15 // The Threepenny Review’s Wendy Lesser on Picking Pleasure Over Ambition [Replay]

Rachel Thompson:
Welcome luminous writers to the Write, Publish and Shine podcast. I’m your host, author, and literary magazine editor Rachel Thompson. This podcast explores how to write and share your brilliant writing with the world. In each episode, we delve into specifics on how to polish and prepare your writing for publication and the journey from emerging writer to published author.

Hi luminous writers. This is a replay of a conversation I had back in 2018. I know, a lifetime ago. And it was with Wendy lesser, the founding editor of the arts Journal, The Threepenny Review. This episode is really popular on my website, and so I thought, I could do with a revisit. I do appreciate a lot of what she says about enjoying writing versus mimicking or hustling to be a writer. And in our conversation, Wendy says, she can always tell when a writer writes in their authentic voice. The Threepenny Review is a very popular journal for writers to submit, to impart, because they have rapid fire response rates for submissions.

So, you can listen to hear more about that. And also stick around at the end of the episode as I want to bring a little more reflection on top tier journals, like The Threepenny Review, and how they’re often seen as arbiters of your writing talents and skills. I think a lot of writers submit to journals like The Threepenny Review to ask the question,

“Am I any good?”

And I will offer, not surprisingly, if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, some reframing on this. So here is my conversation with Wendy Lesser. Welcome to the podcast, Wendy.

Wendy Lesser:
Thank you for having me, Rachel.

Rachel Thompson:
You are not just the editor at The Threepenny Literary Review, but you’re also the founder. I’m pleased to have you here today to talk about your journal that’s based in Berkeley. And I wanted to start by asking you about your own writing origin story. So, I know that your mother is also a writer. Do you think that’s what led you to become a writer?

Wendy Lesser:
Probably unconsciously, but on a conscious level, I avoided it at first, because as a child, I saw her shutting herself up in her room and struggling to get published and all the things that writers have to do. So, when I went to college, I majored in first Anthropology and then History and Literature but planning in a way to go on to be a city planner, and then I even applied to law school. And so, I thought I was going to do something else. But by the time I came back to California, having been on the East Coast, and then in England for two years, and entered a graduate program, I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to be an academic. So that’s when I would say I started turning toward being a writer.

Rachel Thompson:
And do you feel like some of her writing has had influence on your writing?

Wendy Lesser:
Her name is Millicent Dillon. And I don’t think her writing directly influenced me. No, I think her mode of being in the world influenced me. Our entire family was highly critical. And this candidacy has been passed along to my son, who is not a writer, but a political figure in Brooklyn. But anyway, we all address the world as if it needs to be critiqued. And so, I think that came from her. And I think a sense that language matters, having a lot of books in the house, all that was a direct influence, but the style of her writing and the things she chose to write about, no, I don’t think there’s a direct influence.

Rachel Thompson:
You talked to you about how she locked herself up for a long times in the practice of being a writer. What is your practice of writing currently like?

Wendy Lesser:
Well, because I have this Threepenny Review, I don’t write full time, of course, I have to manage the magazine as well. So normally, I have between two and three days a week that I set aside for writing depending on, whether it’s a crunch period on the magazine or a crunch period on the book I’m working on. Some weeks, for instance, this week, because it’s layout week, when I have to figure out where everything goes on the page. I won’t do any of my own writing at all. But when I’m hard at work on a book, I will maybe set aside Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays or something to work on the book. And the rest of the time I’m working on Threepenny, it’s pretty much a seven day a week life. I mean, I do take time off, I go on long walks with my husband, I go out in the evenings, I’m not deprived in any way. But there is rarely a day that passes where I don’t do something on the magazine.

Rachel Thompson:
Yeah, that seems very true to the literary magazine editor life, especially when you’re the one that’s solely responsible for it too.

Wendy Lesser:
Well, I had a halftime deputy editor and he’s very responsible, but he only comes three days a week, and he doesn’t have to work on weekends.

Rachel Thompson:
It’s like we can be our own worst bosses. So, this podcast is mostly talking to emerging writers, so writers who are looking to get some of their first publications in journals or they’re in the early stages of their writing lives. And I’m wondering if you can think back to again maybe getting a bit into your origins around writing. What is the best advice that you received when you were an emerging writer?

Wendy Lesser:
“Have a day job”.

