Chicago Quarterly Review means a lot to me for a number of reasons: one, it was my very first print publication back in 2016, and, full disclosure—founding editor Syed Afzal Haider is my dear father-in-law.
With CQR‘s 30th anniversary issue hot off the press, I wanted to take a moment to chat with Syed and co-founding editor, novelist Elizabeth McKenzie (author of Dog of the North as well as NBA-nominated The Portable Veblen), to track CQR‘s trajectory over 30 years of publishing award-winning fiction, poetry, and essays, and to reflect on the ways Chicago as a literary city has changed since the publication’s inception.
The responses below were drafted by Haider, then edited and amplified by McKenzie.
Christina Drill
How did the idea of Chicago Quarterly Review begin? Was there a gap you felt was missing, or something you felt wasn’t being celebrated in the Chicago literary community?
Syed Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
Back in the spring of 1994, the CQR was born out of conversations between a group of aspiring Chicago writers who had met in Molly Ramanujan’s Clothesline Writing class at the University of Chicago and who eventually formed their own writing group. We shared a belief that the work of many good and talented writers was not reaching a readership through conventional venues. So in the early days of the CQR, in need of submissions, we published the work of writers and editors of our acquaintance whose work in some way matched our vision and personal biases. When we celebrated our 25th anniversary in 2019, we invited our staff to contribute in the tradition of the olden days, and here again on our 30th we have done so again.
Christina Drill
What were the challenges of starting a literary magazine then, and what are the challenges of maintaining it now?
Syed Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
In the early days of CQR, we barely had enough submissions that met our editorial tastes, biases, and standards. We never made any announcements about our inception, nor did we solicit submissions except by word of mouth. Sometimes, somebody would find a copy of the CQR at a few local bookstores and send something in. And now, 30 years later, we have the same difficulty in reverse: even though most of our issues are 250 to 400 pages we cannot publish all the good writing that is submitted. We receive between 20 to 50 submissions a day.
Christina Drill
What’s your proudest CQR moment to date, looking back at the past 30 years?
Syed Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
The issues are like one’s children: you love, and are supposed to love, all of them equally. Our pride and joy comes from publishing a literary magazine for over 30 years. In all due modesty we can also say that our true joy, the ‘‘labor of love’’ or ‘’love of labor,’’ comes when we can showcase the writing of new as well as seasoned and established writers. We’ve also been honored to appear in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. And we are well aware of the impact we’ve made with our special issues, which have been reviewed and used in university courses, including our Chicago issue, our Italian Literature issue, our South Asian American issue, our Australian issue, and our Anthology of Black American Literature. A special issue on Native American writing, guest edited by Brandon Hobson, is now in the works. Our 25th and 30th anniversary issues were highlights as well. In short, we are happy with all we have published, and hopefully what we will continue to publish and celebrate each and every issue.
Christina Drill
What do you find most unique about Chicago’s literary community?
Syed Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
That it’s so vast and varied, that it honors its past with such reverence and resolve, and that you can attend local readings every week and be continually surprised by new voices.
Christina Drill
How do you imagine CQR‘s role in ushering in the next generation of writers?
Syed Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
We are small, but with time we have carved a niche in the independent literary world, and we are receiving a large number of submissions from writers still in or just out of writing programs, who often note that if they are accepted, the submission would be their first publication. As long as we continue to publish the magazine, we’ll be ushering in the next generation with pride.
