The Truth About TriQuarterly?

Gina Frangello’s recent “Lit-Link Round-up” post at The Rumpus is probably the most interesting—and detailed—thing written yet about the 2010 TriQuarterly transition from national print to student-run online publication:

I briefly served as the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online when the magazine was first transitioning from print.  Christ, that was a hot mess.  Susan Hahn and Ian Morris had been fired.  Everyone from Poets & Writers to the New Yorker was enraged that such a seminal magazine was being altered in such a radical way–not just taken out of print, but turned over, effectively, to MFA students who would run the magazine through classes, which Susan Harris, from the astoundingly good Words Without Borders, and I had been hired to teach prior to actually being told that the “new magazine” we’d be training the students to edit was freaking TriQuarterly.  I thought about leaving when I found out, but I wanted to help the TQlegacy survive–there were cool things like an online archiving project…there was history I cared about…it felt more relevant to try to do something positive than to stand outside and hurl stones.  The thing was, TQ was a financial drain, and Northwestern didn’t feel able to fund it anymore.  Subscriptions were apparently way down and the thing had been bleeding money for a long time.  But no one would at the university include that bald fact in their talking points…

Read the entire thing.