Do something else to earn your living. There have been a few years in my life when I have coasted by entirely on what I earned from my writing and what I earned from Threepenny. But mostly, neither of those things, nor both together was enough to support me. So, everybody should have some kind of skill, whether it’s teaching or being a locksmith, or I don’t know, gardening, whatever they can get paid for, and then have their writing.

Rachel Thompson:
Yeah, I think it’s good to demystify the idea that even really successful writers are often still working on something else. I also wanted to ask what is the worst advice you received as an emerging writer?

Wendy Lesser:
I’m not the kind of person that receives a lot of advice, people take a look at me, and they don’t give advice. But so, I don’t recall getting any really bad advice. A woman who came to my party that my mother gave me for my PhD dissertation looked at the acknowledgments in the dissertation, and she said– and thank you to Christopher Ricks for talking me out of going to law school. And she said,

“That man was responsible for the loss of millions of dollars in income to you”.

But I don’t think it was bad advice. I think it was good advice. But she thought it was bad advice.

Rachel Thompson:
I guess I asked this line of questioning, because I want to get at mentoring as well. And part of it is because the magazine- I’m coming from is this magazine. And we do a lot of mentoring within, we have a whole collective of people. So, we’re a large group of people, very few of whom are getting paid for the work. So, I’ll make sure that that mythology is not out there, that there’s a big staff. But there are a lot of people involved in the project, and we’re mentoring each other. But then we’re also working on mentoring emerging writers too. And I’m just wondering what kind of mentoring you’ve had happened in your writing life and then within your writing community today?

Wendy Lesser:
Oh, well, people have helped me tremendously. I mean, Christopher Ricks, as I said, steered me toward being a critic, I would say, and then Thom Gunn, who was a poet in San Francisco, and who I really loved, and was friends with, basically gave me an example of the writing life, the disinterested, not controlled by anybody else writing life. So that has been an important model. Yeah, the writers I’ve met, have had an influence on me. I don’t take my job at Threepenny as being one of mentoring, there are writers who’ve I’ve published for 10, or 20, or 30 years, who would say that the magazine at least, and I suppose, have been a mentor in a certain way.

I’ve encouraged them along; I’ve nominated them for prizes. I’ve told them when they need to cut the last sentence, things like that. But I pretty much want writers who already know what they want to say. And already have an interesting and unusual way of saying it. I’m not trying to shake people into some idea, I have in my mind as to what the Threepenny writers should be, they should come to Threepenny already, if not fully formed, because we published plenty of people in their 20s, are probably going to change and develop as writers, but they should come with their own sense of who they are, and present that material to us. And we’ll take it or leave it basically.

Rachel Thompson:
I think that’s the best kind of editor experience, where they’re trying to help you achieve the vision that you have for your own writing.

Wendy Lesser:
Right. And we do very little tinkering with the work we accept. I mean, every once in a while, with writers I know well, Elizabeth Tallent, for instance, who I’ve been publishing since the 1980s, and who gives me some of her very best stories and very best essays. With her, I’ve had sort of lengthy correspondences about-

“On page 20, do you really think this character would do that? Everything you’ve said about him suggests otherwise”.

But there are very few writers who I would have that detailed conversation about things that are central to the story. For the most part, I need to get to know somebody really well before I would dare to enter into that degree. Mostly, I would say to somebody,

“This story isn’t quite right for us”. Or “This is a great story. Can I correct the grammar problem in paragraphs one and 17?” Like that.

Rachel Thompson:
Can you tell us a bit more about why you started The Threepenny Review? What was driving the need for a new journal at the time that you saw.

Wendy Lesser:
So, I was in graduate school at Berkeley, I was living in Berkeley, and there was something called the San Francisco Review of Books that I was writing for, because I had a lot of free time as a graduate student. And I would write book reviews. It came out almost monthly. And then there was something that friends of mine started in the academy, professors, started university publishing, and I wrote for that and did some editing for them. And neither of those magazines seemed to me to be what I thought a literary magazine should be. There also seemed to be a big gap between the intelligentsia if you want to call it that the intellectual readership of the Bay Area and any publication that appeared there. So, I thought the Bay Area needed a publication that was worthy of its readers and writers and being 26, 27 years old, I thought I was capable of doing that, you don’t have limits at that age. And then I called it “The Threepenny Review”.

