Title Sequence

For thirteen years, prior to May Day of 2010, I was the associate editor of TriQuarterly magazine and for that entire time served under the editorship of Susan Firestone Hahn. The events surrounding our departure can be tracked here, here, and here.

And my in own account of the events in Creative Nonfiction (Spring, 2010).

Because, in this case, an internationally renowned literary magazine, with a publishing history of forty-five years, was “transitioning” — in the sterile argot of a university’s communications department — to a website in said university’s continuing studies department, much of the focus of debate surrounding this action centered on the relative merits of print versus digital publishing, though it is fair to say that the move was as much the residue of the ordinary academic politics that pass — among a population over- represented by those who dribble a basketball with two hands — for sport.

That is the past. What is of interest is the present, and the reality of the present, as it is during any time of accelerated technological change, is of displacement, displacement of all sorts, though the sort of displacement that has always sparked the loudest ruckus in such times is the displacement of labor. Likely, there are fewer people today who earn a living from literary publishing than do playing professional baseball, and, as of last Friday, there are at least two fewer of them. Of course, in the eyes of industrialists and Republican lawmakers, such human discomfort is a signal of economic vitality, and to some degree they may be correct. I offer no apologies for print publishing. In fact, despite the straw arguments of digital-partisans, few book or magazine publishers have shown any measurable inclination to standing athwart history.

The question then is what comes next, for me, for us, for everyone. The fact is that circumstances are changing so rapidly that even technical consultants commissioned by corporations to anticipate the commercial landscape of the near future are often catastrophically (from the perspective of profit) wrong — catastrophic for them, anyway (what do the rest of us care?). Early adopters of the 8-track tape deck thought they were aurally experiencing the future of stereophonics; many Kindle owners reported a similar sensation while reading genre novels previously available as affordably only at WalMart.

What comes next? No one who grasps the enormity of the moment professes to know. I sure don’t. But we’ll see. Exposition suggests an ongoing revealing, an unfolding, not a resolution.