Gianna Jacobson. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
One of the most influential literary magazines of the 20th century is now headquartered in Richmond Heights. It’s right behind the Hi-Pointe Theatre, in a brown 1950s office building that wouldn’t look out of place in the ink-washed streetscapes of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Gianna Jacobson, its editor, keeps a small, neat office on the second floor; her desk faces away from bookshelves filled with archives stretching back to the first issue, printed in 1958 by a group of students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The magazine was dubbed december for the month of its emergence, and over the next few decades, it published early work by writers like Marvin Bell, Rita Mae Brown, Raymond Carver, Linda Pastan, and Marge Piercy. In some cases, it was that writer’s first appearance in print.
Jacobson herself writes—fiction—but she began her career as a reporter. She was on staff at the Riverfront Times for several years, where she wrote a series on the insurance lobbyists in Jefferson City; took a bus to D.C. to cover Webster v. Reproductive Health Services; and kept an eye on John Ashcroft’s political maneuverings. She began freelancing in 1991, writing pieces for this magazine (including a story on former residents of Pruitt-Igoe) and working as a stringer for The New York Times. The newspaper even installed a modem for her. “We were the first home in our subdivision to have one,” she says.
By her midforties, she had done “pretty much everything I could do as a freelancer from St. Louis,” she says. “The stories were starting to not feel as fresh or new.” She went to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for a few years and workshopped her short stories, until one of the visiting writers pulled her aside. “You’ve got some talent at this,” he told her. “But everything you write sounds like a newspaper story. If you really want this to be a career change and not a hobby, you should go back to school.” She decided on the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ master of fine arts program in creative writing, because she could try her hand at poetry as well as fiction.
She graduated in December 2010, ready to climb to her third floor every day and work on her novel. “But there were a lot of days that between the time my daughter left for school and came home, I didn’t have any interaction with another human being,” she says. “It was very solitary. I didn’t have enough stimulus to keep me going. I’d write for an hour, and then I’d take my dogs for a walk. Then I’d write for an hour…”
She loved the two semesters she’d worked on Natural Bridge, UM–St. Louis’ literary magazine. She thought she’d like to get involved in something like that. “River Styx has Richard Newman, and Boulevard has Richard Burgin—neither of them are going anywhere,” she says. “I looked into starting one from scratch, but that seemed daunting. I probably would have just stewed forever, but I’d finished a story, and I went on the Poets & Writers website to see who was open for submissions, and I saw a little ad.” It read, “December Magazine and December Press are open for sale to a college or university writing program.”
She emailed. “It started this exchange of emails with a guy named Craig Sautter,” she says, who managed the estate of Curt Johnson, a Chicago-based novel and short-story writer who’d taken over december in 1962 from Jeff Marks, a poet and one of the original founders. Johnson had served as editor of the press for 46 years—though the journal had ceased publication in 1981, he’d kept the book imprint active until his death in 2008. “I put my reporter’s hat on,” Jacobson says. “I found a handful of names that I knew and recognized, that had early work in december. So we kept corresponding.”
In December 2012, she drove to Chicago to meet with Sautter. “We went to the storage facility where he had all of these back issues and copies of the books,” she remembers. “And I loaded up this Suburban I’d rented. I couldn’t even see out the back window on the way back to St. Louis. I drove a full day and loaded all of these boxes into my family room.”
What she found inside of them astonished her: brilliant work, much of it by now-established writers who were just starting out at the time. In the first issue, that included a collaborative poem by Stephen Berg, Donald Justice, and Robert Mezey. There was a poem by James Wright. There was an early poem by Philip Levine about a military hospital, which Jacobson describes as “spectacular” (though she says she’s talked to him about it since, and he’s not as enthusiastic). She found work by Bell and Robley Wilson. And she discovered that Johnson not only published Carver’s early stories—including the canonical “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”—but also introduced him to Esquire fiction editor Gordon Lish, who helped break Carver as a national talent.
“I felt like I’d hit the jackpot,” she says. “But I also had this simultaneous feeling of ‘I really need to make good on this. I have a responsibility to this—it’s something significant, and I want to do right about it. Either I let this go now and don’t do anything, or I’m going to do something and it’s got to be something that’s worthy of its past.’”