I had some other possible names; Washington Square was one, after the Henry James novel, and also after the places in New York and San Francisco, and Wigan Pier was another after Orwell, but I didn’t take either of those. I took The Threepenny Review because of certain principles that had been outlined by Bertolt Brecht, not in The Threepenny Opera, but in other things he’d written, but because Threepenny seemed to me that nicest name of anything he’d written, I adapted it for The Threepenny Review. All three of those titles, the intention was to have something that didn’t say, “Bay Area, San Francisco, California.” I didn’t want to limit the magazine to its geographical location. I had no plans to move it. But I wanted it to represent national and even international writers and to represent a world of letters that I thought was international, not local.

Rachel Thompson:
I want to follow up on the thread of not limiting the magazine to its geographical location and representing national and international writers. And part of– the point here, I guess, and part of the mission for us, too, is uncovering and an opening space for diversity and writing diverse voices. And what role do you think The Threepenny Review has played in that?

Wendy Lesser:
I think it’s played a reasonably good role. Everybody else is now on that bandwagon, too. So, it’s not as if nobody is looking around for new good, diverse voices. But we, over the years have just done our best to get interesting people into the magazine from elsewhere. So, for instance, a recent issue sometime in the last year had two different Nigerians in it. One who came to us through his agency, the Wily agency, already an established writer, a great short story that we published, and the other relatively unknown young poet who came to us from our online submission system. I mean, if by diversity mean, many countries, we have people, Javier Marias, who’s from Spain, writes for almost every issue, I have Margaret Jull Costa, on retainer, and she translates a lot of things that he’s written and gives them to us for almost every issue.

Then, a Dutch doctor named Bert Kaiser, is somebody who has been writing for the magazine for over 20 years, I found his work in a Paris bookstore when I was there. And I was so impressed by this book, he wrote about death and dying and dealing with old people, which was his profession as a doctor, that I wrote to him through his publishers, and he’s been writing for us ever since. If you mean by the diversity, ethnic and racial diversity, we have tons of Asian American and Hispanic American writers that pop up in our pages all the time. But actually, I could sit down and categorize them that way, if you made me and grant proposals make you do that. But in fact, I don’t think of it in that way. I think,

“Oh, this person is really good at writing essays. And that person’s a great poet”, or “I hope I get another story from this one soon”.

So that tends to be the way I think about those writers.

Rachel Thompson:
What’s been the most rewarding part of editing for you? Like how has editing informed your own writing as well?

Wendy Lesser:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’s been very useful. What I find is, that the hardest part of writing is the first draft for me. And I’ve talked to other writers, and they feel the same way, especially with a book, not so much with an essay, because you know, okay, I can manage 10 pages, I can manage 15. But when you have a book project in front of you, you never know for sure if it’s going to get finished. Are you going to be able to climb that huge mountain and come down the other side? And so that’s the hard part. So, there’s a certain level of anxiety, even that is interfering with the writing process as you’re trying to get that first draft down. For me, once I have the first draft down, it’s all golden. After that, I love rewriting, it’s just easy for me because I’m an editor. And if I just set something aside for even a day makes a difference.

But if I set it aside for a week or two, and then come back to it, I can read it almost as if I’m an outside person, as if I’m an editor reading another writer’s work for the first time, and I can see where the awkward sentences are. And I can figure out how to solve those knotty problems of transitions, it all becomes incredibly much clearer when I’ve had a week or two away from the writing even better a month away. So, in that sense, editing has informed my writing process. And my own belief is that, for me, 90% of the work is in that first draft. But 90% of what makes the book good is in that rewriting phase, that is people would look at my first draft and they would say who would ever publish her. But when I finished the rewriting, it’s all a million times better. And that process of making it better is the fun part.

Rachel Thompson:
And yet, you’re saying everything was there too in that first draft. So, it’s like everything’s there in the first draft, but then in the revision.

Wendy Lesser:
No, everything’s not there in the first draft. Sometimes I read through, and I read a whole paragraph and it seems to be written in cliches, “Okay, so that one goes out”, then something has to come in instead, or I understand that I got to a certain difficult point in the argument, and I quit, what’s there is okay. But there’s this big, empty place where I need to be thinking harder. But that level of thinking is not as difficult as getting down the first draft, it’s more fun. You just say to yourself, “Okay, well, where does this argument go, if I let it go somewhere?”, and then you can make five more sentences that completely improve the whole chapter.

Rachel Thompson:
Yeah, I love how you say “I got there. And then I quit.” Because I think a lot of times when we see emerging writers submit, they haven’t done that next stage of pushing back against the work and saying, “Okay, what am I really trying to say here? And how can I get deeper into the writing”?

