November/December 2016
Dana Isokawa
John Freeman, founder and editor of the new biannual Freeman’s, discusses his goals for the journal, including durability, an international focus, expansive themes, and superlative storytelling.
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After leaving his post as the editor of the British journal Granta in 2013, critic John Freeman returned to the world of literary magazines last October with the debut of Freeman’s, a hefty biannual of new poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography. Based in New York City and published in collaboration with Grove Press and the New School, each issue revolves around a theme. For the journal’s second installment—released in August and featuring work from Tracy K. Smith, Valeria Luiselli, and Alexander Chee, among others—Freeman also organized a tour of more than forty readings and events across the United States, as well as in New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and Canada. Days before the second issue’s New York release, Freeman talked about his vision for the journal.
What draws you to the journal as a form?
For me, there’s nothing quite so pure—nor so enjoyable—as being an advocate for writers whose work I love. It’s not just the sound of their voice and the beauty of their prose or poetry; it’s not just giving them a space to do what it is they do, or even a small paycheck for doing it; it’s that there’s a whole world of light and possibility in the best writers. Their stories and their poems and their memoirs and their recordings are like free radicals for living. It’s about helping writers like that get their voice out in the world.
Freeman’s has been described as part journal, part anthology. What quality of an anthology does it share?
I hope its durability. Anthologies, the best of them, kind of stick around. I think of Arna Bontemps’s American Negro Poetry, and Donald Hall’s anthologies of American poetry. I want the journal to have that same sense of longevity and durability, but I don’t want it to be published into quite as much of a niche. It’s not curating a segment of writing, the way that a lot of anthologies are. I also hope the periodicity of Freeman’s has us speaking not just into the present artistic moment, but also to the present political and historical moment.
Does it have an international focus?
Yes—it’s published in the United States, Australia, England, and Romania, and I’m looking into getting it published in Mexico and Argentina. What I want is to choose the best of the writers that feel localized [within a particular culture] and put them into a kind of global context. Weirdly, we don’t have many literary journals that do that. The overarching aesthetic of this journal is this kind of transnational narrative impulse to take writers out of their national silos, their gender silos, and look at everyone as equal.
Why do you think an international focus is important?
I think we’re in this weird part of capital life where the Internet is this incredible metaphor for the market and the world we live in. There’s no sense of time or place, everything happens simultaneously, and it practically moves at the speed of light. But capital depends on the movement of labor, and we’re watching now how slowly labor moves across borders, and how difficult that is once people move into a different country and rub up against a different culture and different assumptions. I feel these sorts of human stories and these human costs of the period we’re living through need to be observed—and are being observed—in literature, but could be observed a little more. And for that reason, a journal that is global in its outlook and non-national in its assumptions is important not only for aesthetic reasons, but also for political and moral reasons.
I’m always surprised when I go to a different country—I was teaching in Paris this summer, and I would go into this bookshop, and all of the journals in there were French journals. By and large almost every single writer was French or Belgian, and it seemed like you could end up in these really compressed velodromes of ideas, running in circles. There’s a much bigger discussion, and a much more lasting and complex form of solace that can be had by reading across [national boundaries]—seeing the differences, but also finding the similarities between, say, our life right now in America at the cusp of this election and what’s happening in France. With Freeman’s that’s not something I’m trying to bring out directly, but the juxtaposition of writers from Mexico, France, Bosnia, China, Australia, and elsewhere feels like maybe it will make that kind of thinking a little bit more possible, as a kind of added benefit to reading for pleasure.
That seems to relate to what you said about trying to take writers and readers out of their silos. Can you say more about how you work to achieve that?
I think it’s possible by picking writers that really focus on narrative and what it can do. I think narrative is an epistemology as valuable as the scientific method. If you look at our lives—regardless of what you believe in, whether you are a citizen or not—they’re all organized around certain narratives. And writers are the sort of corrective narrative for that. So it makes sense to me to go towards the people—whether it’s Aleksandar Hemon, or Haruki Murakami, or Valeria Luiselli—who are doing that in the most interesting ways. Because I think all the things that we thought haven’t been done before have been done. The thing that really needs to be done over and over again is to transport people.
What do you mean by the “corrective narrative”?
All sorts of narratives are spun at us that are full of mistruths, half-truths, or just outright lies, whether it’s from governments or corporations. I’m not paranoid, I think that’s just how the world works: that in order for our society to function with its current inequalities, certain untrue, or partially true, narratives have to be sold to us. We’re in the middle of an election season, which is one of the great fire sales of narratives. One of the ways [corporations or governments] do this is by constantly abstracting what it is to be human—so while a corporation appeals to you emotionally, it’s basically reaching you through your data and what that represents about you. The government [appeals to you] through whether or not you vote, your voting bloc, and what part of the country you’re in. And I think because of this constant abstraction we need to constantly define against those narratives what being human feels like in various forms.
