Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
N C L R ONLINE
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COURTESY OF MARGARET BAUER
recall, was not what he was looking for. The literary criticism we now publish serves, I think, to reintroduce forgotten writers who are now deceased, so they can’t be interviewed. It also brings another level of critical attention to a writer to have his or her work explored in a scholarly article, which is something I’ve done myself for contemporary writers since my dissertation and first book on Ellen Gilchrist.6 Such scholarship serves to introduce a writer’s work to professors who then introduce it to classes of students.
What are the challenges of producing, simultaneously, a literary magazine and a scholarly journal? And what are the benefits? The first answer that comes to mind is the impossibility of conveying what a huge production each issue is, how much time goes into the content. And before one issue goes to press, we’ve already begun on the next. So it is a year-round production, even though the academic year is August to May for most of the staff members. So for a couple of months a year at least, I am largely on my own. The next thing that comes to mind is that the variety of our material means that we have to find a variety of experts to review our submissions to make publication recommendations. And also, we are now managing three writing competitions, so here again, as we wrap one up, we’re launching the next one, and when the third one wraps up, we’ve got to get all of the works selected for publication through our significant production process. At the same time that we’re managing these competitions, we’re working on the other content in the issue, the interviews and literary criticism, which is in various stages of production and involves significant quote- and fact-checking, often multiple revisions, as well as research to find and get permission to publish the images. I cannot tell you how many times each story, poem, essay, review, critical article, and interview is read – over and over at each stage. And we edit all the way to the printer. As I mentioned earlier, we’re perfectionists. As for the benefits of being something of an amalgam, having a little bit of everything means that we have a broad readership, and I hope it means we’re the go-to place to find out what North Carolina writers you should be reading. And I never get bored.
ABOVE Bauer at the ECU English
Department’s graduation celebration with NCLR fall 2014 interns Stefani Glavin and Kami Wilson, Greenville, NC, 9 May 2015
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Margaret Donovan Bauer, The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999). The essay on Oral History found its way into her book William Faulkner’s Legacy: “what shadow, what stain, what mark” (UP of Florida, 2005).