Wendy Lesser:
I think that’s true. But I also think that least among the writers I’ve accepted, the real writers have a voice. And the voice is there from the first sentence or the first line of the poem if they’re poets, but it’s definitely the first sentence of the story or the first sentence of the essay, and you can’t mistake it. I mean, sometimes I don’t take pieces that have that voice, because they go wrong later on, badly wrong, or severely wrong in a way that I can’t with a couple of line edits fix. But I can always tell when a writer has her or his own voice. And that’s the thing that they need to bring to the project even before the thinking starts.

Rachel Thompson:
I want to ask you, over the years that you’ve been publishing The Threepenny Review, is there a piece that strikes you as the most important piece you’ve published since you began?

Wendy Lesser:
No, no, not any one piece. Not at all. First of all, I think the issues are accumulations of a bunch of different voices. And they matter in that way. Even regular readers tell me this, but also writers who are in the magazine, they love appearing between this poem and that story, or between this essay and that photograph or something They have a sense of being part of a community of voices that are all saying slightly different things but are tending not even fully in the same direction, but they’re part of the same world, part of the same general sense of how things should be in the world. So that I would say matters more than any single article I’ve published. I would say, high points that I remember from, you know, the history of the magazine are, the time we found a homeless writer, Lars Eighner, he’s not known anymore, but he couldn’t even submit the work himself.

The friend of his sent me 60 pages of this stuff. And I called up the friend who I didn’t know, but who’d left a phone number. And I said, don’t send this anywhere else. I’m going to take something, and I edited that down to about 20 pages. And we published what became a piece of Travels with Lizbeth. That was Lars Eighner’s book. And he just went viral in the days, before viral- where there was no computer in those days, or there was a computer but there was no internet, but his work really went wild, and people loved it. And I remember the feeling of achievement in finding him. Not even in the slush pile, underneath the slush pile. And the just the tremendous feeling of accomplishment there was to publishing him. He had a wonderful voice. And then another great feeling of accomplishment was reading a few novels of Javier Marias and writing to him in Spain and saying

“Is there anything you could send us in The Threepenny Review”.

And getting back, I believe the first thing we published his was a short story. Since then, we’ve published articles, but just being able to publish this writer whose work I had so admired in book form, having him send work for Threepenny, that was a thrill, too. But I’ve had many such thrills sometimes, just Wendell Berry who sends us work now. Sometimes I read a story Wendell Berry has sent me and I can’t be satisfied with sending him a little note in the mail, he doesn’t have email, I have to get on the phone and call him up in Kentucky and say,

“I can’t tell you how moved I was to read this story. I’m so proud to have it in Threepenny”.

So that’s why I can’t single out any one thing. I get this feeling at least once a year, or I wouldn’t keep doing it.

Rachel Thompson:
I love hearing that enthusiasm. And actually, I’m thinking of a quote I saw attributed to you on Twitter, is that “I suppose if I have to give a one word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure”.

Wendy Lesser:
That’s definitely true that might come from a book I wrote called “Why I read”. I mean, it’s possible that I said it in person, because it sounds like me, but it’s also possible someone took it out of the book.

Rachel Thompson:
And so, it sounds to me that, that’s also why you’re editing people as well.

Wendy Lesser:
I’m a great believer in people doing what they want to do. And my friends think I’m terribly selfish. But I think that if everybody could figure out what they wanted, and what gave them pleasure, I’m sort of an Adam Smith’s invisible hand person in this way. And if all the people represented themselves reasonably and fairly, not taking too big a piece of the pie, not trying to deprive others so that they could get more than their fair share. But if they just would be knowledgeable enough about themselves to know what gives them pleasure, and let other people know that and everybody kind of negotiate it together openly, things would be a lot better. I think there is too much pushing forward in a way that is not motivated by pleasure, that is motivated by shaped ambition or greed or some sense that people have as to what they should want or shouldn’t want, and what they really do want.

Rachel Thompson:
Would you say that that’s true in literary circles as well?

Wendy Lesser:
I suppose so. I mean, I can’t say that so much for my friends. First of all, I wouldn’t dare to but also, I think I choose friends and probably writers who are doing what they want to, but I do see it in iconic literature. That is, if I read a book like James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Karl Ove Knausgård’s, multivolume work. What I see is ambition, zooming over everything else and saying,

“I want to be a great writer. How can I be a great writer? Okay, I can triumph over everybody else by doing this”.

