22 November 2024
For my editing and publishing students, I am always seeking accounts of what it means to build a life and career in publications. In an interview last year on the podcast Print is Dead (Long Live Print!), legendary editor Adam Moss says:
Look, the magazine is a person. And a successful version of a magazine is also the successful version of a person. It’s someone you want to hang out with. And what kind of person you want to hang out with varies by person. But what you’re doing is trying to create an organism that resembles a living one.
The interviewer, George Gendron, follows up, agreeing that “A magazine is the person, yes” (ah—the difference in their respective articles!), but points out that Moss always talks about the magazine in the plural—“it’s always we, it’s about the team”—to which Moss replies:
Well, I never felt that “the magazine is a person” means that the magazine is about me. I just mean that somehow the bunch of people, the collective—and the collective is really what magazines are all about . . . the entire point of a magazine is that it’s collective . . . And that’s the very best thing about a magazine.
What I mean though is that somehow the group—it’s a little bit like K-Pop. The group has to have a kind of unison. It has to, together, operate as one. Without grounding out its idiosyncrasies, and individual quirks, and individual pieces of expression. But it also has to function as a whole, as a single thing.
Moss completely reimagined the New York Times Magazine into the publication it is today, and then accomplished it once again, with New York from 2004 to 2019; he has much to teach. But these stood out as words I want to live by. In the past, I’ve written here about friendship as a mode of readership particularly germane to periodicals, but Moss’s interview provides language that has helped me think more clearly about what it is we—GR—do. We endeavor to build community on and off the page, and we do so by cultivating one within the office.
This has been a particularly special year for The Georgia Review. In addition to Brandon Som’s collection with Georgia Review Books winning the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, work published in GR has been honored with the Caine Prize for African Writing as well as another award we’re not yet at liberty to announce. We were thrilled to learn in November that we will be receiving a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support our production costs. Our Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and Georgia Review Prose Prize were successful, with writers from all over the world sending us excellent work (the winner and runner-up are featured in this issue). We’ve also been collaborating with the University of Georgia English department and UGA Press to develop a publishing certificate program for undergraduates. We have long provided hands-on training to interns and graduate assistants, but this program will provide a more sustained apprenticeship for developing a new generation of publishing professionals, training that is not always accessible to students outside of major cities. All of this we accomplished as a team.
My hope is that you don’t have to know how our issues are put together to enjoy them, but also that learning the collective work that goes into each issue will deepen your appreciation as a GR reader. For example, Scott LaClaire’s design acumen cannot be separated from the enjoyment of Karen Tei Yamashita and Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira’s multimedia collaboration. Like every issue, this one is full of work brought to the table from every part of the editorial team. Every reader of GR submissions is on salary, and each of us—graduate editor, genre editor, and myself—dives into our ten thousand yearly submissions to find what fills our pages, which enables us to build our editorial practice as a deeply conversational one. Please check out Mona Susan Power’s bracing essay about her family and Urvi Kumbhat’s story about urban malaise in Calcutta. Nicholas Wong has a folio of strong poems, especially one about working through the twilight weeks of a beloved pet dog. David St. John shares with us a pair of poems that take on the seasons with his distinctive lyric voice. And we’ve put Rochelle Hurt’s poems, Corinna Vallianatos’s story, and Tommy Kha’s photography feature together for a little art-forward cluster in the middle of the issue.
Other news:
• Our 2025 prose prize is now open until 15 January. This year’s judge is Allegra Hyde. The best story and best essay will be published in GR. The winner between the two will receive $1,500, and the runner-up $600.
• For the first time, we’ve been offering holiday gift bundles. In addition to a one-year subscription for yourself or a friend, you can save money on the fashion-forward GR hats dreamed up by our marketing and outreach manager Aria Curtis as well as the compelling poetry and prose works in our Georgia Review Books series. These offers will be available on our website until January, though even after the discounts expire our titles and merch are well worth checking out.
• In January we will welcome Aaliyah Bilal, author of the well-received debut short-story collection Temple Folk and the forthcoming graphic memoir Cloud Country, for a reading in Athens.
• Then, in March, we will once again head to AWP to celebrate writers, publishers, and educators, this time in Los Angeles. We will be having a hangout with McSweeney’s, details TBD. Follow us on Instagram to find out when and where we’ll meet. We hope to see you in CA!
G.M.
