Howard Junker founded ZYZZYVA, a journal for West Coast writers and artists, in 1985, and has edited five anthologies of work from its pages, most recently AutoBioDiversity (Heyday) as well as four ZYZZYVA first novels and three ZYZZYVA first collections of poems. This interview was recorded on March 14, 2006 in Howard Junker’s dining room.


HOWARD: [He leans back.] Okay, fire away.

TRANSFER: All right, so long, long ago when you started ZYZZYVA, in 1985, what inspired you?

HOWARD: Desperation. It was a mid-life crisis. (Do people still have them?) I got laid off, an I thought that nobody would ever hire me to do anything that I really wanted to do. So I thought I should try to make this dream I had come true.

In my late twenties, I had written for Newsweek and a bunch of other magazines in New York, and then I got a job at KPIX-TV here in San Francisco. I got fired after four months because I didn’t know what I was doing. For the next ten years or so, I was a drop-out. (Do they still have drop-outs?) I worked as a carpenter, as a junior high school science teacher. Eventually, I got a job as a speechwriter at Bechtel. One day at luch, the proofreader in the PR department, an old man, told me that he had had a lit-mag in the early fifties and had published William Carlos Williams and Olsen and Creeley, and Ferlinghetti—I thought, Whoa, that is so cool. Why don’t we do something like that in-house? We have word processors, which is what they called computers that were “dedicated” for use as typewriters. We have salaries, Xeroxes. We could do that and it would be fun.

But there weren’t enough writers in-house. So I began to look around and I saw that there wasn’t a lit-mag on the West Coast as good as the ones in the East, in the Midwest, in the South. I thought there was a niche, a need.

Now, of course, there are zillions of them. Every writing program has its own lit-mag. Even art school—CalArts and Otis—have them. Because there are so many creative writing students who want to get published, and get their resumes going.

TRANSFER: Do you feel that ZYZZYVA is struggling to compete with all these new magazines or do you still feel like you’re holding on to your niche?

HOWARD: We’re holding on for dear life. It’s easy to start a lit-mag, especially now with the technology so convenient,—and cheap. It’s hard to keep one going.

Our niche is different now. At first, I wanted to be the flagship journal of West Coast writers and artists. I wanted to have all the famous writers in it. After a few years, however, I got tired of the usual suspects, and ZYZZYVA didn’t seem to matter enough to them. But “new and emerging writers,” as they’re now called, people who hadn’t published much really like the showcase, such as it was, that I could give them.

Now I’m totally committed to the slush pile. I don’t solcit manuscripts at all, and I read the entire slush pile—10-15 manuscripts a day—myself, which is incredibly tedious, except that’s where I find my issue. When I do find something I like, it’s very exciting.

One of the people I discovered, in 1991, Mary Michael Wagner, was working on her Master’s at SF State. Her first story was included in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in the O. Henry, but then she disappeared for many years. She has just now re-emerged as a poet: she’s just won the Robert Penn Warren Prize from The Southern Review. How terrific.

Yesterday, Glenn Kurtz called and said his essay about practicing the guitar had just been sold as part of a book to Knopf for $50,000, 20,000 print run. That’s really exciting.

Other lit-mags publish unknown writers, too, more or less by default. But it’s what I try to do. Of course, I still like to have at least one famous writer each issue, Daniel Handler in Spring, Sherman Alexie in Fall.

TRANSFER: In a recent Editor’s Note, you said you felt sad that no writer you had discovered had made it quite as big as you had wanted them to.

HOWARD: Well, my ambition is boundless. I still haven’t discovere a writer who’s gone on to become a household name, the next Philip Roth. I haven’t discovered any Jonathans, like Jonathan Franzen or Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Safron Foer. [Our own Jonathan laughs.]

I’m proud of publishing the first fiction of Po Bronson and Chitra Divakaruni—and giving about 200 writers their debut. But the literary life is so dicey, so filled with obstacles. Developing a career can take so long. I admire the fortitude of those who are able to stay the course. In my standard rejection letter, I encourage the writer to “keep the faith.” I mean it.

Mostly, what an editor does is reject writers, and that’s not as much fun as you might think. It’s really very depressing. Partly because it requires a certain kind of arrogance, which is hard to justify. It’s much more pleasurable to recognize talent and say, “I believe in you.” To commit to a writer is fun.

TRANSFER: What are the things that catch your eye when you’re going through the sluch pile?