And to me, that is not literature, and that is careerism. So, I love Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even more, I love Dubliners. I think Joyce was a great writer. I think Ulysses goes off the tracks into, “I am going to be a great writer” and “Stomp out every other trend around me because people are so impressed by what I’m doing”. And I don’t think Knausgård is a great writer to begin with.

So, he’s just doing the ambition part. But I think that people who are really great writers are in touch with the things that they care about. And they’re in touch with their own dark sides too and their own destructive sides and their own cruel sides. And some of that comes out in their work as well. But they are pouring their own selves and lives and unconscious desires and everything else into their work. Which is not to say; it isn’t very carefully shaped. It has to be, to work.

Rachel Thompson:
Wow. Yeah, I think you’ve really defined for me even what I like in writing, the writing that really does go deep and is revealing truths about someone and not like you said, just saying, “Oh, look at how wonderful I can polish this”.

Wendy Lesser:
Right.

Rachel Thompson:
I’m just hitting pause on my conversation with Wendy Lesser, to introduce the sponsor for this episode, The Fiddlehead magazine. Subscribe to the Fiddlehead, Canada’s longest continuously published literary magazine, based in Fredericton, New Brunswick on unceded Wolastoqiyik territory. They publish four times per year and run literary contests in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Forthcoming for winter 2022 is a special issue on BIPOC Solidarities, curated by their BIPOC editors. To preorder this issue, read submission guidelines, enter their contests or to sign up for The Frond, their quarterly newsletter, visit the fiddlehead.ca. That’s the fiddlehead.ca. And now back to my conversation with Threepenny Review editor and founder, Wendy Lesser.

Speaking of literary giants, as you have been mentioning Joyce, you have some living literary giants who appear in the journal frequently and Sharon Olds comes to mind is one of those American poet that I love. Can you tell me about the choice to have people appear several times historically through the journal?

Wendy Lesser:
Well, Sharon Olds, she sent me like three poems, five poems at once. And I don’t think there’s ever been an occasion where I’ve turned them all down, and that’s true of other- Kay Ryan, who I also publish, Robert Pinsky. David ferry, Louise Glück, for sure. I am really lucky in my poets. They speak to each other, they see each other’s work in my pages. And so, they send me stuff. And writers of that caliber, when they send you five poems, you can pretty easily find one you want in that batch. So, I don’t really know Sharon Olds, I’ve been to her readings. I’m not even sure we’ve met personally, been introduced, but there have only been about four or five times, I guess that she’s sent me work over the years, I’ve taken something of it. And I’m really happy with the things we have in the current issue. There’s this wonderful poem called, “Bay Area Aria” that I really love. She just has wit, it’s fun to read a poem like that.

Rachel Thompson:
I want to ask you, or I want to switch gears to talk about the slush pile for the magazine and to some of the mechanics behind the scenes. So, what is your current acceptance rate of slush in the magazine if you know?

Wendy Lesser:
Well, let’s see. I think I’ve done the calculation; it comes out to be something like 0.02%, 0.0002 if you leave out the percentage sign, but basically, here are the numbers. We read manuscripts for six months of the year, January through June. That’s when our online submission system is open. We get about 100 submissions a day, every day on that submissions. Like I know for sure because I just calculated it. Yesterday, I cleaned them out. I had finished reading them all. It was empty at about five o’clock yesterday afternoon. By this morning. There were 49 more, and each of those submissions is one story, one essay, or up to five poems.

In other words, it’s more than just the numbers suggest, out of those 100 a day that we receive, we probably take two or three poems a month, we try not to take more than four stories every quarter, because we only publish eight stories and we have to have room for all a– in other words, we’re accepting over six months, it has to last us for 12, you can see the numbers are very small. The percentages are slightly higher for nonfiction because we get a lot less nonfiction. So, I take probably two essays a month off of the unsolicited manuscripts. And I take even more table talk. That’s the short, really short essays that we publish, they tend to come in- maybe two thirds of them of the ones we publish come in through tabletop. So, nonfiction is a better route into the magazine, if you can write good nonfiction, because there’s just so much poetry and so much fiction coming in.

I don’t know if this will get out to everybody needs to, but David, my deputy editor and I have a policy of trying to get to everything right away. He reads submissions, all three days of the week, he’s in, I read submissions, seven days a week, or six or five if I’m working really hard on a book. So, we get to everything instantly when it comes in. And we normally give people a response within 48 hours. I have announced every year on our Facebook page that this is what we do. We don’t let it sit around for three weeks. We don’t pass it around in any kind of committee. If there’s anything promising, we put it in the maybe pile and both of us read it and we get to it right away.

