The ‘marvelous, turbulent times’ when a literary magazine was born

Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” When I saw this sentence, I knew we had something good. Sandra Mortola Gilbert ’57 was set to publish a book called The Madwoman in the Attic and had graciously given us an excerpt.

As associate editor and designer of the Cornell Review, it was one of my myriad tasks to “paste up” by hand the long paper columns of text we received from the typesetter in Syracuse for every page of each issue.

The year was 1979: no desktop publishing software, no landmark work of feminist literary criticism (yet).

The Review had started two years earlier as a journal published by the College of Arts & Sciences that would bring cutting-edge scholarship and fine arts from the University campus to the Cornell community beyond Ithaca.

Baxter Hathaway, recently retired from the English department as founder of the creative writing program and Epoch magazine, was editor. An advisory board included faculty stars like Carl Sagan, Jim McConkey, Archie Ammons, Harry Levin, and Tom Eisner.

After my two-year stint as a (non-degreed) MFA student under Baxter’s mentorship, he asked me to help him produce this new periodical. So there we were, ensconced on the rickety second floor of Baxter’s old clapboard building at 108 North Plain Street, where chapbooks in his Ithaca House poetry series were pounded out on an ancient letterpress machine in the basement.

Read the rest of this “Chime In” essay by alumnus Wayne Biddle '70, who was an electrical engineering major, on the Cornellians website.