HOWARD: [Taking a deep breath] I don’t know, that just it: I don’t know. I’m not looking for something specific.I don’t have any preconceived ideas. I don’t do “theme” issues. I try to take each manuscript on its own merits. I do, sometimes, ask people I know to write memoirs. For example, in the Winter issue, I asked a friend of mine whose wife had died of AIDS to tell that story. I worked many months with him on the piece.

But in terms of fiction or poetry, I can’t order it up. When somethint promising but flawed does appear, I can only say, “We can work on this, we can make it better.”

I used to think I could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but now I realize that’s absurd. All you can do is make a more powerful sow’s ear.

Sometimes I can’t work with a writer: they don’t want to be worked with or I have an idea that’s not waht they had in mind.

It’s a different process than what youget sitting around in creative writing class, where other students sound off about what “doesn’t work for me.” My job is to make it work. I’m hands-on about that. I say: If you cut these pages and develop this character and forget this plot distraction and recast it in the third person and blah blah blah, then it will work. Often I just show the writer what to do. I ask permission first, but then I whack away. The process can be rather abbreviated. I find that less experienced writers often can’t translate suggestions into action. But if I can show them how their work can be improved, they are grateful. They always have the final decision, I always yield to what they want. Or, if I can’t, we part ways.

In class, a teacher is working with a student over a long period of time and developing a relationship. What the teacher wants to see is change, not necessarily publication. At best, the student should become more fluent, more free, more imaginative. I’m interested in a product. I need to fill a whole issue.

I like to rush the manuscripts I buy into the next issue. I’ve never been able to work up an inventory. It’s absolutely the opposite. I get frantic every issue. I don’t have anything and the deadline’s coming up. Then I start to read and, somehow, some good stuff comes in. All of a sudden, people start sending me better material—which means, of course, that I’m getting desperate.

I don’t know if any writers time me on that, but the absolute worst moment to send me anything is when I’ve just sent an issue of to the printer. I always think the new issue is the best I’ve ever done, and I can rest on my laurels for a while.

When it gets back from the printer, however, I realize how lousy the issue really is. Then I get depressed. Then, in a few weks, I get anxious because I don’t have anything and the deadline’s coming up. So I’ve got to find something. That up-and-down cycle if very similar, I think, to what writers go through, the manic-depressive roller coaster.

It’s like being an athlete; you want to leave all your energy out on the field. In the old days, runners would race a mile and then collapse. They’d fall on the ground completely exhausted. [Howard makes an exhausted drop to the table.] Nowadays, not even ultra-marathoners seem tired at the end. they shake it right off. [He wipes a little imaginary sweat from his brow.] How do they do that?

TRANSFER: Was there every anything that stuck with you after you read it the first time, have you ever thought about it and come back to it?

HOWARD: Well, if I reject it, I send it back to the writer and it’s gone. Every once in a while, the writer gleefully tells me a piece I rejected was bought by somebody else, and I say, Godspeed. It’s a good thing that there are many other agendas and tastes out there. It takes all kinds.

In any case, an editor can’t always get what he wants. Imagine you go to see Hamlet, and you say, “This guy Shakespeare is great!” So you quill a note to the Avon Theater, and Shakespeare sends over Titus Andronicus. What are you going to do? Are you going to say, “Well, you know, Bill, this is not really right for me.” Maybe he would then say, “Okay, fine, I have some sonnets. Would you be interested in a dozen sonnets?” And you say, “I don’t really do many sonnets.” So he sends you Measure for Measure. It’s not bad, it’s okay, but it’s not The Tempest.

An editor sits there in a duck blind. And the birds fly by. Most of them way too hight, way out of range. Then some fly by, but they’re not ducks or they’ve got avian flu or it’s too dark or you just reached down for a sip of coffee...

Or you shoot and miss or the bird falls into a tree. It’s a very, very chancy business, many things can go wrong, failure is endemic.

TRANSFER: You were talking a little bit about creative writing programs before, how do you feel about the sudden proliferation of writing programs?

HOWARD: You asked me at the wrong time, because I've just came back from the Associated Writing Programs convention in Austin, and it was a zoo. Creative Writing has become an industry!

And I think it constitutes a major, terrible shift in the way that literature is thought about, the way reading is thought about.

A few years ago, the English professors decided they wanted to teach theory. A lot of students didn’t want to do theory, so they switched to creative writing. They didn't have to read much. They couldn't get flunked out. They got to “Express Themselves.”