So, when people get rejections after 48 hours, it is not because we have not read it, it is because we read it right away. But I can’t tell you, I get some nice comments saying thanks for reading so quickly. Because we require no simultaneous submissions, you have to submit exclusively to us. But I also get some enraged people saying

“I know you haven’t read this”.

And I feel like saying,

“How do you know you’re not here looking at me. You don’t know how I run the magazine”.

It’s just so infuriating that people think of you do it quickly. You haven’t read it.

Rachel Thompson:
Yeah, it’s funny because that was going to be my next question. I did read online, someone saying Threepenny Review must be the most wicked lit mag ever. You send them a story in the morning, and you get a rejection email by evening.

Wendy Lesser:
That doesn’t happen. Normally, that happens if I see a name that has appeared 17 times in submissions. If I see it, I read it again right away. So, I can send a rejection right away to send a message. If we get back to you that quickly, probably there’s been a real problem, like you’ve overburdened us with bad stuff. But 48 hours is our normal response time. There’s nothing wrong with your work. If you hear from us in 48 hours. Sometimes I accept something within 24 hours. And the writers are amazed at that. Sometimes, because David and I have to read the things in common it might take up to a week.

Rachel Thompson:
I want to pick up something you said before about the pieces working together to because I’m seeing your process, you’re getting the pieces, and you’re reading them rather quickly. And you’re saying no right away, within 48 hours, but then you have a maybe pile I assume.

Wendy Lesser:
We read those more carefully. And again, we accept them only on the basis of merit. In other words, we don’t accept them for thematic issues or anything like that. Somebody doesn’t get under the wire because they happen to be writing about a subject we’re interested in that day. We do have things called “symposia” in the issues, in every alternating issue. In the spring and the fall, we run a symposium and that is invited writers contributing something on a prearranged topic. So recent symposia have been- a symposium about neighborhoods, a symposium about shame. The next one for the fall is going to be a symposium about charm. We’ve had a symposium about Berlin, and a symposium about London, and a symposium about love, all different topics like that. But other than the symposium, people who are invited to write on a very specific topic, everybody else is chosen just on the merit of their work.

Then, we sort the stuff vaguely into piles for different issues, we think this is going to be a spring story for a winter poem, roughly based on what the other things around it are like, but that can be resorted at any time. And then the rest of it is coincidental. I mean, always, when I sit down to put together the issue, I find that one thing leads neatly into the next. And if it doesn’t, I can put a poem in between that will bridge the gap, or I can put a photograph there that will bridge the gap. So, it might not be that these things were all chosen to go together. But when somebody sits down with the magazine and reads it front to back, it will feel something like a continuous conversation. And that’s chance or serendipity or whatever you want to call it. It’s not a result of choosing things that are meant to go together.

Rachel Thompson:
I’m really glad you clarified that because in my experience, sometimes we’re turning down good work, because at room, we do two themed issues a year, we do four issues a year to preset themes, and then the others emerge, more like what you’re saying. But then we end up turning down some work because we already have a story that’s like this and maybe we want to hit a different note here, like these kinds of decisions that end up being made. Do you find–

Wendy Lesser:
We’re not particularly topical. So, after the Parkland shooting, we had a million poems about school shootings. After Trump’s election, we had a million screeds about that. Of course, we’re not unaware of things happening in the world. And we want people to be aware in their own writing in a sort of sideways way of these real events in the world. But we don’t want thematic stuff like that. Because we’re a quarterly, for one thing, and because sometimes we accept something one year, and it doesn’t come out till the next.

But also, I decided, when I started the magazine, that there were going to be no thematic issues, because one of the publications I’d worked on, university publishing, had only thematic issues, and they had exactly your problem, they had to turn down good things because they didn’t fit the theme. And they had another problem, which is that they couldn’t bring out the issue on time. Because these three people who were supposed to ride on the theme hadn’t gotten their work in and they were waiting and waiting. And the work would only be useful for that issue, not for a following one, so they couldn’t bump it over. So, I decided: No theme issues. That way, if someone’s late delivering, if some writer I really want, doesn’t get it in in time for the summer issue, I can use her in the fall, there’s no limit, because there’s no preset theme, except, as I say, for the symposia, which is a relatively recent development in the magazine, and not a large amount of space in the issues that it’s in.

