for this new territory. All the issues of this series were managed online, and I do believe the effectiveness of Fusion was the simplicity of the concept: it could be pitched quite easily and with clarity.
The key feature of Fusion was its focus on poetry and art. This focus allowed us to identify partners, manage the size of the project, and clarify the nature of the partnership. Here were the steps: I would identify a key individual in a country—a poet who was connected with other poets and who had some experience in editing or managing. This had to be someone who was trusted in their country and who could think beyond their own career. I found these people through literary festivals, email conversations, and through their work on anthologies or in commentaries. I would then ask if they could curate a portfolio of about fifteen to twenty poets from their country, and to work with me to determine a theme for the issue. The theme had to have the kind of iconic scope to allow for multiple ideas and voices, and to be translatable into multiple spaces. You can see how this evolved. The first theme was Work, which is broad enough, and even when we arrived at something seemingly specific like Shoes or Aunts, it was remarkable how this could generate a wealth of interesting poetry. For my part, I wanted “themes” that would make sense in the search through the Schooner archives, and so we negotiated until we arrived at good workable concepts: Archive, Shoes, Aunts, Libations, Bones, Trees, Water, Secrets, Feast, Home, Womb, and Work. Once we had arrived at a theme, the editor would then solicit new work from their fellow poets. Where work had to be translated, we found ways to do this. I enjoyed, for instance, co-translating Vietnamese poems for our Aunts issue with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Thúy Đinh, which was delightful.
From our end, I would set our undergraduate interns at the Schooner to search through JSTOR and gather all the work they could find in the nearly 100 years of the journal’s publication that would connect with the theme. We would expand the search beyond just the term itself— “shoes” would include feet, shod, step, socks, run, toes, ankle, limp, and so on. When all the potential poems were sent to me, I would read through these to see which ones fit, discovering some wonderful pieces by a range of poets. In my own curation, I sought to include work across a wide spectrum of years. At the same time, I would ask the curator in the partner country to think of an artist who might be willing to have their artwork featured in the series—artwork that corresponded with the theme— while we identified a Nebraska artist whose work could also resonate. I would review all the materials that came from the editors and develop a working manuscript which I would share with them. This manuscript would have these two throughlines of poetry and art from the issue’s respective country, from Prairie Schooner, and from Nebraska to produce a collaboration of great beauty and surprise. Our web designer then built a website featuring the art, poetry, bios, and photos of the contributors, as well as introductions by myself and the curating editors.
Over time, our designers and website would change. Despite this, we have been able to preserve much of the original design work for the issues on our website. Although some of the early content has been lost, the spirit of each of these magnificent Fusion issues has been retained and, I hope, will be captured in this special print issue of the Schooner. It is, I admit, part of my long farewell, but this one is special to me because of what I believe Fusion did for the Schooner.
It pleased me greatly when my editors began to report that our submissions from outside the US had increased significantly. With each new Fusion, the submissions from the country featured would explode. Eventually that spike would settle into a regular set of submissions. In other words, for poets from those countries, Prairie Schooner was a legitimate venue for their writing. This has not changed. We created a tag in Submittable to keep track of international submissions and to alert our readers to be sensitive to this work, which would be engaged in poetics and traditions with which they may not be familiar. Over the last decade, the Schooner has gained a great deal of traction internationally, as can be seen from our list of contributors. This is in no small part due to the wonderful poetry that has appeared in Fusion.
It means a great deal to me that we can now publish much of the work by these international writers in this special Fusion issue of the journal. To be able to do this, we had to reconnect with all our guest editors and contributors. They were fantastic in supporting this special issue, and I remain grateful to them for their willingness to take a chance with the Schooner in the initial Fusion series and their further willingness to be a part of this celebration.
For many of you, this will be your first introduction to Fusion and to many of these writers. We have made a careful effort to update their contributor’s notes, so you can find their work published before and since their appearance in Fusion. I encourage you to take your time and, while you read these beautiful poems, consider the global conversation that is inherent in their writing. There is something extremely important about the celebration of the series at this time. Here, we are honoring the power of mutual respect among artists across cultures and nations. Here, our poems are legislating a certain grace and care that comes through the power of the empathetic imagination.
Fusion has been a collaborative project that presents us with a model for literary exchange across cultures. I am grateful to everyone who had a hand in this series, including managing editors Marianne Kunkel, Ashley Strosnider, Siwar Masannat, and Jessica Poli (whose hand in the production of this print edition has been invaluable), web editor Paul Hanson Clark, our various web designers: Zach Green and Laura Healy at Chocolog Media, Caron Andregg at SeaCliff Media Marketing, and a special thanks to our current web designer and collaborator, Josh McCall, who has worked hard to help us preserve the Fusion sites for future readers and viewers.
Kwame Dawes
March 2025
Providence, Rhode Island