In the old, old days, if you liked to read, you could major in English Lit, and then you just took your chance and went to law school if you were smart and had enough money to do that, or you went into advertising or journalism or sales or whatever. Now people just want to “write,” which is very hard to do well if you haven't read much and it doesn't train you to be anything except a teacher of creative writing. In that sense, it's like a Ponzi scheme, this generation lives off the next generation, which lives off the next generation. I think it's become a vicious scam.

It used to be that people would say writers who got jobs as academics had sold out: for safety, a steady job. Now the academy is the assumed place of residence for “literary” writers. But I still think that it's very difficult to be a writer and a professor at the same time. I think teaching tames you and gives you too much comfort--and sucks you dry at the same time.

Most of the stuff I see from professors of creative writing is terrible--unreadable. Even stuff from teachers who've gotten lots of awards...

And society at large is changing: It seems to me that it's oppressive for many people to be alone with their thoughts, which makes it very difficult to be a writer and impossible to be a reader. Solitude is the sine qua non for literary life. And there are so many other ways of communicating; most people are plugged in all the time. This new sensibility is a scary thing to me.

TRANSFER: Where do you feel the literary magazine scene is moving since it's being impacted by this technology?

HOWARD: At the book fair at AWP, there were zillions of new lit-mags and also lots of old lit-mags that were being refurbished. The VQR, the old Virginia Quarterly Review, which I remember in the old days as being exceedingly boring, is now 290 pages, too fat to hold. And it has color all the way through! And it's sending writers on special missions to Africa and the Antarctic to do reportage. I admire this energy, but I think it's misplaced. There are other formats better suited for journalistic confrontation. I don't think a lit-mag should compete in the day-to-day arena. I think a lit-mag should be more like an old-fashioned museum: carefully curated, a rarefied atmosphere, a preserve for the elite.

On the other hand, nobody has a monopoly on communication anymore. Anyone can use the Internet. Almost anyone can afford to produce a digitally formatted book.

I don’t view myself as a gatekeeper, trying to keep people out, because the discourse is really open to everybody these days. I’m just a filter. There's so much going on out there that nobody can pay attention to all of it--or even very much of it. Nor can I. But at least what comes to me, I can filter. I can respond, and if people find they like how I respond, then that's good, that saves them time and concentrates their pleasure. And if some writer feels confirmed when I publish her work, if she somehow feels certified, not just a wannabe anymore, so much the better.

Somehow being published on paper still seems the way to become “official,” it still seems to be the best way to get the mess out your head. Once it's down on paper, it becomes in some profound sense real.

TRANSFER: How would you define the aesthetics of West Coast writing today?

HOWARD: When I read other literary magazines, I don't see any differences based on regionalism. Some are stuffy, some are merely boring, some are crude, some are filled with schlock, but in terms of being derived from their place, I don't think there are any distinctions to be made.

People move around so much anyway. People who go to high school on the East Coast go to college on the West Coast, and the teachers are moving all around, too.

Every place basically looks like every other place and not just in America. I was in China last fall and the kids there look just like the kids here, because they're all wearing the same clothes--which are made in China to begin with.

I think we all like to read about people who are the same as we are. But we also like to read about people who are different, people who are living on the margins. The new immigrants, their children, for example. The third generation is usually not as interesting. The Chicanos, for example, have been, to a large degree, assimilated, just as the Jews were, and before that the Catholics. We tend to forget that Dreiser and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Farrell and O'Hara...were Catholics.

New groups continue to fight for acceptance. Southeast Asians, lesbians, trannies... I'm very proud, by the way, that I did not fall for JT LeRoy. [Everyone laughs.] I got a manuscript or two from JT, but I thought they were poorly written and sent them back.

TRANSFER: Do you feel like there ever was a way to characterize the Bay Area literary scene?

HOWARD: Twenty years ago, the Language poets were very strong in the Bay Area. Then they began to move off and get academic jobs. Then, spoken word and poetry slams had a moment of glory, although not one that interested me very much. I think the poetry community continues to have a lot of energy, but I don't think there's a codified scene. It seems very open. I wish a major poet or two or three would come along soon.

I think there’s a generation--let's call it the McSweeney’s generation--that's interested in pastiche and in pretending to be serious about literature, but really isn't. It's a generation that strikes me as being more into packaging than substance. I'm troubled by this, because I believe in commitment and passion. On the other hand, my generation couldn't read Latin and Greek, as the older generation could, so there's a constant dumbing down--or maybe just a constant change of focus.

I think some people are tempted to be writers these days, who really shouldn't be writers, they should be something else. I suppose there are always poseurs and hangers-on and wannabees. The temptation of the literary life these days is of course less than ever, because the culture heroes have moved off the page to the Web.

