Conjunctions has for so long been a part of my reading life; it ensnared me at the stage when one comes to understand that perhaps the ordinary means of communication are insufficient for saying everything one wants to say and that this is part of what mandates art in our world. It was massive—a semi-annual literary magazine hundreds of pages long—and contained within the works of fiction writers with whom I was already somewhat familiar (Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace) but also those who would change my concept of what it meant to work with the material of language (infinite, but include Carole Maso, Frederic Tuten, and, indeed, William Gass). What the works had in common was an absolute fearlessness, free from commercial and societal expectations about what the written word was supposed to do and, as such, achieved a kind of transcendence.
As a young adult I attended a few Conjunctions readings in New York: the writers always seemed to be having a great time. But it was fifteen years ago in Christopher Sorrentino’s evening fiction class at 92nd Street Y when he joked that while some literary magazines would insist on certain conventions, Conjunctions might just slap a piece of text on the page, that I knew what he meant and that it was exquisite.
One year later, I finished a story with elements that could be reshuffled. On Christmas Day, I received an email from Bradford Morrow accepting it to Web Conjunctions. I spent the rest of the day in disbelief, infuriating a fellow moviegoer by constantly checking my phone in disbelief: how could this be? But this is the wild, courageous magic of Conjunctions: the risk is the point. The work was edited with enormous care by Brad, Micaela Morrissette and Pat Sims. To my jubilation, a few months later Conjunctions published my first work in print—what would become a chapter in my recent second novel, Nebraska. It has since hosted my work several times, always with benevolence and encouragement. As doors began to open—residencies, grants, an MFA, an agent, a publisher—what most sustained me was the faith of Brad and Conjunctions which permitted me to feel that my work belonged in the world.
Brad’s humanity is unparalleled, and this is, I suspect, part of what makes him such an extraordinary writer and editor. This past winter, I faced a family tragedy and was in the thick of grief and its endless administrative tasks; I also needed to engage in that much-maligned authorial task, sourcing blurbs for my forthcoming novel, the last thing I wanted to do. Himself in the midst of so much life—not to mention terrible weather—Brad wrote me the kindest and most thoughtful of blurbs.
The Conjunctions oeuvre is extraordinary and omnivorous: the themes of each volume are at once precise and accommodating, epitomized by the title of the most recently-published issue, Conjunctions:84, We Love All We Voices. The issue contains within a portfolio of works from the Caribbean edited by Robert Antoni, celebrating the cross-pollinations of language and the ways in which it continues to evolve. It reminds me that for as long as Conjunctions continues, it will change with the ebb and flow of language, of literature, of expression, and that writers and readers will always seek it out for nothing less than the truth.