To me, one of the most constant pressures in contemporary life is on the family, because the family absorbs the economic pressures of political change. The family absorbs the cultural pressures of nation-building or un-building, as we’re watching in Europe, with this massive era of migration that we’ve entered. So in order to assert the value of those human experiences, they have to be presented in a way that reminds us of certain fundamental things about human life. I think the best writers do that. They’re not doing it consciously. It’s an impulse. But the best ones can do it in a very beautiful way, and they’re not doing it for political or moral purposes—those are the contraindications to great storytelling. [Good stories] force you to ask certain questions, or reassign value back to human life and human-scale experiences, rather than the large-scale narratives.
That’s very moving.
It is because the writers make it so. And I’m continuously surprised by how—and I’ve been working in publishing for twenty years—how continuously important writing feels. It’s not like, “Okay, that’s enough, I’ve had enough. I’m sated.” Do you think someone has reached a point at age forty-one and said, “You know, I’ve had enough, thank you. I’m just going to stop here, I’ll get indigestion.” No! We keep doing it, because it obviously fulfills a need that is continual.
There was a point at which I assumed knowledge was collectible, and that it wasn’t flexible, plastic, and constantly shifting. And then I don’t know what happened—I think the scale of my life changed, and I realized, “Oh, this is something that the endlessness of it is what’s enjoyable.” And as long as you sort of sign on for that, it’s one of the best things ever. It’s discovering what it is you don’t know, or writers whose sound or voice you don’t know. Valeria Luiselli’s work, for example, was sitting around in front of me for a long time. I worked at Granta, where they published her books, and I had a shot at one or two essays that didn’t fit our themes. And then at some point I read all three of the essays, and thought, “Holy shit! This is incredible, it’s like a Mexican Sebald!” That experience keeps happening to me. So I look at shelves as sort of untapped happiness.
John Freeman
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How do you find writers for the journal?
I spent fifteen years as a book critic, seven years judging a prize, and four years editing a journal—all of which gave me an excess of enthusiasms. I’m also always searching, because finding the things you don’t know exist is really fun. When I commission a piece, it’s kind of like: Who haven’t I heard from in a while? Or, what do I think someone hasn’t done? For example, in the next issue, Kay Ryan has a short piece about her home. When I interviewed her before, she told me she’s lived in the same house for thirty-five years and that she reroofed it herself. Here’s a MacArthur Genius– and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet sitting on the roof probably doing this all by hand, getting a sunburn. And on top of it, she’s such a great describer of internal space; she thinks of it in very physical terms. Some of what I do is spend time with writers and listen to them tell stories, and often a piece emerges right from what they’re telling you. So it’s a mixture of that, blind submissions, and submissions from agents and people that I’ve watched develop. It’s sort of like if you’re really into birds, everywhere you go, you see and are looking for birds. For me it’s the same way with stories.
Why did you start Freeman’s?
I realized I missed editing stories when I left Granta three years ago. I was going to take a break and finish some books—and I did—but right away I started editing an anthology, kind of by accident, about New York and inequality. By the end of it I thought, “What am I doing? Why don’t I do this again?” So rather than apply for jobs or wait for one to come open, I thought it’d be much more interesting to start something new. I figured it was also a little less pressure if the money I was losing was essentially my own and the smallest bit of someone else’s, rather than having to start with an office full of ten people and a subscription agency. Why not just start and see, Okay, can I get this off the ground? And so far it’s worked.
With the release of the second issue, have your aims for Freeman’s changed?
I guess a little bit. I’m teaching a class on the journal at the New School and doing more about the history of the journal. In the United States in particular, the journal was attached to the growth of modernism. A lot of little journals published writers like H. D. and Hemingway first—Ezra Pound was basically everyone’s contributing editor—but they had a lot more power than they had readership. All of them were attached to salons, which were run by, or funded by, wealthy individuals. And I realized that by publishing Freeman’s this way [with each issue accompanied by many events and readings] I’m trying to invert that scenario. I want the journal to feel like a salon, but I also want to it also feel like an accessible salon for readers. That if they live in Sacramento, or Minneapolis, or Miami, or Barnes, Kansas, they can go and participate in an event. That the pieces in the journal rise up through their storytelling. And I think that’s an important step for literary journals—if not mine, then someone else’s—to take forward, because I think for too long they’ve been an elitist institution. Obviously they have small acceptance rates because they get lots of submissions, but I’m talking more about their interaction with culture at large and their readers and their assessment of who their readers are and can be.
