I will be out of the office starting Wed 09/28/2011 and will not return until Tue 10/04/2011. I will respond to your message when I return.

I will be out of the office starting Wed 09/28/2011 and will not return until Tue 10/04/2011. I will respond to your message when I return.

I will be out of the office starting Wed 09/28/2011 and will not return until Tue 10/04/2011. I will respond to your message when I return.

Yes, in the realm of literary publishing, we do tend to pat ourselves on the back to a distressing degree. (Well, in my post I wasn’t patting myself on the back, per se, because I had nothing to do with the publishing of any of those people I mentioned. But I do admit to a Prairie Schooner bias, having been a product of the UNL creative writing program, a past contributor to PS, and now on the payroll.) "The Prairie Schooner Story," the book I consulted (out-of-print, but I suspect fairly accessible via interlibrary loan or used booksellers), though fifty-five years old, offers keen insight into the politics of such back-patting, as well as fundraising, early 20th-century censorship (aka editorial policies), and other vagaries of literary publishing in an academic setting (the very vagaries that Lowry Wimberly manipulated and Karl Shapiro chafed against). But my only real defense for listing the famous writers published by the journal is because there are famous writers to list. And those are the names that provoke a response. It does indeed, as you note, imply a fundamental insecurity—a fear of dissolution, of vanishing, that has driven the magazine since 1926. A commitment to the obscure comes with many hazards. In spending some time with the Prairie Schooner archive, seeking the pieces by these famous authors, I’ve discovered any number of works that failed to endure, but that remain relevant, and that have all the qualities of fiction and poetry that nonetheless should endure. When the entirety of PS’s archive is available online, some of these authors will be “discovered” decades after their work was published. This is just one ancillary benefit of back-patting and name-dropping. I suspect that one of the first things that the new editor will institute is an online submission manager. (Those reasons may be green in nature, or simply because of the ease such systems allow both the journal and the writer.) I also predict that the magazine will be available to subscribers on PDF, for reading on e-readers or laptops. As for paying contributors, Wimberly likely gave Capote nothing. In 2010, Prairie Schooner awarded contributors--courtesy of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards, the Lawrence Foundation Award (and others)--a total of $8,500.

And here's recent news on Barnes and Noble's own handheld book device: http://gizmodo.com/5380942/exclusive-first-photos-of-barnes--nobles-double-screen-e+reader