"I Have Made the World Ready For Me"

You’ve been at the helm of Fence, a magazine you founded, since 1998. How has your role changed since the beginning?

In the beginning I was involved in pretty much every decision, every mailing, every subscription, every single thing, and up until around 2008 that was still really the case. But a few years ago, I stopped being directly involved with the poetry editing. We now have six poetry editors, and they read all the submissions and come to their decisions, and I come in toward the end of the process. At this point, I solicit work and am sort of the outside channel of our submissions.

But on a day-to-day basis, because we also publish books, that’s become my focus, and once the books started to become more established, those took more precedence in the whole processes. I’m almost always dealing with something to do with book publishing and distribution, which can be really time consuming. In some ways it’s probably a typical, sad progression away from the part of it that you loved most, i.e. poetry. I wish sometimes I could revert, but I’m really glad I’m still part of the process.

You’re in an unusual position, compared to literary journals where the editorship turns over every academic year. How does the length of your tenure at Fence affect your perspective on the magazine?

Fence started in a particular moment, out of a need I saw at the time, and I feel as though it’s moved through that original motivation; its reason for being has evolved and its needs have changed. It’s confusing. At times I feel it achieved its original goal, and has now relaxed to the golden age, like a grandparent who can just enjoy their grandchildren. But at other times it feels clear that I may not even have understood what I was trying to do at the beginning. So there is a need for redefinition.

Because it is such a personal journal, it remains my vision, but having the poetry and fiction editors achieves the goal of not allowing Fence to ever be the product of one coherent editorial vision. Originally, the incoherence had a specific mission, wanting to work against rigidities I saw. Now the landscape has changed so much, but certain things still stay the same. There are social constructs that don’t allow for a lot of flux, and I do think Fence still works against that very actively, but at the same time I understand why people want to be a part of them. So I have complicated feelings about what Fence is doing right now. I’m about due for a re-upping of my mission statement.

What were the constructs you wanted to work against?

It really arose out of feeling as though there were these twin rigidities in the publishing scene, perceived by me, as a poet, trying to find a place where writing like mine could be appreciated. I hadn’t attached myself to any particular aesthetic or ideology, or found people who represented that to me as mentors; I just wrote what I wrote, and read what I read, and felt strongly about it. So back in 1997, it seemed clear to me that the problem could be defined thusly: there was the establishment poetry world, in which you had Edward Hirsch — he’s always my punching bag, and I’m totally using him as a straw man — in these positions of power, making decisions, shepherding people, so you would have a journal like the Kenyon Review. So there I am, trying to understand “What is poetry?” looking at the Kenyon Review, or let’s say Jane Kenyon, a wonderful writer, but if I had shown my poetry to Jane Kenyon, she probably would have found it difficult to relate to and not wanted to publish it.

On the other hand, there was this world out there of experimental writing, Lyn Hejinian, Clayton Eshleman, Michael Palmer, that whole highly visible world of experimental writing, and you see that your writing is more like that, in some potentially superficial ways, but similar perhaps in ambitions, the aesthetic attempts that is making. So you say, okay, maybe that’s where my writing can be understood. And then you find that those scenes, in the poetry world, but those scenes are very guarded — not to make a pun on the avant-garde being guarded, but I guess I will.

So it was about finding a community?

Well, unlike writers who are comfortable with really entering a community, and saying we love the same writing, we embrace these lineages, we embrace our forefathers and mothers, we sign up for this. I was pursuing a more primitive and radical, in the sense of indivisible, version of what it was like to be writing. So that is where Fence came from. I was like, okay, Fence is going to be a journal that is not going to reject any of these different impulses for writing. We can respect Jane Kenyon, the need people have to write in that way, and these other impulses that arrive out of a different tradition — William Carlos Williams going in one direction and Wallace Stevens going in another, those family tree lineage split kind of things.

And you called it Fence, without irony?

Irony comes and sits on things and squelches them. The ironic interpretation is ambivalence, but it is meant to be a gesture of openness. I had the idea for the name of the journal before I knew what it was.

Now Fence is thirteen years old and affiliated with the University of Albany, as well as some major players in American fiction, such as early collaborator Jonathan Lethem. How have you not become the establishment?

I’ve managed to sabotage that in many ways. One is that I don’t think there will ever be a time when anyone from a particular perspective looks at Fence and says, “This is what this journal does.” People who do that are tricking themselves. One becomes an establishment when one can be seen to be directing writers, issuing directives, saying “Here is an acceptable mode in which to write.” You’ll never be able to use Fence for that. I’m happy with the fact that Fence continues to never please anyone; everyone who picks it up is going to find something that is really beautiful and right on and satisfies their desires, and something that’s going to make them say, “What is this crap?”

Another way is that just personally, I’m removed myself so much from the literary world. I really don’t participate in a lot of literary culture and I’ve quite concretely resisted the growth thing. At one point it would have been possible for me to make Fence into a literary organization. Other journals like Tin House have done this in great ways, starting workshops or reading series. Those are great for growing your community, but those have become a way you define your territory, and that’s something we have not done. I’ve made pretty conscious choices to not grow that way.

With such emphasis on openness, how do you ultimately select work that fits?

I want Fence to be instructive about openness; everyone should take the time to understand what somebody else might value in the work there. So in a totally weird way, our editorial process is about trying to be representative. It’s like we’re the United Nations or something. I hope that the way that our process works is like an education for the editors, putting things forward that they feel are objectively good enough, in one of a billion different ways, to be of worth to some of the other editors, even if it’s not their particular bent. Each of the editors has their own thing that they prize most highly, but beyond that, there is the need to listen, to tune themselves to the other editors’ needs, essentially. So that’s how we go about it.

Has the journal become a good home, in theory, for your own work?

I hope so. Every now and then I’ve had the cockamamie idea to submit my own work under an assumed name. I have this line in a poem that says “I have made the world ready for me.” So if Fence is representative of the world, then I hope the world is ready. It’s probably surpassed me.

Jessica Ullian's fiction has appeared in Upstreet, Slice, and Meeting House. She studied journalism at Columbia University and creative writing at Boston University, and lives in Boston.

Click here to read Jessica's interview with Farren Stanley, editor of Black Warrior Review.