In the beginning, I had to make up some rules in order to know what the game was going to be. As a rebel in the great Catholic tradition of Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O’Hara, I’ve always felt more comfortable struggling against constraints than in having no boundaries at all. Playing tennis without a net, Frost insisted, is a lesser challenge.

My geographic exclusiveness annoys some people, especially writers who feel they are being denied some entitlement. Richard Kostelanetz excoriated me in a letter to Small Press Review, March ’95:

It is lamentable that ZYZZYVA didn’t accept my work, only because, as my old friend Howard Junker says, with the adverb in the wrong place, “I only publish writers who live on the West Coast.” It seems to me that ruthless inclusion/exclusion based upon accidents of residency are no more acceptable than those based upon accidents of race, sex, or ethnicity, because all those limiting categories function to establish a privileged class above the hoi polloi, to the detriment of universal opportunity and thus the general good. When I was young, such people who practiced such exclusions were called fascists.

To which I replied:

I am not surprised that a magazine that would publish a review by the poet-in-question’s departmental secretary (“I’ve seen some of these poems before,” Glenn Bach began her review of Gerald Locklin’s latest, in your February issue, “as part of a packet of Xeroxed tearsheets Gerry had given me to type as part of my responsibilities as a secretary in the Dept. of English....”) would also publish a stupid letter from Richard the Inexorable Kostelanetz complaining about my policy of publishing only writers who live on the West Coast.

Place of residence is not, as Kostelanetz seems to think, an “accident,” like “race, sex, or ethnicity,” it is a choice. At least it is in this country, at least it is for people who do not live in New York City.

Perhaps Kostelanetz calls every editor who rejects his work a fascist, in which case, no apology is necessary—neither from him nor from Small Press Review.

May I also admit that I have also often rejected submissions by the aforementioned poet, Professor Locklin, who is at least wise enough to live Out Here; I simply didn’t like the work.

We’ve paid a price for this geo-restrictiveness from the beginning: when David Kirby, in Literary Magazine Review, ranked the 24 journals that made their debut in 1985, he admitted, “Actually, I thought the material in this journal with the unpronounceable name was of slightly better quality than that in The Pennsylvania Review, but ZYZZYVA’s California apartheid (or Apartheid Lite) compels me to put them second—the arts are democratic, according to this two-fisted guy. Geographical chauvinism aside, ZYZZYVA offers wonderful and varied fare....”

This chauvinism arose, you may remember, because we started “in house” and then expanded our purview to “downtown,” and only then to “West Coast.” Also, I had developed a sense of myself as an immigrant. I wanted to leave the Old Country behind and become a new man in the new world. I guess I also wanted to bite my thumb at the Eastern establishment.

And I wanted to find a niche: I did a little counting up, to see how many writers from the West Coast were included in various anthologies, in various granting programs, on the faculties of various writers’ conferences.... We were underrepresented, I discovered, and that gave me another reason to set up a trade barrier against cheap goods from the East.

The art we publish is submitted to further, more practical rules: works on paper; recent—within the last year or two; done in black and white only. It turns out that most artists don’t work much in black and white—color is, in general, more expressive, and it certainly sells better. (Works on paper themselves don’t sell as well as paintings.) We don’t reproduce photos of paintings, sculpture, installation, or performance.

We don’t “illustrate” by selecting images to fit the texts. When I put the dummy together, I certainly do take into consideration how a given image might play against a specific text, but I’ve already made my selections and it’s merely a question of placement. I like resonant juxtapositions, most of which, I think, are never noticed by anyone else.

Other litmags have included images, maybe a portfolio or two, but from the beginning we clearly stated our commitment to “West Coast writers & artists.” I quickly realized I needed to use more art, not less—as punctuation, the way The New Yorker uses cartoons, as an attractive way for the reader to move through the issue without actually reading it. And since the West Coast doesn’t have a first-rate art magazine, this was another niche we could try to occupy.

Because art magazines don’t encourage artists to submit their work, and, in any case, artists want to sell their work, not just have it reproduced, for the most part, I have to go looking. The galleries send monthly announcements of their new shows, and I visit all the San Francisco galleries once a month, and try to get to L.A. twice a year, and Seattle and Portland every other year. A third of the artists I publish don’t have galleries.

Sometimes I’ve devoted an entire issue to a single theme or artist: unpublished architects; unpublished photographs by John Gutmann; large-format Polaroids by Marsha Burns; young sculptor John Beach’s notebooks; calligraphy; photographs of artists making prints at Gemini G.E.L.; self-portraits; works in a 6x9 format solicited by alternative-space curator Michael Damm; artists from Seattle and Portland; young artists from L.A. solicited by dealers Tim Blum & Jeff Poe; students at the San Francisco Art Institute....