Mid-American Review 43.2 is well on its way to our subscribers, contributors, and “lifers”!
In 2001, I joined the Mid-American Review staff as a first-year graduate student and, among the many other things I learned early on, I learned how a literary journal was mailed. The staff set up an assembly line on each side of the long tables and proceeded to pit line A and line B against each other as we slid books in envelopes, sealed them, taped top and bottom, and slotted them into long mail trays. Often the envelopes had been stamped and labeled beforehand by our intern staff, an arduous task in itself. The parcels needed to stay in zip code order to comply with postal code for standard bulk mail. Each tray needed to have the same number of envelopes to get an accurate count. A few folks stacked books and broke boxes down as the mailing continued. There were about twenty of us, so everyone had a small job in the process. I usually chose to put books in envelopes, a control position responsible for setting the speed for the line. I love a good sprint.
The mailing was always festive, full of music and laughter and “encouraging” slogans written on the whiteboard (My favorite will always be “Questions are decadent” from The Simpsons.). At the end, two big bins full of trays would be walked over to the warehouse.
Since that time, much has changed, but some things not at all. Our university’s warehouse is now at driving distance and we dive into its depths to get our stack of boxes to the mailing area. We are at the mercy of heat and cold and spiders. Envelope technology has advanced and a few postal code elements have shifted. Still, all these years later, I set the mailing up just as I was taught, partly out of nostalgia and partly because it works.
I don’t know how many journals hand-mail their issues anymore. There are certainly many services that can do it, and you can take advantage of cents saved with barcodes and bundling to presort. These services are also up to date on postal codes and changes in requirements. They will even check addresses in your list and make sure they’re good—both correct as addresses and current.
But there’s something much more personal in handling the literary journals you built piece by piece, sending them off to their destinations with hopes that the recipient loves those works you loved, that they will discover writers the same way you did. There’s something more joyful in working a mailing as a team, chatting over the top of stacks of envelopes and (if you’re lucky and the correct size of envelope wasn’t too expensive in this type this time) piles of peeled peel-and-seal film. I’ve certainly done summer mailings with fewer people, sometimes working by myself for a few hours, watching movies or listening to audiobooks. That’s joyful, too—the quiet industry of a finite, repetitive task.
But a crowd of grad students and interns lined up around a table, sending filled envelopes in a smooth stream hand-to-hand, bonding amid chatter—It’s a good and true thing.
From our hands to yours, please enjoy. Single issues and subscriptions can be purchased on our website on the Buy MAR page.
—Abigail A. Cloud, editor-in-chief