Paris Review: What do you find the compelling reason for continuing an enterprise that in effect has such a limited audience?

Howard Junker: Litmags are essentially an outlet for writers, the reader's pleasure being decidely secondary. And their hodgepodge of fiction/poetry/essay cannot be anything but aesthetically diffuse. No wonder the audience is limited.

What has been the darkest moment in your magazine’s history?

Darkness is the litmag norm, not the exception, especially here in the fogs of San Francisco. Sunny days are like violent storms, they disrupt the flow. In the midst of this endemic darkness, one darkest moment stands out: when we ran out of money after the first issue. I had never done a cost-analysis because 50 friends agreed that starting a litmag was a good idea and that they would each put up $200. It came as a shock that the printer charged $10,000. After our startup funding vanished so quickly, no one, especially not the board, was willing to throw anything more into the abyss. But I had nowhere else to go. The first issue was beautiful, I thought, and I wanted to keep going. So I became the lender of last resort. The early morning terrors, as I pissed away ten grand after ten grand, gave me many more moments of darkeness.

What has been the particular pleasure of editing a literary magazine?

After ten years in harness, I began to realize that the only truly good thing I could do was to publish writers I could help more than they could help me. So I stopped trying to land known quantities—the Usual Suspects—and began to concentrate on finding writers in the slush pile. Nothing is more satisfying than to give writers their first time in print. Whether they go on to become household names or not doesn't matter; the long term is always dicey. I like bestowing my imprimatur upon a writer. The most obviously appreciative was the late F. X. Toole, who was 69 when he made his debut and went on to publish a collection of stories, Rope Burns, with Ecco Press: He came by to visit one day with a gooseberry pie he had baked. [Eventually, his stories inspired the Oscar-winning “Million Dollar Baby.”]

How often do you accept an offering because you feel it could be edited into publishable form but then fail to do so—either because of difficulty with the author or it wasn’t any good in the first place?

I'm not a slut, but I can’t go home alone because I have an issue to fill. Sometimes I wake up the next morning and go, What was I thinking? On rare occasions, unbelievable as it may seem, a writer falls out of love with me during the editing process. Sometimes writers I've kicked out of bed let me know of the hotties they’ve hooked up with on the rebound.

Was there an urge to make [your magazine] different from other literary journals?

My dream was to make a litmag like The New Yorker. Wide-ranging and smart, but nonacademic. With lots of visual-real art, not cartoons (we run more images than any other litmag). And with much more revenue produced by ads (we have more ads than any other litmag). I wanted a celebrity-cocktail-party table of contents like The Paris Review. Also, like The Paris Review, no reviews or criticism, and because Writers at Work was so good and had been so intensely imitated, no interviews or profiles. I didn’t want to be in thrall to a clique or school or my writer-friends (since I didn’t have a bunch of them anyway). I wanted a classic look, neither PoMo (over-designed, impossible to read), nor slovenly (like the mimeographed rags.) My latest urge is to make a litmag that has coherent parts, one that is composed in a complicated, indiscernible, affecting way, a work of art in and of itself.

What are the key ingredients in keeping a literary magazine afloat?

An independent income is the basic flotation device. Having the office in the editor's basement reduces rent and the editor's commute. Also helpful because, even if the budget remains modest, attracting money is key: good looks, charm, guts, a thick skin, a sense of humor, a good work ethic, luck, and the ability to spot and nurture talent.

Do you have any predictions about the future of literary magazines?

I predict that the Instant Message/blog generation will not have the patience to submit to printed litmags, much less read them. Or subscribe. (It’s pathetic that even among the writers who currently subscribe to Poets & Writers, half don’t subscribe to a single litmag.) On the other hand, creative-writing programs continue to proliferate, and all these writers will need outlets.