Rachel Thompson:
Can you tell me a bit about what kind of writing you’ve seen too much of, that you never want to see again?

Wendy Lesser:
It’s not that I don’t want to see it again. Because as I said, in Why I Read, I was talking about editing a magazine and the kinds of things that I really don’t like, and then I said, and then here’s this Wendell Berry story, that breaks all these rules. It just does all the things that I just said, I don’t like perfectly, and I published it. So all these rules are meant to be broken by people who can be brilliant on the subject, but, A, stories about childhood, and particularly essays about childhood, but also short stories in the first person that talk about grade school, or what mom did when we went to the mall or any of these things, I can’t tell you how many of those we receive and how few of those are worth publishing.

So, beware of thinking that your childhood is interesting to other people, for the most part, unless you’re Wendell Berry or a few other brilliant writers at which they are, I suppose, many, Rebecca West is another. But it’s very, very hard to do a good story based on a child’s perspective of something that happened to her or him as a child. Another one where people tend to go astray, they don’t do it so much anymore. I don’t know why but dating and sex. I mean, like I hated that cat story that was in The New Yorker, I just thought that was garbage and morally garbage too. The narrator was a total jerk, but she presented herself as a high and mighty person who was experiencing the other guy being a jerk. So, for the most part, I think people’s responses to actual real life, dating and sex are not good literature. Again, great writers can transcend this, and we have published stories, and in fact, just recently accepted one that’s kind of on this subject.

But on the whole, there’s way too much of it and it’s not done. Well. As I said, extremely topical things aren’t good. We have a ban on the name Trump in the magazine, from the moment he was elected to the moment we get rid of him, which God willing will be soon, his name will not appear ever in The Threepenny Review, and maybe ever forever. In other words, this ban may last for the rest of his in our lives, but you’re not allowed to use his name in the magazine. You can allude to him as our president, or the present administration or whatever and people do. I don’t want poems or stories that are on the subject of Donald Trump. It’s bad enough I have to read about him in real life.

Rachel Thompson:
I guess I’m wondering why. And you maybe you answered it, you said, you read enough about him outside of the journal.

Wendy Lesser:
Well, part of that is just a visceral distaste, from the minute he was elected. And of course, even before because we had to experience him quite a bit before, I find him such a disgusting creature. And I don’t want to sully my magazine with his name. I’m just like everybody else. I read the newspapers three times a day to see what stupid thing he’s done now. And that’s the function of newspapers, and it goes away in 24 hours, and there’s a new stupid thing next, but I don’t want to have his name. That’s all I can say. My hatred of him is so visceral that I do not want to have his name in the magazine. My own article in the current issue, which is about a German theatre piece, that came to BAM in New York, ends with a paragraph that directly alludes to the Trump administration and to how we all feel about the Trump administration. I’m not saying that the subject matter of our hatred for this figure is banned. Not at all. It’s just his name that’s banned.

Rachel Thompson:
You’re talking about the function of newspapers, and then it got me thinking about the function of literature. What kind of thoughts do you have on the function of literature?

Wendy Lesser:
Well, Ezra Pound called it “News that stays news”. Now, Ezra Pound was a maniac and fascist but on the other hand, he was right about a lot of things. And I do think that’s true that literature stays current, when everything that’s just current events, drops away. And I do think that literature tells you things about the world that can stick with you and shape your sense of history in a way that regular old nonfiction accounts often can’t. I mean, most of what I know, about 19th century England, everything I know about 19th century Portugal, and at least half of what I know, about 19th century Russia, comes from novels.

I have a sense of those worlds from reading the great works of literature that came out of them. I’m not saying that literature is separate from life. Literature is part of life, as TS Eliot said, at one point, but I think that some kind of transmutation has gone on having to do with the fact that it was sifted through an individual perspective, the author’s individual perspective, even if we don’t know anything about him, like Homer or Shakespeare, those are like anonymous people in a way to us. But something has been sifted through their perspective, and then has come out the other side in a way that is no longer personal. It transcends the personal, even though it’s gone through the person.

Rachel Thompson:
What kind of writing are you eager to see more of?

