CONFRONTATION
No. 86/87 • Spring/Summer 2004

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

General Cornucopia: A Harvest of New and Re-Emerging Writers

Every teacher likes to discover a genius, particularly an overlooked one.  The odd, the eccentric, the dyslexic.  Every editor likewise likes to find an undiscovered writer, one who though unformed is recognizable in a growing shape of visionary and craftsperson.  The talent of discovery is the coin of an editor’s gift.  Sometimes such discovery is easy, but not always, as the stories about literary geniuses not recognized till late in their lives or after their obscure passing attest.  Kafka, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Pym, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Yates, even Faulkner and Robert Frost who had to wait decades for recognition, are a few of many examples; Andre Gide, working as an editor at the time, rejected Marcel Proust’s masterpiece. Yet, always, discovery is apparent in each age, for the need to write, and the need to discover, are simply profound and ineradicable urges that bloom and fructify in complex ways.

An editor’s task then is to discover distinction.  In the case of known merit, the task can be completed without difficulty.  One need not concern oneself with the granted values of a work by John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, or Salman Rushdie.  It is THERE to begin with (though only after years of having been there with not everyone noticing).  In the case of a new writer, or a beginning one or a changing one, the task is more daunting.  How to see through the eye of a reader the one shining manuscript in a haystack of manuscripts is a formidable goal.  In the case of Confrontation, we receive 100 to 200 manuscripts a week during at least six months of the year.  In the summer months (June, July, August) when we explicitly state in our masthead and in our listings that we do not read/consider unsolicited manuscripts, we receive 50 such manuscripts a week.  (We return them unread.)  Simply reading what we receive raises the possibility of dulling our appetites by satiation.  Yet read the Board of Editors does in the hope of discovering a new Updike, Ozick, Oates and/or Rushdie.  And sometimes the discovery happens.

Every serious literary magazine has seen such discovery.  In our case we’re proud to claim the publication of early work by Ozick, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Theroux, Walter Abish, Susan Vreeland, and others.  The temptation to publish known writers—because their names, like the names of any star (movie, athletic, intellectual, even planetary) brings in readers—remains with us.  Why should we not yearn for the company of established merit?  And yearn we do, and sometimes our yearning is gratified by the generosity of such established writers.  We know however  that our primary task is to discover and not to repeat, is to give a map and a route to recognition for the unknown navigator.

It is also an editor’s duty to recognize the return of a writer after an absence.  By absence we mean silence—that is, not writing or not publishing for a noticeable time.  This is our definition of the re-emerging writer, and the search for material by such a driven artist is accompanied by our sympathetic cheering.  We’ve published Jane Mayhall years ago; we’re publishing Lucy Daniels in this issue.

It is then a pleasure to present a cornucopia of stories and poems by new (to us) and re-emerging writers (and a memoir by a never-halted writer).  We call it a General Cornucopia for it is filled by no particular controlling arrangement but that of a heaping of varied colors and tones.  Like the horn of plenty, this cornucopia offers, we hope, many courses for many tastes.

Martin Tucker, Editor in Chief