Gatekeepers

“First, would you trust a citizen surgeon to remove your son’s neuroblastoma?” asks Parisian media consultant Frédérick Filloux. This question, while intended as an argument for the necessity of professional writers and editors, actually points more directly at the dilemma facing writers and editors today. Most people—other than those who boast that they don’t read—believe that they could be writers themselves. In fact, during my tenure there, the Northwestern University Press published collections of poetry by four physicians, while during the same time period I know of exactly no poet who dabbled in surgery.

As for editors, the prognosis may be even more bleak. To the extent the editor is given any thought in the age of the Internet, it is as a crusher of dreams. There is a pervasive belief among unpublished writers that editors act as bouncers—“gatekeepers” being the popular term—who prevent a certain type of writing from being published. “Yes,” reply we editors, “bad writing.” “No,” protest these thwarted aspirants, “my writing.”

Now that the creators of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of new online magazines that spring up each year are free to publish all the neglected or misunderstood work they wish (without even the burden of word limits), what will come of this trampling down of the gates? a new literary renaissance driven by bold experimentalists heretofore gagged by the dictates of prevailing literary taste as held uniformly by every magazine editor in the country? We shall see.