Fortunately, I was never really tempted to be a writer. I was able to resist without too much effort because I had no talent. I was tempted to be a critic or a reviewer or a reporter. A much lesser temptation.

And I've really liked being an editor. It's allowed me to glom on the other people and use them as surrogates, as front men. They do the dirty work for me, the stuff I'm afraid to do. They take the chances and I just pick the fruit off the trees. [Howard reaches into the air to collect the most perfect fruit.] “Oh, yes, I'll take one of these and one of these.” That’s an easy way to have an imaginative life, but it's not, I think, as ultimately satisfying as if I were really able to write a story or a poem myself. But I have no hope of that, so I've settled for this other thing, which is pretty good for me. It's the best I can do.

TRANSFER: Has editing taken over all of your creative life?

HOWARD: Well, I play chess. [Dead pan pause.] The magazine is my literary life. I do write an Editor’s Note every issue and that takes me months to do. I'm big on condensation. I really like, as some filmmaker said, to begin the scene as late as you can and get out as early as you can. It's a pretty wonderful idea, so you just get [Howard compresses air in his hands into a little ball.] that.

TRANSFER: What are your feelings about forms and categories? ZYZZYVA, like our magazine, breaks up the sections into fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. How do you feel that experimental fiction and narrative poetry are blurring those lines? Do you think there will always be a place for that separation?

HOWARD: I hate “creative nonfiction,” I can start there. I think that's the most pretentious and academically grasping attempt to legitimize nonfiction. Why is it “creative”? It's just nonfiction. It has some relationship to the facts. Those are the only useful distinctions--imagined and factual. How categories of writing break down in terms of tables of contents or curricula, I don't know and I don't really care.

The reason I established categories is simply to let people know that there's a balance in the issue. I'm trying to give them a little bit of this and little bit of that. Not all story. Not all poetry. A mix seems important to me. It takes all kinds.

In some sense, I'd rather not have any poetry in the magazine. I would prefer to have just wonderful essays and terrific stories. But somehow poetry is essential, even though great poetry is so rare and ordinary poetry is so unattractive. It's part of the risk I feel I have to take: I have to include some poetry just on the off chance that I'll come up with something great, Ordinary prose is much more palatable than ordinary poetry.

Also, I like using poetry as punctuation. It's usually very quick. And it allows you to see a writer in a very naked position without a lot of [makes a flowery gesture of excess]. And you can put a poem on the right-hand page or on the left, so structurally, in terms of layout, poetry serves a function.

I take the art I publish very seriously. When I started, I would only have five or ten images in each issue. Now I have an image between every text. That's become standard with lit-mags, although the art they have access to is not often very interesting. I'm very strict. I just do recent works on paper, originally done in black & white. By artists who live on the West Coast, of course.

As for experimental writing I love it, but it's hard to find. A lot of things people claim are experimental don't seem very experimental to me. Maybe I've been around the block one too many times. A lot of the experimental writing I see, seems just as orthodox in its practice as "traditional" writing. I miss "transgressive" writing, but it's hard to violate taboos when there aren't any left.

I'm still a sucker for concrete poetry; I love words used as visual material. I'm tired of nonsense poetry. I get enough mystery and absurdity and disjunction at home. In poetry I want something else. The challenge these days, I think, is to make sense of the world.

For all their occasional coyness, Billy Collins and Kay Ryan, who was in our second issue, by the way, are very welcome for their attempts to write poems with unapologetic, intelligent, declarative sentences.

I love it when somebody can make it new. Or just give it a slight twist. Or let me hear an inflection I've never heard. Or take me somewhere I've never been.

TRANSFER: Here's a random question. What is your favorite line or phrase in all of literature?

HOWARD: Oh, that's a good one! It keeps changing. My favorite line for a long time--maybe not now, but at the moment I can't think of any other--is from Death of A Salesman: "I went to Africa when I was seventeen. I came out when I was twenty-one, and, by God, I was rich." [He laughs and takes another sip of chocolate milk.] It keeps changing, but I wish I would keep chapbooks so I could remember at least some of them.

That's one of the reasons I like being an editor--the slate gets wiped off each time. It seems to be a tabula rasa each time, but it's not, you know. I now have this backlog of twenty-one years of this thing, ZYZZYVA. I tend not to want to repeat myself, but of course I'm repeating myself all the time. If I did a story about drug dealers in Mendocino, even twelve years ago, I wouldn't want to do it again. That's what I say when in fact I do that story again and again.

