This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Common, a literary organization in Amherst, Massachusetts, that aims to “deepen our individual and collective sense of place.” The Common puts international and American writers and readers in conversation with one another through its eponymous award-winning biannual print journal and online publication. The organization also sponsors publishing internships and educational programming, hosts readings and collaborations, and curates subscription writing prompts. Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, recently spoke about what it’s like to “bring the world into the magazine and the magazine to the world.”
How did you decide to start the journal, and how did you arrive at its focus on place?
I was at a crossroads in my professional career, trying to figure out my next chapter, and I started thinking hard about what literary magazines were out there. What was really important to me as a reader and a writer? I grew up in a small town in rural Maine, and I thought about how much that has affected my life and the way I think about the world. In New England, the common is a public space where people can come and exchange ideas. Everyone is welcome. And the common is not just a New England phenomenon. The piazza, the zocalo—every culture has its own version. The idea of place was also specific enough that we could really make it a focus for the magazine but capacious enough that we could publish a lot of different works by a lot of different authors.
I’m so interested in this juxtaposition between the local and the global. How has the presence of international writers shaped the mission of the Common?
From the very beginning we were interested in having a global readership and in inviting international writers into the magazine. Often a literary publication only does translation or only focuses on domestic writers. We wanted to merge those communities, rather than treating international writers as something distinct or other. Over time we’ve also developed special portfolios to shine a spotlight on a particular community that American readers have not heard from very much. After Hurricane María, for example, we focused on Puerto Rican writers, to open up this incredibly diverse and vibrant literary culture that’s on our doorstep.
Walk me through the process of developing one of these special portfolios—say, the recent spotlight on farmworkers’ writing.
That portfolio started because our wonderful managing editor, Emily Everett, grew up on a dairy farm here in western Massachusetts. She went to an AWP panel that was about farmworkers and writing by farmworkers—she’d never seen another panel like this before. So she reached out to the moderator, Miguel M. Morales, who had been a farmworker as a child and is now a teacher and an activist and a writer. Emily and Miguel crafted a call for submissions, which we also translated into Spanish, since there are so many migrant workers in the United States. We ended up with so much wonderful material that we had both a print portfolio and an extra supplement online.
What does it mean for a piece of writing to be place-based and place-forward?
What we look for is a modern sense of place. The word sense is important. That’s what creates a place: the visual input, the oral input, the smells, what you can touch and feel, the humidity of the environment, what you feel underneath your feet. Take the farmworkers’ portfolio. What is more connected to a particular piece of land than farmwork? These pieces were extremely evocative about what it’s like to wake up early, about the foods their parents made to pack up into tinfoil and bring out into the fields, the heat of the fields, the damage done to people’s bodies by years of farmworking. Every detail was so specific, tangible, sensory, and distinctive.
The Common features an especially rich body of literature from Arabic-speaking authors. How did you come to start publishing annual portfolios of Arabic writing?
In 2012 my husband and I spent a year teaching at NYU in Abu Dhabi. I had just started this place-based magazine, and I realized that I didn’t know anything about Arabic literature. I eventually met a Jordanian writer named Hisham Bustani who suggested that we collaborate on a special issue in which we published writers from dozens of Arabic-speaking areas. This way we could introduce readers—particularly American, English-speaking readers—to Arabic literature and translation.
What are you proud that you’ve achieved over these past fifteen years, and what are your hopes for the Common moving forward?
One of my goals in starting a literary magazine was to build a community around it. How do you have very far-flung contributors, and how do you also develop a very real sort of in-person community? Our focus is on sustainability, on maintaining quality, and on increasing our readership. Literary magazines are not easy to run. Financially they’re often very precarious, and funding sources can be cut at a moment’s notice. I’m grateful for the community I have that’s working on this magazine—for the support of Amherst College, and the support of our donors, and the advocacy work that organizations like the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, the National Book Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation are doing. Literary magazines are the fabric of the literary community. The effort that people are bringing to this magazine because they love literature is inspiring. And we’re going to have to hold on to that really tightly over the next few years to not lose sight of why we’re doing this.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022), Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Press, 2020), and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). She teaches at CUNY and lives in Brooklyn, New York.