by Lydia Mead (Managing Editor & Publicist)
Over the first pandemic summer, between my second and third years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, my creative writing professor, Sara Jaffe, connected me with Rebecca Wolff, who founded FENCE magazine in 1997 (manifesto written) / 1998 (first issue published), and Fence Books in 2001, for a virtual summer internship. I lived in the attic of a small blue house, & for Fence, I archived poetry reviews from The Constant Critic’s near-expired old website into a document for future upload onto Fence’s newer digital imprint, Fence Digital. I copied over and proofread some number of reviews per day (Ray McDaniel, Joyelle McSweeney, Tyrone Williams), & talked weekly with Fence’s now-Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor, Emily Wallis Hughes, about this process.
Over these near-six years since, I’ve dipped into and out of responsibilities and rhythms with Fence, as my commitments to college and other jobs variously shifted my capacity to engage with them. Now, I find near-every variety of task I’ve completed for Fence across those years represented in my current, consistent position: I support Fence Books through outreach and publicity efforts (I submit our books to book awards and reviewers/review outlets, & reach out to bookstores), post on Fence’s social media, write and respond to emails (of course!), & publish poetry reviews—new, and from the archive—on The Constant Critic.
When I describe Fence, I usually say some words like, “Fence was founded at a time in which the poetry world was really polarized between traditional, lyric poets and experimental, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to offer poets whose writing does not so clearly fall within a delineated camp or aesthetic—the “fence-sitters”—space to publish their work and enter into conversation with each other.” Fence resists binaries to embrace variousness and nuance. Fence creates and advocates for a “multi-minded” community.
I appreciate that I joined Fence through The Constant Critic, a project so palpably dialogic: poets writing about other poets’ writing. & I appreciate the variousness of my responsibilities throughout my time at Fence—an experience so shared between all of us who work for small, not-for-profit presses—& the ways in which they contribute, in shifting ways, to an ever-shifting ecosystem.
& I’ll note that I use so many ampersands in my writing because, six years ago, I read Karla Kelsey’s 2013 review of The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Cole Swensen and Rod Smith for The Constant Critic, in which she quotes Hocquard on his own use of “&” and “and”:
Here, the ampersand (&) is not a replacement for and. Rather, it denotes a tautological aim. Which is to say that it tends to mark, between two terms, a relationship (but can we still speak of relationship?) of identity: “Table & hands” (p. 10), “Person & path” (p. 86), or indifferentiation, closer to or. You could also say an augmentation. “The painting shows Alvina’s photographed arm augmented by a shoulder as if it’s a birth…” (p. 55) is less the description of an image than the development of a formula such as “Alvina’s arm & shoulder” while the other formula “Alvina’s arm and shoulder” denotes an addition. (82)
I internalized and remembered this distinction as something like, “and” designates an addition to a list or sequence in which the items remain relatively discrete, & the ampersand designates or indicates the relationship between two items, in which each changes the other. The ampersand articulates an interaction; a reciprocal exchange. At Fence, we believe and invest in literary conversation: in the “&”s that we generate when we collect and arrange nonconforming poetry, fiction, translation, and other in our magazine, & when our titles land on bookshelves and in readers’ hands.
…look forward to Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor Emily Wallis Hughes’ feature this summer!
Lydia Mead lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works remotely as the Managing Editor & Publicist for Fence Magazine & Books. She collaborated with Barb Tetenbaum, a visual artist interested in the act of reading, to publish her prose poem thesis, [some sentences & phrases I wrote once], with Barb's artist book imprint, Triangular Press, in 2024.
