Outgoing Interview with Editor Kendra Kopelke

A special episode of Burning Bright, featuring an outgoing interview with founding editor Kendra Kopelke.

Transcript

KK: I get a little choked up thinking about it… When I think about what’s going to be hardest, I think it’s to be away from this community of people who have enriched me so much and so deeply and changed me—and thinking that finding the next writer will not necessarily be part of my life. And I already think about that loss.

That was Passager’s founding editor Kendra Kopelke. Kendra is retiring at the end of June. On this special edition of Burning Bright, Kendra will reflect on her 35 years of leading Passager.

Before we go on, though, you may notice some bumping around in the background during this interview.

KK: You’re hearing my dog chewing on her bone because she hears this conversation, and she wants to get in on it.

Ahh. So why are you leaving Passager? Was it something we said? And why now?

KK: I’m leaving Passager partially because a couple of years ago my life changed. My daughter’s in Boston; I’m in Baltimore. My daughter in Boston had twins, and that was thrilling and is thrilling. And so my life has been divided between Baltimore and Boston. And I really want to be a more full time grandmother as much as I can be. So that began me thinking about needing more free time.

Second, I want to have more time and more space in my head to do my own writing. I’m really looking forward to that.

And finally, I’m confident that Passager will continue to develop in very good hands. We have a great board of directors. We have Rosanne Singer; Rosanne’s been with Passager for five years now as assistant editor and will take over as editor-in-chief. Then there’s Christine Drawl. Christine’s been with Passager for ten years now and understands every aspect of running the organization. She’ll become our executive director. And Mary Azrael and Jon Shorr will still be here, doing all the things they do.

So that’s now. Let’s go back to “then.” You started Passager 35 years ago in 1990. How’d you get into this business in the first place? Where’d Passager come from?

KK: Passager grew out of two things that came together. I was 27. I was looking for ways to teach creative writing, and I landed in a senior center in downtown Baltimore. And I was so taken by this experience of these 10-15 people that were 70, 80, 90 years old. And at the same time I was teaching a class at the University of Baltimore, and it was called “The History of the Literary Magazine,” of which I knew nothing. So I was learning right along with my students about the incredible power that a literary journal could have, the ways it could influence not only the writing itself but also the community of writers surrounding it. Poetry Magazine; Little Magazine. These were from 1910, and I hadn’t really paid much attention until then about the potential of a literary journal to actually change thinking about whatever. So I put those two ideas in my head and I thought, wow. You know, here’s this creative writing class at a senior center that when I first thought about going in, everyone looked really old, and who knows what I thought was going on in their minds and imaginations! But then I was with them, and I couldn’t believe the passion in that room! It was extraordinary and the laughter and the sharing of stories.

So I thought, man, maybe we could put together a literary journal that would make older voices public, that could collect these powerful voices and put it out into the arts community, not just pass it around the senior center as a stapled—y’know, back then you would have at the end of semester a stapled everybody’s-poems-together with a cover. But what if we made something beautiful? Put it out into the world… Wouldn’t that change people’s perceptions about the older imagination the way it did mine? So that was the original question that I was really excited to explore.

You said you studied and taught about literary journals, so you knew there were a lot of them out there. You said Passager would be different because of its focus on older writers. Anything else?

KK: We wanted the reader to not encounter just the poem or short story or essay by the writer, but we wanted the reader to encounter the writer, too. That was critical to the early design of Passager. The design of the original journal was different from a lot of literary magazines because literary magazines—at least the ones I knew and was sending my work out to, like the Georgia Review or Poetry—there were no pictures of the authors. There was no comment by the authors in the back. There were contributors’ notes that were generally just a short list of recent publications that really didn’t suit what I thought we wanted to do, which was not just present the work but also introduce the writer. You know, these faces, old faces. And to me—remember, I was 27—so some of these “old” faces were 60, and you know, I’m 68 now, so the way you view things changes as you get older. But I thought they were so beautiful, and could we link the face with the writing and also have them say something about growing older or how that had affected their imagination, and that was exactly what I was trying to understand: what happens to your imagination as you age? How does it change? And what kinds of things do you care about that maybe you didn’t care about earlier?

When it was originally published, it was black and white. It was much smaller, fewer pieces in it, and it was stapled, but the paper was beautiful; it was linen paper. And it was actually designed to be on a coffee table rather than a bookshelf because we envisioned it going out to doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. We thought it might be like a magazine that you could pick up while you’re sitting, feeling very anxious and waiting for someone to call you in and do things to you that you don’t want them to do..

35 years later, Passager still focuses on older writers, it still includes contributors’ photos and bios, and it still stands out as a beautifully designed journal. How has it changed over the years?

KK: It’s evolved; it’s grown. It’s grown from a journal to a press, and that’s a really big change. It’s gone from publishing only a journal to now publishing single-authored books by Passager writers, as well as a weekly podcast, video author interviews, workshops that we started this year and we’re expanding on those. We’ve been supported by the changes in technology because not only can we use photos, but we now have the web, and we have the Internet, and we can have online readings, and our writers have many opportunities to connect with one another. So that early impulse to build a stronger, more vibrant community is still true today.

OK. Anything else?

KK: Something we did that certainly meant a lot to me was during the pandemic, and this is part of how Passager has been always thinking about how can we reach more people who aren’t necessarily polished writers of a certain level of craft, but people that have this desire to write and to connect with their writing with others. So during the pandemic, we created something called the Pandemic Diaries that we published on the website every week, and this allowed us to solicit journal entries from people from all over the world. It also allowed us to include art because we were publishing online rather than in print.

