The Tampa Review is an artistically rich, financially poor member of the select club of often short-lived literary magazines.
By JOHN BALZ
Published May 2, 2003
[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]
Richard Mathews is the editor of the Tampa Review.
DOWNTOWN - Each fall, thousands of envelopes in all shapes and colors cross national and international borders to arrive at the University of Tampa's Plant Hall. They land in a plain room where a century ago servers and cooks in the former hotel ate meals side by side.
The envelopes are addressed to the Tampa Review, the university's literary magazine, and contain poems, stories, essays, drawings and photographs from hopeful contributors who would like to hear back from someone.
Even if that someone dislikes their work and decides not print it in the magazine, which published its latest issue in April.
Once a day, a staffer gathers the envelopes and takes them to the opposite end of the building, up four stories, to what was once the bedroom of a luxury suite but for the past 15 years has served as the magazine's office.
If you were to journey to this door, perhaps curious to see where your envelope had ended up, you would find it locked. It is always locked. Even when someone is inside.
A sign on the front reads, by appointment only, which is a polite way of saying, "Go away." It is not that the folks at the Review are an unfriendly bunch. It is simply that they have work to do, lots of work, and they can't have just anyone who thinks they are a writer walk in, sit down and strike up a conversation by saying, "Hey, I write a little poetry."
No one would ever go home.
A paid creative-writing or English student, handpicked by the Review's editors, logs the contents of each envelope into a computer database custom-built by a professor from the math department.
The assistant routes each manuscript to one of five caretakers: two fiction editors, a nonfiction editor or two poetry editors, all of whom earn their primary living as UT English teachers.
The editors accept unsolicited envelopes between Sept. 1 to Dec. 31, a window known as the reading period. The rest of the year, submissions go back to senders unopened.
The copy travels through the editors, back and forth, back and forth, a blur of motion. Fiction editor Lisa Birnbaum, hunting for brave writing, passes possible suspects to Kathleen Ochshorn, the other fiction editor, who is on her own search for fresh language.
In the end, the editors select roughly 60 envelopes to fill two issues: one in the spring and another in the fall. Occasionally, there is a fight or an argument over an editor's choice, but it is rare.
Using the database they notify the selectees, usually by February. The lucky few receive $10 for each page of work accepted and the personal satisfaction of seeing their name in a handsome, hardbound literary journal. The rest receive tiny slips of paper: Thank you for allowing us to consider your manuscript. We hope that you will continue to be interested in Tampa Review, and that this rejection will not discourage you from sending us future work.
Perhaps an editor will write a quick personal note on the back, but not often.
"We can't be teachers to the people who submit or we could spend all of our time answering mail," said the Review's editor, Richard Mathews, who holds a doctorate from the University of Virginia.
The smallest world
Most literary magazines are, like the literary world they draw from, intimate, poor and short-lived. Nearly a thousand debut every year, by professionals and amateurs, according to University of South Florida creative writing professor John Fleming, and fewer than three in 10 last long enough to see a second issue.
The magazines rely on an inelastic pool of writers from around the country in pursuit or possession of a master's of fine arts degree. Many dream of a career as an author or teacher at a fine arts program where they might have the good fortune of editing their own literary magazine. To an outsider, the whole culture wears the odd feeling of an amoeba self-replicating.
One of the most visible differences between the Review and other literary magazines is a hardback cover. Hardly any literary magazine publishes in hardback; the production costs are simply too great.
The Review published its first 18 issues in softcover, but the editors found that readers were pitching them into the trash. The hardcover was, in part, a reminder (wink-wink) that the Review is timeless, a cut above, not the same type of publication as even Newsweek or Cosmopolitan.
Locally, the Review is one of the only publications of its kind. The University of South Florida does not publish a literary magazine. Neither does Eckerd College.
Many of the contributors are known among literary circles but not among the public at large. Contributors include Chilean-born Marino Munoz Lagos, whose poems in the current issue chronicle a mother, a father and a horse.
The Review scores its biggest coups in its published interviews with prominent writers. Four issues ago, Tim O'Brien of Things They Carried acclaim discussed his career as a writer and let the magazine publish a copy of his story, Loon Point, about a 37-year-old woman whose paramour drowns during a weekend getaway.
Though the Review may be artistically rich, financially it is poor. Subscriptions and book sales don't cover the budget, making the Review a cash-needy child, of sorts, always looking for next week's allowance from its academic, or otherwise wealthy, parents.
Because universities and private donors subsidize most literary magazines, they often form the hubs of the country's strongest literary communities.
Tampa is not as fertile a crescent of writing as some other southeastern cities, such as Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina, or Savannah, Ga., which has become a colony of sorts for artists all over the South.
But Tampa is, say those who know it best, a vibrant, multiethnic, perpetually energetic, expanding hamlet currently undergoing an artistic Renaissance.
"It's literature, prose and poetry, in Tampa, dare I say the entire Suncoast," said James Tokley, Tampa's poet laureate. "It has ceased to be the ward of the musty and the seldom heard."
The artists do exist, says Nicholas Samaras, Review contributor and Writer's Voice Program director for the YMCA. The challenge is looking past bridges, bays and county lines, and unifying them.
One of Mathews' main missions: connecting this fractured ward with the rest of the world.
The gatekeeper
Mathews is a well-proportioned man. From a few feet away, his beard is the color of bone and his dark hair flecked with white, heaviest near the nape of his neck where it appears as if he was hit from behind with the gentle toss of paint-soaked sponge.
The job of editor is not to pick the work. It is to pick the order in which it appears in the Review's 70 or so pages. And to worry about the typeface, the ink quality, the column design.
In the Review's office, Mathews has the window seat, which would be a perk if not for the incessant rattling of a window unit air-conditioner that Mathews says he finds, rather facetiously, delightful.
The university published a poetry anthology in the 1960s, a forerunner to the Review, which Mathews revived in 1988, two years after he arrived.
He and his wife, Julie, live in St. Petersburg. If he arrives in the office at 9 a.m., he is being what he considers lazy.
Rarely will you spot Mathews in a jacket. You will have better odds catching him in a tie, probably bought by his wife, probably on sale. The ties are a sign of command, not fashion, and they are meant to tip off students that Mathews, Dr. Mathews, is an authority and one would do best to stop the chattering and start taking notes.
Mathews' area of expertise is science fiction and fantasy. He is currently engulfed by preparations for a second edition of a book he wrote on fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien.
But for all his love of worlds outside of this one, Mathews edits a magazine that publishes literary fiction. Of the thousands of entries he reviews, only a few fall into the fantasy category.
Over the years, he has accepted only one. It was in the 1993 spring issue: Man Overboard, by a writer from Los Angeles. The closest the current issue has to fantasy is the cover. It is a painting by Tampa native Richard Protovin. The title: Moonscape.
- John Balz can be reached at (813) 226-3401 or at balz@sptimes.com
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