Don Williams, Editor, New Millennium Writings
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Don Williams, editor of the literary journal New Millennium Writings. Founded in 1996 in Knoxville, Tennessee, NMW runs two contests per year for poetry, fiction and personal essays. Winner of a Golden Press Award for Excellence, the magazine has published such notable authors as Susan Vreeland, Madison Smartt Bell and Shelby Foote, and interviews with literary giants like John Updike and Norman Mailer.
Q: Tell me a little about the history of the magazine. In particular, what was your inspiration for founding NMW? Was there a niche that you felt was unfilled, a type of work that wasn't getting a sufficient audience?
A: Founding NMW was a little like walking off a cliff. An act of faith. I had a good job writing features and a weekly column for The Knoxville News-Sentinel, a paper with over 100,000 circulation. I had won some awards and I enjoyed a lot of freedom and flexibility when it came to my writing. The pay was steady and improving, and I was half through writing a novel I had begun while enjoying a year-long journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan in 1991-92.
By 1995 I was tired of working for the paper, however. Writing daily journalism is a good way to postpone ever finishing your novel and it risks corrupting your style and vision. To maintain any stylistic or visionary integrity means a constant battle with editors and other journalists with fixed ideas about what writing should be. Most of them lean toward the who-what-when-where, upside-down and backward style of the so-called "inverted pyramid." This is a writing formula that goes back to the Civil War, a form which set out to ensure that the first paragraph of every reporter's battlefield dispatch would be read. Unfortunately, it ensured that every story would end with a whimper rather than a bang. I had fought that style of writing for years and it was a never-ending battle, usually waged against copy-editors not that long out of J-school or career journalists who had never written or edited in any way counter to the inverted pyramid.
By 1995, I wanted to participate in the serious writing culture of our times more directly, meaning I wanted to be promote writing that was more daring stylistically and formally than daily journalism, yet much of what I was reading in literary journals left me cold. I had made it a point to seek out and interview lots of my favorite writers for both The News-Sentinel and magazines like Poets & Writers and Writer's Digest. I'd interviewed John Updike, Lee Smith, Ken Kesey, William Kennedy and many others, and I'd profiled reclusive writers such as Cormac McCarthy, who declined to be interviewed. Reading their books and speaking with most of them whetted my appetite for more.
At the same time, I was ahead of the curve when it came to celebrating the New Millennium. As early as 1993 I suspected there would be an opportunity to gain some recognition for anything with the words New Millennium in the title. I was a fan of Glimmer Train and the Asheville Review and a few other independent journals that seemed to be making a go of it, like Granta and The Sun and The Paris Review, edgy, yet accessible journals—so I decided to start one too. I wanted something that would imply an eclectic and forward-looking approach, and almost immediately I came up with the name "New Millennium Writings," which owes something to the journal New World Writings for its name. So I rented a PO box and took out ads in a few writerly magazines advertising a contest to help jump-start it.
The first issue came out in April 1996. It was 160 pages and contained a full-length interview with John Updike, fiction by Madison Smartt Bell and Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White and Marilyn Kallet and lots of other wonderful writers. It remains one of my favorite issues. [Editor's note: Marilyn Kallet and Lisa Coffman are judging the current NMW poetry contest.]
As far as a "particular niche" goes, the only niche I was interested in was the "scintillating-words" niche, if you will. If it burns with style and vision, we'll publish it. The only things I sought to avoid were boring words and any sort of reductionism. I didn't want to limit NMW with notions of regionalism, or any dogmas or schools of writing, including realism, minimalism, deconstructionism or feminism or conservatism or radicalism, or new-age-ism, or high-toned literary dogmas of any sort. Rather I wanted it to be inclusive of any and all such things and more. By and large I'd say we've been successful at that. We've run poems, stories and articles that could be called mystical, sci-fi, political, literary, realistic, feminist, gay and lesbian, libertarian, historical, fantasy, existential, hippie, romantic, historical, psychological, humor, you name it.
Q: Readers of NMW can see that it has a distinctive editorial vision that sets it apart from many other journals. How would you characterize that vision?
A: As I wrote in the introduction to the very first issue, Spring 1996, "Some of the voices here are funny, others grim. Several are mystical or fantastic. All are searchingly provocative. None are reducible to a single category or school of literature.... Rather, they are eclectic, entertaining, stylish and smart. Some display a scruffy sort of optimism and wonder...." I'd say that sums it up. We want to be smart, yet accessible and sometimes visionary.
Q: What, for you, makes a contest entry or submission stand out? What do you look for in terms of formal mastery, style, imagery or "sense of life"?
