Doing due diligence, I will offer this link to the official press release about the demise of Northwestern’s fine literary journal, TriQuarterly. You can read it here for another side of the story. I should have included a link to it in yesterday's post.
But I still don’t find anything to cheer about in terminating the jobs of two excellent, dedicated, professional editors and sending a legendary journal—along with its publishing history and prestige—off to be a student-run, online journal. There’s certainly nothing wrong with either online or student-run journals…but why must this new one have the same title as the “real” TriQuarterly? (Yes, yes, I understand that TriQuarterly originally started as a student-run journal, but did anyone think it was a step backward when the pros started running things?)
It was rather controversial years ago when Story magazine decided to simply stop publishing rather than sell the name and continue on in a way that may or may not have been representative of that journal’s storied (sorry!) past…but I can see the case for that action. I suppose only time will tell if this new iteration of TriQuarterly will do justice to the past and to a journal that has published some real literary heavyweights in its pages: Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, and Tobias Wolff.
Note on my possible biases: I graduated from Northwestern University, and I’ve been honored to have had two stories published in TriQuarterly…the PRINT version.