We’ve been talking about the journal and the press. Let’s change subjects for a minute; let’s talk about you, at least you as editor. What does an editor do?

KK: As an editor, one of my jobs is to read submissions and choose things that we want to publish in the journal. When I taught at the University of Baltimore, my job was to help the student grow as a writer. As a journal editor, though, we’re reading finished pieces, and deciding whether they should go into the journal. Is it consistent with what we publish? Does it stand out among the pieces we’re reviewing? Have we published something similar recently? Will it affect our readers? Sometimes, we read something that introduces a new style or subject to Passager, pushes boundaries, and we might select it because we want to broaden Passager’s range of what we publish. The issue we published last year about generational trauma, for example, edited by Christine Lincoln, brought in stories and poems about abuse and other very private subjects, especially for older people, some of whom were writing their stories for the first time. We have since received many more submissions in which writers take more emotional risks. And this growth is good for Passager, which is part of what an editor is always paying attention to.

Mary and I have been having this editorial conversation for a very long time. Rosanne Singer joined us a few years ago and brought her fresh perspective to our work. It’s always been one of our favorite parts, to discuss the work, and come to an agreement about what to choose, however difficult. I’m happy to say that Rosanne will become the new editor in chief after I leave.

You’ve been talking about editing the journal. But Passager also publishes books. Do you approach book editing any differently?

KK: Many of the books that we’ve done, we see ourselves as actively editing to bring the book into shape because some of the things that we can see as editors, the writers can’t see at the beginning. In terms of poetry, I think we often are involved in helping with the sequence of the poems. We have our own sense of the shape of the book, and we work pretty hard to get there if we think the book doesn’t have a shape.

Another area we focus on with editing manuscripts is the title. Once we have seen what the beginning of the book is and the end and the arc of it, then we think about the title that the writer has given, and we sometimes make suggestions for a different title. And then—I’m thinking about the books of poetry right now—within the poems, we do line edits, too.

And you know, working with individual writers is just absolutely so rewarding. Every writer is different. Every writer has a different sensibility, and that takes a little while to discover. I think Zoom has helped us because we have a lot of conversations with writers on Zoom now. And we feel very much the sense of a partnership. You know, it’s a “we” now putting out the book.

Clearly, one part of producing a book is editorial. But another part is design. Talk about that process.

KK: When we’re close to the end of our editing process, the manuscript goes to our designer, Christine Drawl, and she does a very similar kind of deep dive into the book. She reads it first before she starts thinking about what shape the book will take. And then she has a beautiful, long meeting with the writer on Zoom that we are part of, too, which she learned from our previous designer, Pantea Tofangchi, who taught us everything, really, everything about how to make a home for the book so that when you hold it in your hands, first of all, you want to look at it, pick it up, and secondly, you want to hold it. When you hold it, you can feel that every bit of it has meaning. And that’s something that she passed along to Christine and to all of us, and we think about with all of our books. I think if you pick them up, they all feel different, and that’s because we collectively thought about every single aspect of the book itself.

With print-on-demand now and people self-publishing, it makes us happy for them but also sad that the quality of the actual print and production isn’t necessarily there. Because they haven’t learned from Pantea, and they haven’t learned from Christine what it means to hold a beautiful object in your hands.

OK, Kendra, time for the big reveal… Where’d the name Passager come from?

KK: Sally Darnowski, the early co-creator of Passager. Jane Keller, and I made up the name. We were sitting in Jane’s backyard batting around this idea for this journal, and we thought about passages, passages through life. And then we thought about passengers, travelers through life, and then we put it together as Passager. We thought it was great. It’s been misspelled many, many times, just like my last name. Passenger is what most people call it, what a lot of people mistakenly call it, or Passages. It’s OK; we’re used to it. But it’s this idea that we’re all passagers, travelling through life. It’s not French; I mean, it is French: “passage” is French for “traveling,” but that’s always sounds snooty to people, and that is absolutely not our intent. Our intent was to create a word that would attract attention and then go from there.

At the beginning of this interview, I asked you why you were stepping down now. Another version of that question is why’d you stay so long? What kept you at Passager all these years?

KK: If the initial question I was asking was “Who are these older writers?” “What are they thinking about?” “How do they feel about being alive?” I’m still thinking about that, and I’m now easily an older writer myself, and I’m kind of surprised by my 27-year-old notions of what it would be like, because of course it’s nothing like that. The question is, how do you keep creating? And I think that staying in it all these years, it just in some ways got more and more interesting, and it was always exciting. It was always new, a new writer, a new voice, a newness, a new sensibility, a new idea. And the question of Passager to me is, of course, never going to be answered, but the exploration of it is always important to do. What if there were no Passager? I’ve asked myself that sometimes, and that has kept me going.
The other reason I’ve stayed, of course, is the staff. The people that work on Passager are absolutely the dream group of people you want at your table. And I’m sure that’s part of the reason that it’s meant so much to me. You know, who do you want at your table and Passager? Christine Drawl and Rosanne Singer and Mary Azrael and Jon Shorr. They’re the people.

Kendra Kopelke, reflecting on her 35 years at Passager.

To subscribe to, contribute to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, go to passagerbooks.com.

And speaking of contributing, Passager’s board of directors has established a Founders Fund to honor founding editor Kendra Kopelke. If you’d like to show Kendra how much Passager means to you, contribute to the Founders Fund in her honor. Go to passagerbooks.com and click on “donate.”

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.

KK: I’m going to miss everybody.