Interviewer: Where did the idea for Callaloo come from and how has Callaloo survived so long? How is it different from its contemporaries: African American Review, Paris Review, and The Southern Review, to name a few?

Rowell: Callaloo is a journal of necessity. Its origin is need. This means that when I first thought of the idea of a journal I was responding to the fact that Southern black writers, especially those not well known and those developing as writers, had no immediate publication outlets, in spite of the fact that there were numerous literary journals published by whites in the South. These white literary journals were not interested in work by or about black writers. Before I conceived Callaloo, I had noticed that magazines and journals published by blacks in the North were not overly interested in the Black South or its emerging writers. Of course, a few of us had found our way into the pages of Black World, the Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, and Freedomways, for example, but these African American periodicals-with their impulse toward chronicling and responding to the Black Arts Movement, a Northern urban phenomenon-were not really interested in what we, who were still in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, were doing. For some bogus reasons, our Northern brothers and sisters thought themselves superior to us in the South.
       At any rate, just after I had visited and interviewed poet Sterling Brown, and returned to my father's farm during the spring of 1974, I thought long and hard about solving our publication problem in the South. There in Alabama, I came up with the idea of a journal for us in the South. After all, I had been conducting extra-curricular creative writing workshops with Southern University students and with a few black adults from Baton Rouge. I had witnessed the rapid development of quite a few publishable new writers who had no publication outlets. I knew we needed a journal in the South. So, as I sat at my father's dining room table, writing letters to my friends Jerry Ward (Tougaloo, Mississippi) and Tom Dent (New Orleans), telling them of my plans to start a journal and asking them to join me in the efforts, Callaloo was born. But it was not until the fall of 1976, a year after I returned to Southern, that I actually published the first issue of the journal-thanks to some of my friends and colleagues (Mercedes Broussard, Paulette Johnson, Sybil Dunbar, Oneada Spurlock Madison, Johnnie Mae Arrington, and Verda Talton) at Southern University, who assisted me in various ways from production to fund-raising. (I asked Tom Dent to help me select manuscripts for and to write an introduction to the first issue, but Jerry Ward, who was away in graduate school at the University of Virginia, could not assist us with Callaloo until I published some of its subsequent issues.) The funds to defray the cost of the publication of the first issue of Callaloo came from the few gifts we received from interested friends in Baton Rouge and from elsewhere in the United States-and from my own little pockets.
       I came upon the name of the journal by accident. Its origin is a telephone conversation I held with a friend and colleague, Professor Lelia Taylor. During the period I was trying to identify a name for the journal, I happened to speak with Lelia by telephone about an academic matter. For some reason, our conversation drifted toward cooking. I happened to describe for her what we called gumbo in my home in central east Alabama, and she told me that what I was speaking of did not sound like Louisiana gumbo, that what I described for her, she said, was "callaloo." That was a new word for me, and I liked how it sounded. "Say it again," I asked her several times, and she obliged me, but I was a bit surprised when she told me she could not spell it. I wanted to know why this English professor could not spell a word she obviously used at some periods in her life. "My grandfather is from Trinidad. When we were children he used to make callaloo for us," she told me. I knew, upon hearing her say "callaloo" again, that it would be the name of the new journal. I fell in love with the sound of my new word, "callaloo," and I knew it would attract curious readers' attention if they saw it on a magazine rack or bookstand. They would at least pick it up and look at it, if not buy it out of curiosity. But, during the early beginnings of Callaloo, I didn't know that the title would resonate, culturally, geographically, aesthetically, or politically. So for the first issue I asked Lelia Taylor to write a recipe for and an essay about the dish. Callaloo might be the first North American literary journal-or journal anywhere-to open its initial issue with a recipe as its lead text.
       You see the word "callaloo" (spelled calalou in francophone countries) refers to a melange. Hence the variety of genres and subjects and cultural groups represented in Callaloo. As you know, callaloo is a food in the Caribbean, and in Brazil carurú is a dish very much like the callaloo made in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Trinidad. But in Jamaica callaloo is a leafy vegetable that is cooked as we do spinach or turnip greens. The Haitians call their okra "callaloo." Of course, I learned all this long after I had published several issues of the journal; for a long time, all I knew about callaloo was what Lelia Taylor had told me. When I look back, it is as if the gods or the ancestors where speaking to me in this naming which actually describes us as a people (or as peoples of African descent) in the Americas. A melange. A gumbo! A callaloo! We are culturally and racially a mixture; we are all creoles, for although we are a people of African descent, we are neither Africans nor Europeans. We are creoles. We, of necessity, reinvented ourselves in the Americas.
