Photograph by Samantha Dittmann
River Styx editor Richard Newman and the literary magazine’s reading series co-director, Adrian Matejka, are both dads, professors, and poets (Matejka’s latest, Mixology, was just released this spring by Penguin; Newman’s second collection, Domestic Fugues, appears from Steel Toe Books this fall). They also play basketball together every week and generally agree on what makes a writer shine—or not—when reading work in front of an audience. They talked to us about the tricky work of curating St. Louis’ oldest reading series, including balancing fiction and poetry, as well as regional and national writers.
RN: It’s more complicated than just making a few phone calls and saying, “Hey, do you want to read?” When you get the little bookmark with all the names on it, it seems like it just all fell into place.
AM: River Styx is a national magazine, but it’s also firmly grounded in the community. To try to keep that balance in the presence of the readers, that’s really hard.
RN: We started working on this year’s schedule in December.
AM: Almost a year ahead.
RN: And it’s mostly us, but we’re open to feedback. Michael Nye, our managing editor, will suggest prose people, since Adrian and I tend to be poet-centric. We throw in a couple of fiction writers and think, “Eh, we’re diverse!” [Laughs.]
AM: We’re lucky that every day, Richard is seeing this work at the magazine. And I’ve had the good fortune to have lived in nine different places and to have bounced around a lot—literature’s regional. In the Northwest, they have their little group of writers they think are the best in the country that hardly anybody outside the area knows about. More than anything else, that’s what I bring to the discussion.
RN: Some writers don’t want any money. They’ve been at the River Styx podium before and want to read with us, like David Carkeet, who’s got a new novel coming out... Then there are people who are considerably more expensive, like B.H. Fairchild, who’s won major awards. So we’re splitting him with [SIU] Edwardsville.
AM: Then there’s another guy, Major Jackson, who’s coming in, and that was in tandem with Fontbonne. Some of it takes a little more wrangling. It used to be the most difficult thing about getting readings was dealing with the writers themselves, you know, who want chicken and orange juice and that kind of thing.
RN: Or no brown M&Ms.
AM: This year, we’re really proud of what we’ve got, because it’s all lined up—all that’s left is the actual showing up.
RN: But then of course you have to do their introductions. I write mine down, and Adrian talks off the top of his head. Our job is to just save the writer from having to do all the introduction stuff—so he or she can just read.
$5 at the door, $4 for members, students, and seniors. Time: 7:30 p.m. Readings take place every third Monday at Duff’s, 392 N. Euclid, 314-533-4541; get the full schedule at riverstyx.org.
