Jo Pitkin K ‘78
Rachel Lu: What was your involvement in Red Weather like when you were on campus? What was your vision for Red Weather? Obviously, you founded it, so what were your hopes in creating it, and what did you want it to become on campus?
Jo Pitkin: I was thinking about that this morning when I was taking my morning walk. I’ll take it back to why did I even get involved with a literary magazine. In high school, and I think this is true for so many students, I didn't do a lot of extracurricular stuff, but I was on the high school literary magazine. Ours was called Gambit. When I was a senior in high school, I took a creative writing class and really liked it. I never thought I would major in it. I never knew that I could. When I got to Hamilton and Kirkland, we had an activities night so the incoming freshman could get to see what all the activities on campus were. Of course, you have many more opportunities now than we did then, but this was 1974, and I remember that I went. It was held in the Bristol Campus Center, and there was a whole room full of people who ran different organizations, so they gave out information or recruited people for their various campus groups. The only one that really interested me was the literary magazine, Dessert At the Plaza. I told you a couple of times, I hated the title. But I was on the staff freshman year, sophomore year. I published a few not-very-good poems in it. Although I had been published in high school, it seemed much more serious and adult to be in the college magazine. The staff was very hard working back then. For whatever reason, at the end of my sophomore year, our editor Bob Weisser tapped me for the job. He must have liked the way I looked at poetry or fiction or whatever. He was graduating, so he knew he was leaving it to somebody. It never occurred to me. I just never had thought I would lead anything. I was very shy, so I didn't aspire to this, but I thought, well, why don't I run for this? At the time I thought, “Sophomore, no, they usually take a junior.” I thought, “Well, I’m not going to get this job, but I’ll certainly run for it.” I was very flattered and thought, “yeah, I could do a good job” because, by then—my first creative writing workshop at Kirkland was at the end of freshman year and I had taken two more at least, so I had about three under my belt—I felt very confident, strangely, about my editorial decisions. Not so much about the other things that come along with doing a magazine. I’m sure you know what I mean.
But once I did get elected, I spent a summer with a knot in my stomach because I thought, oh no, now I really have to create a schedule for this and work with a very tiny budget and look into the printing company that they had and see if I liked that company. A lot of new ideas did bubble up once I realized, hey wait a minute, I am the editor now. So at the beginning of my junior year, I went a little bananas and decided, I hate the title, I hate the size. In my opinion, the magazine was too big. It looked like my high school literary magazine, actually. It was the size of a piece of paper, eight by twelve, and I didn't like that. I'd been reading a lot of literary magazines as an exercise since that was part of what I was doing as a creative writing major. These magazines were all nice and small, and you could hold them in your hands really easily. So I thought, I'll try to make it look a little less high school-ish and a little more grown up and serious. I worked on a couple of different improvements at the beginning like setting up blind submissions—I know you still probably do blind submissions. But I didn't consciously know I had a vision. The vision kept evolving, but I thought, I really want the magazine to be inclusive. So many students were submitting work from a certain group of friends, mostly creative writing majors. This wasn’t true of the Hamilton students at that point because they weren't allowed to be creative writing majors. They could take the workshops, but they couldn't major in it. A small handful of serious writers sort of dominated the magazine and I felt like we could probably reach some other voices. This was not the case with the artwork that people submitted, but that's what I was really trying to do by changing it, so it looked friendlier. It really was tiny. And I thought blind submissions would encourage people. They wouldn't feel like they were being judged on anything but their work, so I was the only one who knew what was coming in and the staff—the fiction and the poetry—just had to react. Of course, on a small campus sometimes it was so easy to identify the writer from his or her style, but we never had names on anything. That was a big change.