How do you sequence the pieces or create the overall arc of the journal?
The short pieces come first. With Granta, I used to start with the big piece, because I thought, “This is why people read journals: to get these twelve thousand words.” With Freeman’s, I kind of feel like people need a bit of a warm-up. I also feel like the first of those short pieces has to open up possibilities in different pieces. And then the first long piece has to do the same thing, so that there can be like a prelude and an opening movement that creates a series of notes that other pieces can play with. That doesn’t make shorter pieces any lesser. But it does mean that with a long piece like Aminatta Forna’s piece “Crossroads,” which does a lot of different things—it’s talking about belonging, it’s talking about history, it’s talking about migration, it’s talking about adoption, it’s talking about biracial family life, it’s talking about parents and grandparents—if I put it at the beginning, it allows the other pieces to be themselves. I also try to balance pieces that are humorous, or that have humor, with ones that are more somber.
This second issue was originally going to be the humor issue. I knew from the beginning that I would have at least three or four pieces that were funny all the way through. And in general I feel like literary journals could do better with humor. I also think that in North American life we tend to silo humor and tragedy, or humor and drama—and they don’t have to be that way! You read Chekhov, you read Tanizaki, you read all these humorous writers from elsewhere. I think humor is better when it’s rubbed up against something dark. Otherwise, why don’t you just go be a standup? Even the best standups talk about serious things with comedy.
Why did the issue theme change from humor to family?
Well, you can’t commission humor, I don’t think. If you can, you’re just an editorial ninja. The New Yorker does a very good humor issue, but they also have people and cartoonists whose job is to be funny all the time. In general literary humor is very hard to do, especially when you tell someone to be funny. I think for a lot of writers humor is a coping mechanism, and if you ask someone to cope in advance, it’s like, “What’s wrong with me?” I was talking about this in Australia last week with Helen Garner, and we were talking about humor and its importance. She said, “The best books, like the really really good books, almost all of them are really really funny.” Dickens is funny, Shakespeare’s funny—we sort of went through it, and were trying to find the humorless ones. And those are the ones you feel obligated to read.
How do you approach editing the pieces in Freeman’s?
Everyone’s different. I can’t approach everyone with the same method—I’m the child of two social workers and they came from a very process-oriented method of listening. But I don’t think there’s a process or method of listening that can be applied to twenty-nine different writers. I think everyone has different needs as individuals and writers. Some people don’t need any help at all; I can virtually just put their piece into the design program and ship it off. Other people need a lot more collaboration. So I have to be flexible that way. Some people need really long deadlines, while with some people I can say, “I need this next week,” and they’ll hurry up and write it. Part of the pleasure of editing is finding that interaction that creates the proper interaction. It’s like when you first meet someone, you calibrate—and that’s what I think editing requires.
Do you work with other editors on the journal?
I’m starting to work more with Allison Malecha at Grove. Peter Blackstock helped me get the first issue into production, but all the editing was done by me. This is the second issue I’m working on with Allison, and she’s really good, as is Peter—Peter edited Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. And he speaks five languages and Allison speaks three. I’m still going to make the call [on pieces] myself, but it’s nice to have a collective. It’s good to have people to bounce things off of, but also people who can see things that maybe I wouldn’t see. I loved having that at Granta, having four or five other editors, but it’s a very expensive proposition.
Can people submit to Freeman’s, and if so how?
I just finally put up a website for Freeman’s, and I think we’re going to put up some sort of submission queue. For the last year and a half I’ve just been trying to spread the word through social media and through literary channels like agents and editors. So I’ve been getting a fair number of submissions. But I wanted the first two issues to really say, “Okay, this is where I’m calling from.” I hope that makes it easier for people to submit and know if this is the kind of space they want to be involved in. Because there are so many journals out there. I found that once we opened Grantato Submittable, the number of submissions went up to like three hundred a week. And there was something important in making someone go to a postbox, put something in an envelope, put on the dollar eighty or two thirty, and ship it overseas and wait. And I was lucky—we pulled someone out of slush almost every issue. I want to start doing that with Freeman’s. In the first issue we published Fatin Abbas, and it’s her first piece of fiction; I found out about her through Colum McCann. But I want it to be more open than that, not just a friend’s student. I really want to be surprised from something that comes out of nowhere. There will be a more official channel for submissions soon. But until then, people find me on Facebook or Twitter and I’ll write back and say, “Send it to me.”
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.