TSR Closes Fifth Year With East End Art

Don’t dare to say that the world of publishing and writing is on the decline around members of the editorial board of The Southampton Review.

This literary magazine, published by Stony Brook Southampton’s Master of Fine Arts program in literature and creative writing, has five years—and 10 issues—of history which beg to differ, according to publisher and graduate writing program director, Robert Reeves.

“You’re not going to make a very good case in this community, where values and traditions and attachment to literature play an important role,” said Mr. Reeves during a telephone interview last week. “This issue gives a preview of things to come.”

With its release last month, The Southampton Review, or TSR as it’s called around campus, celebrated the closing of its fifth volume in an East End artists’ issue, explained editor-in-chief Lou Ann Walker during a telephone interview last week. Forty authors and 20 artists are represented in the journal’s 254 pages.

“Art is very important to the East End, and we’re about to start a visual art MFA soon,” Ms. Walker said. “We very much made it into a historically correct issue, starting with Charles Henry Miller and the usual suspects, going all the way through to today. We’ll be doing more issues like that. We just want to make sure we represent the East End over and over again.”

A portion of the upcoming issue, slated to be released this winter, will be devoted to the Shinnecock Indian Nation, she said, but details are being kept close to the vest.

“Because of all the changes at the college, we’re just figuring out what we can do,” Ms. Walker said.

Themes aside, TSR always runs the works of established and emerging artists side by side, Ms. Walker pointed out, though she said she is careful not to repeat too many of the same voices from issue to issue.

“We don’t only accept work from faculty and students,” she said. “We’re open to submissions internationally. We’re publishing people who deserve to be published.”

The journal flows from art and plays to short stories and poems. About 75 percent of the contributors have a tie to the East End, Ms. Walker said.

Liza Donnelly, staff cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, is an exception to the rule. She’s never visited the Hamptons, she revealed during a telephone interview last week.

“But it’s a nice place to do cartoons!” she exclaimed of her involvement in TSR. “I really enjoy having my work in the middle of good writing. Like The New Yorker, I feel like The Southampton Review respects what we do. The cartoons, the illustrations, are often very thoughtful, not just jokes. They have a little more to say than that.”

When she heard the issue’s theme was about art, Ms. Donnelly said she was thrilled because The New Yorker doesn’t print cartoons about the art world all that often, she explained.

One of her cartoons shows a museum-goer gazing up at an abstract painting. The woman’s headset plays, “This next painting speaks to you—the viewer—and it wants to say, ‘Hello.’ Say ‘Hello’ to the painting.”

Ms. Donnelly said she has always watched tourists with headsets in amazement.

“Like, why are you doing that?” she said. “It’s not my cup of tea. I want to experience the artwork on my own. I know there’s a lot of really important information in those headsets, but I always kind of make fun.”

In another cartoon, a sculptor says about his piece of artwork: “Officially, it’s titled: ‘Ambiguous Formality of Meaning.’ But I call it ‘Harry.’”

An artist herself, Ms. Donnelly said she’s never named one of her paintings.

“Oftentimes, the titles you run across can be pretty haughty, contrived,” she said. “That’s where that came from. Painters, and I’d imagine sculptors, have intimate relationships with the pieces they’re working on, so this guy had his own nickname for his sculpture and a different name when he takes it into the public.”

Ms. Donnelly, who has appeared in TSR three times, including this issue, began cartooning when she was a young girl growing up in Washington, D.C., she said. By the time she was 7, she was tracing her favorite cartoons. She developed her own style, and by her senior year of college, she was submitting to The New Yorker, she said.

“I was shy and quiet, so it was a way for me to communicate and get approval without having to say a word,” she explained.

This issue is Bridgehampton part-timer Bina Bernard’s first appearance in TSR. Her inclusion is a chapter from her novel, “Keeping Secrets,” which is about a family of Holocaust survivors.

“When they accepted my novel, it was like winning the lottery,” Ms. Bernard recalled during a telephone interview last week. “I’d never written fiction before. It’s a way of telling a story where you play God.”

The former People magazine journalist said she’ll never go back to non-fiction.

“You can follow the people in different ways than you can in non-fiction,” she said. “You’re dependent on the subject and the story, but I was interested in writing a narrative. I hope the printed word can survive.”

Ms. Walker said she shares this same hope—but if all else fails, her goal is that TSR is representative of culture and art on the East End today.

“If the world falls apart tomorrow and the little spaceman comes down years from now and finds this as a little artifact, it’s something that’s meaningful and reflects us as humans,” Ms. Walker said. “Our lives have changed a great deal in the last 15 years. We’re not trying to be a throwback to the old days. We’re looking at furthering our cultural mission and talking about how important art is to our lives. We can’t lose sight of the fact that this all matters to us.”