And then I did actively campaign to get submissions. I think that's still the eternal problem of literary magazines. Not so much in the national market but on college campuses. But we did have a steady stream of really good work, and I think my vision for the second year was just to continue what I had started. The name change, that really was something I was very excited about, that I could change the name and still have it be the college-funded magazine, but we could do what we wanted with it. I think the unique thing about Red Weather is that there's not really any faculty supervision. There's nobody overseeing it. I mean the Media Board, I’m sure, gives you a little bit of flak if you go way over budget. What I remember is that I wanted to be democratic. I didn't want to just come up with a title that I liked, so I came up with a whole bunch. I still wish I had kept the candidates in the running. It would be so fun to know forty-five years later what it could have been named. My recollection is that I polled my creative writing teachers if they had any ideas. My poetry mentor, Michael Burkard, was reading Wallace Stevens, and he just sort of came up with this. He said, “What about Red Weather?” Now, I think there's some other magazines with that name. Not college. But there might be a magazine or two out there with that name, but no college had it, so it just made sense to me. Once we pitched it to the staff at the time, we voted and that's the one that won. I did let everyone weigh in on it. Can you believe it stuck for forty-five years? I think that's terrific, and I think the name has its own personality and everything.
RL: I don't know if anyone has thought, “Oh, I'm going to change the name.” At least, that thought never occurred to me. I think it's a great name, and you don't mess with what's already working.
JP: I think that's true, and I think it somehow hit something the right way. It could've been the Hamilton Literary Review, which sounds really pretentious, but Red Weather stuck. That stuck. That was a big change. I have to go back and really think about this, but I think I might've found a different printer in Utica. I’m sure in central New York there weren't tons of options. I remember having to go to some printing plant and picking up the issues, but I tried to save a little bit of money so we could have better quality paper. I don't think I did any issues that had glossy paper on the cover, but I joked with you about this that if you look at the early issues, up until a certain year, probably in the eighties, they were all black-and-white covers because we didn't have the money to do a color cover. A lot's changed, but my vision was simple. It was just to really provide a great and hopefully vibrant venue for the students who were there. I'm now speaking from forty-five years later. I didn't know then how important literary magazines are on college campuses in terms of building confidence in people who are starting out writing. Sometimes they haven't written in high school. For some people, it was their only publication. I’m not saying I launched anyone, but I know one of my friends still is Nin Andrews who started writing prose poetry at Hamilton and Kirkland and is a quite well-known prose poem writer. We published a poem of hers that was not a prose poem. I always tease her. I’m like, I’m going to expose you, Nin. So Nin Andrews, I think she's class of 1980, had one of her earlier poems published in Red Weather. We published a very well-known off-broadway playwright, Harry Kondoleon from Hamilton, who sadly passed away many years ago. I’m sure if I went back to the first six issues I edited, I would see some names that are still familiar and recognizable. So sometimes, Red Weather is an early start, and more importantly—it's going to answer your fourth question—for me, it gave me such a sense of satisfaction to watch from the beginning. Getting submissions for us was literally paper, printed out, in our mailboxes. My mailbox would get full of submissions. But you take it from that point and get it all the way to a finished product that you have discussed and planned with other people. You collaborate by talking about which pieces you wanted and why.
You have done some great stuff with having themed Red Weather issues. We were never that ambitious. We were simply happy to get an issue out. But I think this is a satisfaction I really felt. I didn't feel the magazine was treated all that seriously. I don't think the students were waiting for it to come out. Sometimes, you'd see them tossed on a cafeteria table, just sitting there, and it felt so bad, you know, if it had a coffee stain on it. You try, and you try to make it available to people, and now that I think about it, I think that's exactly what led me to Boston when I graduated from Kirkland in 1978. The first thing I did was move to Boston and look for a job in publishing, and I didn't know whether it would be magazine or book publishing. I just knew I wanted to be in some kind of publishing and that was all because of Red Weather. I never would've thought of that but that's what I did, and I still am in book publishing.
RL: What is your favorite memory from Red Weather?