I don't know anybody who could read me, to know what it is that I would be looking for. I certainly pretend that I don't know. Yet there are certain kinds of things that I don't respond to. For example, last year I brought a story about a woman who went to teach in Kyrgyzstan--now that's the biggest creative nonfiction cliché of all time--"My Fabulous Adventures in the Peace Corps"--but I did it because I'd never done it before and for me it was still new and I didn't know anything about Kyrgyzstan.

What I liked about the piece was that this woman didn't get Kyrgystan at all. All she ever did was go out with her friends and drink in the ex-pat bar. I loved that. I loved the fact that it was about someone who thought she was gonna have an adventure, but in fact didn't have any adventure at all that she couldn't have had if she'd gone to the University of Colorado at Boulder. I thought that was great; here she was in the midst of Iraq and Iran and that just didn't register. I thought that was terrific, but really it was a terrible cliché for me to do that.

Well, she did have some photographs, so that was kind of fun.

TRANSFER: I remember coming out to San Francisco and hearing about ZYZZYVA as a magazine that publishes only West Coast writers, do you consider ZYZZYVA now just part of the West Coast landscape or does it still feel like a personal project? Do you think that you could ever pass it on or is it something that--

HOWARD: --pass it on to someone else? Well, we think about it--me and the board. It's hard to think of how that might be done. Who could possibly replace me? One of the things that I do is sell ads to bookstores and galleries and restaurants. That takes a lot of work and it's hard to imagine who might be willing to do that. I developed that as a way of corporate fundraising.

Who could also be a good fundraiser and work with the board, a board that I've developed and tailored to my needs? Our independent donor base is in some sense "my friends". Could somebody else keep them in the camp?

Maybe there would be some rich person who would want to take it over, but wouldn't they just start their own? Would they really want to do what I have to do? Would they want to empty the waste baskets? Would they want to go through the slush pile? Would it be ZYZZYVA if they didn't go through the slush pile seriously, and then also have the ability to work with the slush pile, not turning a sow's ear into a silk purse because that can't be done, all you can make it is a better pig's ear, a nicer pig's ear. You can comb the fur on the pig's ear; you can wash the pig's ear. It's still going to be a pig's ear.

I don't get the same stories that The New Yorker gets; John Updike and a newly discovered Nabakov and Deborah Eisenberg don't show up in my slush pile. By the same token, I wouldn't want to publish lots of stories The New Yorker does. So “succession” is a difficult issue. I'm not sure what will happen. Especially because it's quite clear that the lit-mag scene is in its last act. I'm pretty lucky to have ridden it out as far as I have. Maybe I'll get as far as retirement, but it's getting a little bit creaky.

Well, it's always been creaky, that's the amazing thing. It's always been desperate and we've always just squeaked by each year and there was always just enough to keep us going. The carrot just kept dangling in front of my nose. And when we needed a windfall one came along.

The terror toward the end of the year when the contributions come in has been internalized for me, but for any normal person to come up to the end of October and still need to raise all that money—it would be too scary.

Very young people can start a literary magazine because they don't care what happens, they assume they're gonna move on. It really doesn't matter if they do a second issue or a third or a fourth.

I never thought that I would do ZYZZYVA this long. I just did the first issue and it was so cool that I really wanted to do the second issue even though there wasn't enough money to do it. I thought, well, we have to do it, because we said we're a quarterly. Then the second issue was cool and I just thought let's try a third and maybe there will be enough money to do a fourth.

Then it got a little easier, because after a while you can get a grant. We got a rant to do four first-novels a few years ago, and one of them became a local bestseller and we even sold the paperback rights, so we made more money than we'd gotten from the grant. It was very lucky.

Looking back, I know you just can't make a legitimate business plan for a literary magazine, certainly not now and especially not then. I only had a business plan in the sense that maybe there's this opportunity, but in terms of whether it was economically feasible, no. I didn't know what it would cost and I would have been well-advised not to even try it.

I guess it's called “taking risks,” and it's what anybody has to do to make their dream happen. You have to go where you're driven, as far as you possibly can. Try everything you can to make it happen and, if you're lucky, then it does happen. If you're not, then you have to try something else. And I'd tried many things beforehand, and they hadn't worked out. I tried a T-shirt business. When my girlfriend picked up the shirts from the printer and brought them home, she left them in the car on the street overnight and they were gone in the morning. So that was the T-shirt business. Then we tried vinegar starter, a totally hopeless project... That's the secret, I guess, keep trying.