Wendy Lesser:
That’s a strange question to ask somebody who has to read 100 scripts a day, in a way I’m not eager to see any more of anything, there’s enough already, there’s a lot. Flannery O’Connor, when somebody said to her, “Do you think MFA programs are stifling young writers?” She said, “Not enough of them”. I mean, there’s a way in which the notion that everybody has something to say, is not healthy one, I think people should edit themselves more and not send out everything that touches the page. But what kind of writing do I want more? I can’t say, there’s a great Randall Jarrell poem, or a little boys sick in bed and he says, “If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want”. And that’s kind of how I feel about writing. If I’ve already thought of it in my mind, it’s not what I want. I want someone else with their mind and their take on the world to come in and show me what I’m missing.

Rachel Thompson:
That’s the trick in the challenge, the gauntlet laid down for writers who want to submit to editors, I guess part of how they discover that is by reading Threepenny Review.

Wendy Lesser:
I suppose, it can’t hurt to read it. And I probably do have tastes and prejudices and things that I like and things that I don’t like that I’m not aware of, and that I don’t list on our Submissions page. But I think- again, what I was saying about voice and originality, I think a writer who read The Threepenny Review and tried to copy a Threepenny article and send it in, I think I would spot it as inauthentic. I don’t think I would end up taking it. I think the writer has to have something to say and put that down on the page in whatever form, fiction, nonfiction poetry and then I will respond to that thing that he or she is saying and not respond to it because it fits our mold.

Rachel Thompson:
Thank you so much to my guest, Wendy Lesser, for talking to me about submitting to The Threepenny Review. Thank you to our sponsor for this episode, the Fiddlehead, Canada’s longest continually published literary magazine. You can preorder their upcoming BIPOC solidarities issue, read their submission guidelines and enter their contest, or sign up for The Frond, the cutest name for a newsletter I’ve ever heard, at the fiddlehead.ca.

As promised, dear listening writers, here is a little love, maybe tough love, I don’t know, depends on what you believe about the top tier literary magazines. You see, nobody can tell you whether or not you’re a writer. And that doesn’t mean that your first draft or your 50th draft is perfect and ready to publish. I’m not saying this to get you off the hook of working hard on your writing. In fact, I’m saying this to get you on the hook, though, I’m not sure what that metaphor means exactly.

Let me try to put it a different way:
Writing takes a lot of work. It takes thoughtful revision; it takes reflection and a lot of self-understanding. It takes practice. And publishing your writing requires all of this, plus it requires timing, and connection with an editor who understands you and your unique voice. I do not subscribe to the idea that one editor can tell you if you’re a writer or not. And we know. We know that historically, a lot of writers have been left out of publishing because editors didn’t have the perspective or point of view, or just general cares and concerns that many communities have writers had.

Does this mean that publishing and lit mags is irrelevant? Maybe, if your goals aren’t aligned with the benefits of lit mag publishing. I think for most of you listening though, and I’ve heard from so many of you, that you’re looking to hone your craft, to be read widely, to polish your work and publish it somewhere you can reach and connect with your unique readers. So, for that reason I continue to espouse lit mag publishing. But I don’t and will never espouse the idea that certain tastemakers can tell you that you are or are not a writer. The act of writing makes you a writer. The continuous work and development you bring to the page makes you a writer.

Now, I’m not saying that top tier lit mag editors, and certainly I’m not saying that my guest in this episode thinks that they are arbiters of writing. But I do think it’s a myth in the writing community that there are tastemakers that can decide for you in that instant, whether or not this is a path for you. So, I urge you to shake off that myth if you can, and to continue to write, publish and shine and work on your own writing in your own time and in your own way. Okay, that’s the end of my rant about that. And I just wish you well in your writing journey.

The Write, Publish and Shine podcast is brought to you by me, Rachel Thompson. You can learn more about the work I do to help writers write, publish and shine at rachelthompson.co. When you’re there, sign up for my writerly love letters sent out every other week, and filled with support for your writing practice.

If this episode encourages you to pick pleasure over ambition, I would love to hear all about it. You can tag me on social media. I’m @RachelThompson on Twitter and @RachelThompsonAuthor on Instagram and tell other luminous writers about this episode. You can do this by sending them to the podcast at rachelthompson.co/podcast or searching for Write, Publish and Shine, wherever they get their podcasts. Thank you for listening. I encourage you to choose pleasure over ambition. And to not let anyone tell you whether or not you’re a writer.

My guest for this episode spoke to me from the territory of Cochin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County, in a place colonially known as Berkeley, California. Myself, I am a guest in the South Sinai Egypt on lands, historically and presently occupied by the Al-Tirabin Bedouin.