Dr. Kristin Dykstra

What projects are you currently on? (Include issue #s, books, chapbooks, broadsides, special projects, print and web).

We publish one issue of Mandorla a year. Right now Mandorla 11 is with the printer. Our final preparations of that file are done, but there are related details to finish up this summer and fall, things related to distribution, website updates, database versions, and so forth. We’re beginning work on Mandorla 12 (2009) at the same time.

What has been your biggest challenge as a poetry publisher/editor?

Carrying out a magazine that defies institutional and market categories. It sounds like a cliché, but there you have our very real challenge.

When Roberto Tejada founded the magazine in the early ‘90s in Mexico, he set up border-crossing moves that remain unusual – they set up a field rather than conforming to one. This is motivational. Yet it’s not convenient.
Here’s a sketch of what I mean. We run work from many countries and in multiple languages. Even though each issue will be dominated by English and Spanish, distributors and stores and libraries aren’t sure where to locate it (foreign language? poetry journal? American literature? Latin American literature? literature in translation? etc.). We run multiple genres and are willing to let some visual artists and scholarly voices into the mix. We run originals, translations, and texts that authors don’t want to be easily classifiable as either Original or Translated. We have Latin American and US Latino contributors of many backgrounds but also plenty of people in every issue who don’t fit either of those descriptions, no matter how flexible their application (I’m always surprised when Mandorla is described as “a Hispanic magazine”). Our strong emphases in poetry and translation correspond to two areas of the literary marketplace that are commonly associated with losses rather than profits. Each of these aspects of the magazine can be linked to important creative and intellectual traditions of the past and present, and yet each defies some common expectation in publishing and circulation that magazines will politely conform to the current State of Divided Affairs.

Who needs a literal fence when literary industries are already shaped by all these same old fences, influencing audiences to think that the status quo reflects the Natural Order of Things?

My role in dealing with these conceptual/practical parts of Mandorla began when Roberto invited me to guest-edit issue 7, which was the “return from hiatus” issue. Returning also involved restructuring the entire magazine’s production, moving that component of the magazine to the US, specifically Illinois. So each issue has meant negotiating institutional expectations (ISU, libraries, booksellers, database companies, etc.) while avoiding compromise on the border-crossing features I mentioned above.

It has also meant collaborating with editors in Mexico City and California in a consistent way. Gabriel Bernal Granados, who is in Mexico, plays an important role in every issue of Mandorla, despite the distance and a variety of related practical challenges that crop up.

Do you regret any paths you have followed as a publisher/editor?

No. As logical as our project seems to us, we regularly hear that “there’s nothing else like it out there.” Maybe it’s the particular combination of risks structured into our format, making every issue a bit of a miracle and a ton of work to pull off. But as a side effect of the effort it takes, I don’t have time left for regrets.

Name one poet who has not appeared in your publication which you would love to have included and why.

I would have liked to run the Lev Rubinstein pieces that appear in Fascicle (I think issue #1 – www.fascicle.com), translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky. There’s an example of something we lose due to our focus on work “from the Americas.” Rubinstein is associated with Russian avant-garde and underground movements.

Who is the designer of your web site and how much input do you have in the design of the web site and the other design elements including covers for books, etc.?

We were lucky to be offered a spot with Litline, which created part of our site’s current format (www.litline.org). Mandorla’s update and design responsibility have shifted since then, with various people at ISU dedicating a little spare time here and a little there. The most time ever devoted to our site came with a redesign phase, when my department and a technology office called LILT helped to fix accumulated code problems a couple of years ago. Because that support was temporary and the university doesn’t have specialized staff assigned to web publishing or maintenance, we can only do minimal updates with the occasional help of a very busy staff person.

Currently we work with our strength: the excellent job done by the English Department’s Publications Unit in preparing material for print publication.

What recognitions have you received as a publisher/editor?

One thing that writers and readers may not always be aware of is the importance of grant awards. I write yearly peer-reviewed project grants for the Illinois Arts Council, and the reviewers look at the quality of our past issues when making their decisions each year. We do well on the grants, which makes it worth the amount of time they require. The awards are modest, but those partial contributions toward covering our print costs are essential. So I’d like to take this space to point out the importance of this practical “recognition” and offer thanks to all those people who put time into making grants available to journals. They help to keep publishing diversified in this country, which I see as a basis of its strength.

What are some of your other interests?

Parrots. Hockey. Getting outdoors. Art exhibitions.

What is your favorite poem as of today and why?

Today it’s not a poem proper but a collaborative essay on poetry composed by two poet-translators. Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander’s “Ni pena ni miedo: A Sentimental Education in Chile” is online at Jacket #30 (www.jacketmagazine.com). It’s a beautiful piece and to my mind, “beautiful” here means that it evokes not only the stunning landscape and poetry of Chile, but the history and trauma and messed-up outsiderness that are part and parcel of the very construction of myth that Gander and Johnson are so good at. Their introductions to the poetry of Bolivian writer Jaime Saenz have this marked quality of literary mythmaking that I’m talking about. Having recently read some prose by Roberto Bolaño, I’m interested in seeing how these double moves, mythmaking/deconstructing, get worked out by different writers.
http://jacketmagazine.com/30/chile.html

Recommend a poetry book, blog or web site to our audience (not from one of your press) and why.

Bob and Susan Arnold at Longhouse produce a variety of wondrous poetry objects. They post a lot to their website and create publications in PDF files, so they offer free and low-cost access. But the real pleasure is to open a package from Longhouse with one of their little handmade booklets inside. http://www.longhousepoetry.com/index.html

What is the most exciting aspect of being a poetry publisher/editor?

The slow release of seeing a piece you love show up and start moving through each stage of becoming a publication. Then finally seeing how the whole issue looks when it’s back from the printer, and sending it off to the contributors.

Leave us with a recipe for poetry.

Other respondents beat me to playing around with the idea of recipes, so I’ll give a straightforward reply in my editorial hat. I prefer to be surprised, with the idea that erring in that direction helps to keep our issues from getting stale.