A: I look for something that sings me a story or philosophy or vision. Even if it's a vision of despair it has to sing. The crisp, clear image that moves the story or poem along and makes it resonate to deeper meanings is always compelling to me. At the same time, economy of language is important. Every image, every metaphor, every line of dialogue should move the story or poem and its theme forward in a compelling way.
Q: In the last contest-winners issue (#12), you gave some very useful advice about how to make fictional characters come alive by fleshing out their personal history, mannerisms, smell, appearance, voice etc. Do you have similar advice about how to make a poem come alive? Many amateur poets who write to me have difficulty making the transition from merely describing the meaning or feelings they want to convey, to actually making the reader relive a unique and significant experience.
A: I'm not a poet, per se, so poetry is a mystery to me. I know it when I hear it or read it, and I've had some published, but I don't know how to tell people, exactly, to get there. Qualities I like, however, are dynamic ranges in subject, tone, imagery, sly use of rhyme and rhythm, poems that tell a story or capture a moment. I appreciate the clear, sharp image. I generally prefer the active voice and poems that bring all the senses to bear. I also appreciate poems that celebrate life and this fantastic universe of ours.
Q: How has being based in the South (Knoxville, Tennessee) affected NMW's literary vision?
A: I've tried to make geography a non-factor in NMW. Of course, I've failed. East Tennessee has so many fine writers it would surprise most people, and quite a few submit to NMW every issue. Of the 35 or 40 people we publish each time out, an average of five to ten of them are from East Tennessee, and another 5 or so are from the Southeast. However, I get loads of material from New York and San Francisco and California and Iowa and Michigan and Maine and Alaska. Few people who pick up NMW would assume it's a "Southern" publication and that's for a very good reason. It isn't, except in point of origin.
Q: Can you suggest a few authors whom aspiring poets should read in order to improve their craft? Why these authors?
A: Yes. Whether writing poetry or prose, I'd suggest reading strong literary stylists. Read the early Ken Kesey, Annie Dillard, Cormac McCarthy. Read the 20th century poets who display a strong sense of word-craft or distinctive visions. Read E.E. Cummings and not just 'Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town' and the one about Buffalo Bill that are in all the anthologies. Read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and not just 'The Windhover.' Read W.B. Yeats—as much as you can get your hands on, especially from the middle and late periods, and read Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin and of course Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot and the early modernists like Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Subscribe to a few good journals, such as Poetry, New Millennium Writings and the Asheville Review, which is a kindred spirit, independently published and promoted from this region, but inclusive of all sorts of visions from elsewhere.
Q: What are some common ways that unsuccessful submissions to NMW miss the mark? Poetry, specifically.
A: They miss out in all sorts of ways. I get poems that are too prosaic, too intellectual, too cute, too off-the-cuff, too formal, too ungrammatical even. The most common way poems miss out is by being too opaque or inaccessible. It's amazing the number of poems that arrive straining so hard to be intellectual or detached that no one can decipher them. On the other hand, the largest complaint that I hear about the poetry in NMW is that so much of it is inaccessible. It's something I try to guard against, so poets be warned.
Q: In perusing writers' guidelines for literary journals, I often see warnings like "no religious poetry" or "no sci-fi and fantasy." Such editors are most likely trying to avoid sentimental Hallmark verse or genre cliches, but the prevalence of these warnings, I feel, tends to ghetto-ize literature into "sophisticated" realism/cynicism as opposed to "escapist" spiritual or magical work. NMW is unafraid to smudge that line! I'd be interested in your thoughts on genre and the stereotyping thereof.
A: I try not to stereotype, period. Someone said, "Grant the writer his donnée," meaning his or her basic approach or assumption, then judge their words on the merits. I never turn something down because it's spiritual or "genre" or "escapist." We've published several stories and poems over the years that could be described as "science-fiction" or mystery or even police procedural or religious to some extent or other. I think editors who draw the line at such things are foolish. It means they would have turned down much of Hopkins, much of Eliot, H.G. Wells, Orwell, Bradbury, Tolkien, the Book of Job, maybe even Homer and Euripides. Let me add, there seems to be a bias in certain quarters against anything affirmative of human warmth and fellowship and notions of redemption and transcendence or any sense of mystery, wonder or awe at the universe. Yet in society at large these earthy, organic strands are everywhere pulling us back to acknowledge a mystery in the cosmos that the latest findings in particle physics and cosmology only strengthen. So, yes, NMW is open to all sorts of literary exploration and expression. The universe is certainly a lively and brilliant and many-faceted place. For any of us to have existence at all is so fantastic it's like winning 500 million lotteries in a row. Our own existence—maybe the universe as a whole—is that unlikely. Let's celebrate it.
Spring 2003