JP: There are probably a few. I have one very fun memory. Some people were not creative people, necessarily, in terms of wanting to be writers, but I had a very loyal group of Hamilton students who really loved doing production. Again, this is so long ago. In the seventies, production meant we had to actually cut and paste the magazine. I probably still have an exacto knife somewhere in my possessions. We did print out every piece, but it had to be individually laid out on pages using glue and an exacto knife. These guys, for some reason, really enjoyed doing this, and we stayed up pretty late to get the issues ready to go to the printer. The production was all done in the same building, Bristol Campus Center, that I mentioned the activities night was in. We were all in Bristol up on the top floor. We had to take the elevator up there. We got the space when The Spectator didn't need it, and we had to work at weird times because that's where the newspaper staff also did production of their weekly newspaper. I arranged to get everybody there who wanted to do production. Such fun on a Saturday night! Strangely, it's not the creative part I remember at all. I liked the fact that these guys came and helped and really enjoyed being part of it. I don't think they had any inclination toward writing, but they wanted to help produce the magazine, so that's a favorite memory of mine. We had a lot of laughs. I think this would be something to emphasize. It wasn't all a chore. It was really a lot of fun. We had some lively arguments, of course, about different pieces and sometimes, I did override the staff. I don't know if you've done that, but sometimes I was like, “Nope, I don't believe I want to put that in the magazine,” and that's a fun power to suddenly have.
RL: I've never done that just because when I first joined Red Weather as a first year, there were already several rules in place, and one was that during the meetings, editor-in-chiefs couldn't speak and say their opinion and certainly couldn't override any decisions. There were definitely moments that I wanted to, when a piece wasn’t accepted and I really wanted it to be. Actually, I do think that more and more recently, starting last semester and even a little before that, I do sometimes step in. So I guess I’ve been expanding my jurisdiction recently. But yeah, I was in a similar situation as you were where I became the editor my sophomore year. I applied at the end of my first year, and I didn't think I was going to get it because I was going to be a sophomore and that was just really really young.
JP: Wow, so you had the two years as well. See, I think that's good to have two years of editing because by the second year, it doesn’t seem like you're trying to learn everything. You just know what you're doing. I think I had written about this in an email to you, but part of the problem was that we had the two semesters, fall and spring, but at the time, all Hamilton and Kirkland students had a winter study in the month of January. It was fun because we could take some interesting courses. I mean, I was trying to keep the magazine in line with that calendar. We had three distinct academic periods, so I did a fall, winter, and spring issue which, in retrospect, was too much. It would've been fine to just do the fall and spring, but I was a little overly ambitious.
I did edit the first six issues. They look terrible. If you look at them now, you'll know the ones where I was like, I don't know how to typeset this stuff correctly. There's spacing issues, and I experimented trying to figure out the right font. It took awhile. I think during the second year, the last three issues look a little more polished and coherent. And you know what, that's the fun of all of this. Every year, editors take on the task in their own way and make their own improvements. That's what makes it fun to watch. I try to not take too much ownership here, but I loved that an early editor said, “Wow, we have enough money in the budget that we can start doing color covers.” And, you know, things keep evolving, like the example that you just described. Somebody obviously put into place that the editor in chief can't speak. That would've been hard for me. But I think those are the refinements that come along over many years. There, and you know I’m sure, there were some issues that were ugly. I don’t want to say which decade, but you've seen them all. You sound like you've gone to the archives and looked at them. There's some I would see and say, “Ooh, not so attractive.” I do believe they changed the size, right? Didn't you see different sizes?
RL: Yeah. So many different sizes. In my, so this is my third year being editor, time here, I just got bored of making them the same size. I've tried all different sizes, making them smaller or bigger. Some, I’ve regretted. But experimenting with different styles—it’s been like making different products.
JP: That's what keeps it fresh too. It doesn't have to always have the same look, but it's probably time saving to just keep it the same way because you're not having to think about all the different—probably not technical issues—but design issues. One thing that's really different from my experience and yours is that you have a really large staff to work with.
RL: Yeah, I’ve actually whittled it down a lot. It used to be fifty plus people my freshman year, which was just way too big, it’s down to twenty-four people now across three different boards: art, poetry, and prose. It's become a lot smaller, and that's one thing I knew I wanted to do early on. But being halfway through my senior year, I just don’t want to leave Red Weather. It’s like my own pet project.
