Barthelme Departs, Mississippi Review and Center for Writers in Confusion

Another troubling story of a literary journal with an exceptional legacy and leadership being thrown to the curb: Frederick Barthelme has left the University of Southern Mississsippi's Center for Writers, leaving The Mississippi Review in limbo. The managing editor of the Review has also been dismissed.

The Chronicle asked Barthelme via email what's going to happen with the Review. "At present, then, there is no staff at all, and there is no one here who has actually run a magazine previously," he responded. "The interim department chair has been talking to other English faculty (non-creative writing) about taking over the magazine.  He is also talking to the remaining CW faculty about the same thing, and it's unclear which way the tree will fall."

The summer 2010 online issue (which has content unique from the print edition) has been canceled. Fall issues are planned, but there is nobody working on them. The University's writing faculty is not pleased:

Julia Johnson, a poet and an assistant professor of English, voiced some of those concerns. "I came here to work in a nationally recognized creative writing program, with a national magazine, a visiting writer's series and Rick Barthelme," she told the Mississippi paper. "I didn't come here to work in an English department with a little sideshow for its creative writing students."

The interim chair is reported to have said that Johnson herself is groomed to take over the Review. As well, there are four remaining faculty members at the Center for Writers, including Steve Barthelme -- Rick's brother and the one remaining fiction faculty. USM is apparently seeking a writer-in-residence -- a $43,000/year role for 2010/2011 offered to and rejected by Barthelme. The Hattiesburg American has the details:

What faculty members want - a more lucrative, longer-term offer made to Barthelme - seems unlikely at this point, however. ... Steve Barthelme said that one of the issues currently not addressed is whether the college wants a creative writing program with some autonomy or just a creative writing emphasis within the English department.

... Since (the dean disputed notion of the center being a unique entity), the Center for Writers has seen the loss of its office space, as well as administrative control of its e-mail listserv and academic records.

There is also the possibility that the next editor of the Mississippi Review, the center's respected literary magazine formerly edited by Rick Barthelme, will be an English department faculty member not in creative writing.

The Mississippi Review, incidentally, has achieved landmark status by publishing dynamic writing by the likes of TC Boyle, Rick Moody, Bill Moyers, Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Padgett Powell, Raymond Carver, Charles Simic, Alyson Hagy, Barry Hannah, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Barth, Jim Shepard, Ben Percy, Francine Prose, and many other brights minds of past and present. They have done issues focused on prose poems, politics and religion, dislocation, and Hamlet, among others. The online magazine was established in 1995 as one of the very first literary magazines on the web. It has sponsored the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction and poetry writers, as well as the MR Poetry series which has most recently published books by Martha Greenwald, Liana Quill, and Christopher Salerno.

And can I just say that this seems to be yet another episode in the series of astonishingly bad decisions to come out of Mississippi this year? Far be it from me to rag on any one state or city, as I'm hardly in a position to do so, but as I was discussing with a pal last week, Mississippi is making national news in 2010 for a) cutting NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" from public radio for being sexually explicit; b) telling a gay kid she can't go to prom with her date; c) setting up a fake prom for the same kid to go to when the story made national news; d) informing another, separate gay kid that she can't wear a tuxedo in her senior school photo; e) putting on the ballot and voting this November on whether to give embryos a full slate of American rights; and f) the University of Mississippi still can't decide on a mascot to replace the Confederate general that they dismissed lo these seven years ago. Goodness, people. If I hadn't traveled to Mississippi awhile back and grown enamored of its gorgeous night skies and Delta blues music, and if Mississippi didn't gift the world with William Faulkner (also, David Halberstam, Natasha Tretheway, Alice Walker, Ida B. Wells, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Walker Percy), I'd have serious doubts about the give-and-take relationship that state has with the rest of the Union.

Comments

[Michael]

A really shame that the University of Southern Mississippi doesn't understand what a wonderful program the Center for Writers is. Here's hoping, however slim that hope may be, that there is a late change of heart.

[Russell]

One of the beautiful things about our state and our dysfunction and our writing and our many novel, backwards ways is that we help make the rest of the country feel normal and well-adjusted. I'm not saying that I agree with the astonishingly bad decisions that come out of this state. In fact, were you to come visit again, you would find a great number of Mississippians walking around with slap-reddened foreheads. We'll figure it out eventually. So long, Fred.

[Ron Jaworski]

no archives

the archives are gone

everything that was in the archives - nowhere to be found

[Anna Clark]

That's really alarming. And really sad.