When Chicago Quarterly Review was launched in 1994 it aspired to live up to its name and hasn’t exactly succeeded—that is, it’s published 19 issues in those 21 years. But founder Syed Haider tells me he’s picked up the pace—the latest issue is the third in a year’s time. “Suddenly we are becoming what we should have been—some kind of quarterly,” says Haider.
Are other publishers taking notes? Pay all Contribute to the expenses out of your own pocket—as Haider and his coeditor, Elizabeth McKenzie, do— and the agonies of capitalization fall away. “If it dies it dies,” Haider said. “Way too many people are seeking private money that people don’t have to give. I don’t want to have to go to the writers.”
But he has regrets. “The origin of the magazine once upon a time was to publish small, unknown voices,” he tells me. These days, “we hardly have one piece from somebody who’s new and unknown. The small writers are gone. They don’t send me anything, or what they send me we reject.”