JP: That's hard too. I was thinking when you said that though that it’s a sign of health that so many people want to take part and be working on a magazine. I'm sure that somebody's written an article on the value of college literary magazines, and it would be so interesting to find out—you know, Hamilton's not such a big, well-known school—how many colleges actually have had the same literary magazines for forty-five years? That would be kind of interesting. I don't know how easy it would be to find that information. But the value is that a college lit mag encourages younger writers to try publishing their own work. That's always such a big step. Also, working on a staff gives students a chance to develop real-world skills. It's not even just doing the editorial side of a literary magazine, although I think that's a good way to practice what we're learning in college. I mean I took literature also. I did a double major that I designed myself, and I felt like I was applying what I was learning about literary criticism to what we were doing by making selections and making really judicious decisions about the magazine’s content.
I do have to say that another part of my experience toughened me up. In a small school, boy, there was some blowback. I got some, but it was not so much about what was in the magazine but about why someone didn't get in. It was so painful. You'd see them on campus. One person called me to his dorm room. He wanted to have a discussion with me personally to find out why I'd rejected this particular piece, even though we had published so much of his work in previous issues. It was just that particular piece we rejected because it just didn't seem to gel with the other pieces. Experiences like that later made me a very conscientious submitter. When I submit my own work to anything, any kind of magazine or anthology, I just take these decisions editors make seriously. I would never argue with them, even if in my head I’m thinking, “What are you crazy? You should've taken that!” But that was an interesting development; it was a little bit uncomfortable and awkward for me because I certainly didn't want to offend people, but I wanted to have a good magazine. I think that's kind of the way you have to be, you know, shut out the noise. You'll see what I mean if I send you these old reviews of Red Weather from The Spectator. It was quite stunning. I didn't expect to get reviewed but, as I said, there was blowback.
RL: How has Red Weather influenced or affected where you are in your life?
JP: So that's what I was saying—basically it led me to a career. I wanted to go into book publishing. I suspect other former Red Weather editors would say something similar. One, Peter Cameron, created his own small press. Barbara Berson, who was right after me, became a literary agent. I think it influenced me a lot. I suspected that the camaraderie that I had at Hamilton and Kirkland would last, but then I went to the University of Iowa, the Writer's Workshop, the oldest workshop and one of the most competitive. It was a rough meat grinder, let me tell you. I went there when I was young, and I still had the glow of college and all the support from my peers and teachers. Even if I didn't agree with what members of the staff were saying, I respected them. That was tough to go from that camaraderie and that feeling of achievement to, “We hate you. Go away.” Graduate school was not fun. It's funny, I was just at a training meeting last week for a new project I’ll be doing, a freelance writing project. I suddenly remembered that feeling of working with others, when you have input and you're part of a team all working towards a finished product. Working on book projects and working on a college lit mag can be a very similar process.
RL: Who was your favorite writer in college and who is your favorite writer now?
JP: That's a hard question. I have to think. I just read so much poetry. I kept reading and learning. Of course in college there is a lot that you haven't been yet exposed to. Interestingly, one of the writers I first read in college is Louise Glück, the Nobel laureate. I read her when she had two books out in the seventies, and I really always loved her work. I have her collected poems. It's about the size of a dictionary. I always admired her, and I was pretty happy when she got the Nobel prize. Today I teach poetry workshops online and many times go back to some of the writers I first read in college.
I also loved the people I studied with. Tess Gallagher and Michael Burkard were my college poetry teachers. They're very different writers, very different styles, very different teachers, but I love Tess' work still. I certainly read a lot of women writers in the seventies, probably because of Tess. That wasn't the easiest thing. A, they weren't being published as widely, and B, they weren't being taught as widely. This sounds really nerdy, but I took a colonial literature class in my freshman year at Kirkland, and that was the first time I had heard of Anne Bradstreet, who was the first published author in the new country of America, and also Phyllis Wheatley. Of course, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Those were the poets I studied in college. I’m not sure that I had a favorite. I was certainly exposed to writers that I still enjoy. One of the writers I read in college, just by chance I think, was Francis Ponge, a French writer. I loved his work in translation, and I still read him. I feel like he influenced me a lot in some ways. The usual suspects, Emily Dickinson. It's good that these are still writers I like. I don't think I’ve shed any writers. Just keep accumulating more that I like. That was one good thing about having creative writing workshops. I don't know if that's still the case, but we were always given a list of writers and a reading list. It was not required reading, but it was so helpful.