She met with Robert Nazarene, editor of Margie. “Bob also has an MBA—maybe the only poet in the universe who also has an MBA,” she laughs. He gave her a laundry list of things to do and people to find. She recruited artist, poet, and Washington University art professor Buzz Spector to be art editor. “It turned out, Buzz went to the University of Chicago in the ’70s,” Jacobson says. “He had founded a literary journal there called White Walls, which was a magazine for artists to write about art, and he had been a reader of december in its first incarnation.”
Spector introduced her to Wash. U. design lecturer Diann Cage, who created the template for the magazine, as well as the website, and resurrected december’s original typeface. And when Jacobson contacted 160 of the original contributors, she found a pool of people—86, in fact—who were willing not only to send her new work, but also to help her with the heavy lifting of bringing the magazine back. Bell is an advisory editor; so are Piercy and Brown, St. Louis poet Sally Van Doren, and Steve Schreiner, who now directs UM–St. Louis’ MFA program.
There are dazzling names in the magazine’s pages, but Jacobson says december’s mission was always to publish great work, whether the writer was young or old, known or unknown. “Curt really nurtured writers’ careers,” Jacobson says. “I want to be now what december was then, which was not a place where writers just sent in their work and we answer either yes or no. If it had merit, we try to tell them what was good about it and what was bad. There have been so many cases that are really good and just not quite there. We have, on several occasions, sent the writers the reading panel’s comments.”
The revival issue, published in December 2013, featured poems by Bell and Albert Goldbarth, as well as work by Karen Holman, who graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the ’80s and went on to work in the field of mental health. “I don’t think she’s published anywhere else except december,” Jacobson says. “But she’s a writer I’m happy to champion. Dawn Robinson is another; her work was in the first two issues.”
When december revives the book imprint, which Jacobson is determined to do, she would love to publish a collection of Robinson’s poems. “We’re trying to build a community,” she says. Not just a community of writers, but also a community of readers, which is why she has a “father-in-law rule” for poetry. “I don’t think my father-in-law has ever read a poem that wasn’t assigned to him until I got involved in december,” she says. “The pieces that are more esoteric or less accessible are of less interest to him. And I want to have a poem in every issue that resonates with him, as a kind of symbol for people who are not into poetry.”
The same goes for fiction and nonfiction. The first issue featured a humorous short essay, “Riding Sidecar,” about ridesharing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jacobson just discovered Star Clipper, “and I would kill to run a great graphic tale,” she says. But she’s not interested in being totally populist—december is still purely literary. And though she’s determined to stay in St. Louis, she’s pushing to make sure december has a national presence. For the revival issue, she organized a New York launch, where Bell read. For the spring-summer 2014 issue, there was a reading in Chicago. Last month, The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, hosted December in November, a group reading with past and new contributors. The magazine had a presence at the AWP Conference this year and will return in 2015. It will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in the spring.
Jacobson says one of the hardest parts of this process has been giving up her naturally suspicious reporter’s nature, though her tenacity and pragmatism—two other natural reporter’s traits—have served her well. She hasn’t missed the almost magical way this story has unfolded: all of those December milestones, including her graduation date; winning a $10,000 marketing grant, almost by chance, after a disheartening direct-mail campaign; finding the right people at the right time. It was as if string was being pulled from behind the ether, and it was all meant to be.
“When I got the letter from Craig Sautter saying that he was going to sell it to me, he wrote this really beautiful note about how—based on my intentions and exchange of emails and the fact that I was in the Midwest and that I got what it was—he’d decided I was the spiritual heir to december,” she says. She has read every back issue, and every time admires Johnson’s unerring eye. When she chooses work, she asks how Johnson would read the poem or story. Though she’s still a fiction writer first, she says her poetry sense is sharpening. (Architrave Press' Jennifer Tappenden serves as main Poetry Editor.) She finds nothing more thrilling than finding a new writer, a new voice, a piece of work that makes her head spin.
“I feel most days as though I stumbled into the thing that I was meant to do with my life,” she says. She does wish she had a window, though—which will soon happen. A tenant is moving, and an office with a view is opening up. Because how can you be editor of december and not have a view of the falling snow?
The Winter 2014 issue of december launches December 7 at 4 p.m. at Bruno David Gallery (3721 Washington). For more info, go to decembermag.org.