       The first issue of Callaloo was exclusively Southern. But, after I moved the journal to the University of Kentucky in Lexington in late 1977, I began to include black writers from other regions of the USA, and by 1980, Callaloo was known as a journal publishing work by and about black writers nationwide. By the way, Callaloo was never a part of Southern University, which meant that originally the journal had no ongoing institutional or certain financial support. The invitation for me to join the faculty of the English Department at the University of Kentucky saved Callaloo, for it was there that I was given a budget to operate the journal. In 1986, the University of Virginia invited me to join its English faculty and offered me additional financial support. My move to the University of Virginia was very important for Callaloo: the Johns Hopkins University Press took on the publication of the journal, and I expanded its scope to include African literature. But it was not until the 1990s that Callaloo became an African Diaspora journal. This means that we now publish work by writers of African descent who live in the Americas and Europe. This also means that we publish work translated into English from a variety of languages. It is probably the Diaspora focus, along with our interest in cultural studies, that makes Callaloo different from most contemporary literary journals. Most con- temporary journals published in the United States focus on European and European American literature.
       I am very happy to report that, beginning this fall (1997), we will add another dimension to Callaloo, which will make it different from other journals published in the USA. Recently we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to begin a Callaloo outreach program to historically black colleges and universities. As you know, we, with selected creative writers as instructors, plan to begin offering two-week writers' workshops, first at four institutions-Spelman Col-lege, Fisk University, Morgan State University and Xavier University. We plan, in the future, to expand the outreach program to include other historically black institutions, if we are able to get additional financial support from a variety of funding sources. If we are able to locate funds, I also want to expand the outreach project to include a month-long workshop at the University of Virginia during the summer, a project that will be available to selected developing black writers nationwide over a three to five-year period.
       Again, I am talking about a need. We need to go further in encouraging, nurturing, and supporting young writers in our various black communities across the country. As a referee and advisory editor of Callaloo, you, too, are aware of the numerous young black writers out there who, with some assistance from working poets and fiction writers, would no doubt become publishable writers if they had some instructions on how to develop their writing skills-if they had the opportunity you had, for example, to study with the kind of excellent writers you had at Brown University. I am convinced that, to affect the future of our literature in another profound, positive way, we must immediately address the aesthetic needs of our developing writers.
       You will notice that I have almost avoided your question, "how has Callaloo survived so long." And yet I am very happy that you asked it. First of all, Callaloo has survived because many generous individuals and two major institutions have contributed to its survival. From the beginning individuals gave us gifts to support the journal financially. Some of them, whose names you will recognize, were our first patrons-e.g., Alice Walker, Trudier Harris, Sonia Sanchez, and Jay Wright. There are many others whose gifts we equally appreciate. Then, too, we have received grants from numerous state and national agencies, such as the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, the Kentucky Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Grants from the Literature Program of the NEA have allowed us to offer occasional payments to authors and support for the publication of full-color portfolios of work by a variety of visual artists. I shall long remember the financial support the University of Kentucky and the University of Virginia have given Callalloo-the latter, continues to give-for it is at those institutions that we have been able to build a journal of national and international reputation.
       On the editorial side, we have been very fortunate: Rita Dove, Norman Baylor, Bernard Lovely, Percival Everett, John Edgar Wide-man, Carrol F. Coates, and a host of other individuals have been, over the years, selfless in their continuing support of the journal. Then, too, there are the established and new writers, here and abroad, who have been generous in allowing us to publish some of their best work. And they have done so knowing that we do not have funds in our budget to pay them for their manuscripts. In other words, Callaloo has survived since 1976 because many individuals and groups believe in it and continue to support it as a necessary forum for writers in the African Diaspora.
       In attempting to answer your survival question further, I am going to risk sounding self-promoting because, to keep this journal alive, I have had to live Callaloo, so to speak; I have had to dedicate a great part of my life to it. To continue the publication of the journal and to maintain a high standard for the work published in it, I have had to ignore my own needs for writing: I have had to give up the writing of poetry and of literary and cultural criticism altogether. In spite of the finished product you see as Callaloo each quarter, times have been very hard for the journal and for me-so hard that, at intervals, I have had to do some of its clerical and other forms of work that editors of journals of Callaloo's scope and reputation are not expected to do. Now that I finally have a managing editor, I can give more attention to my teaching and spend some time on my numerous writing projects, most of which are directly related to Callaloo. (By the way, Tom, I teach half-time; I teach courses in American literature.)

Interviewer: I began reading Callaloo during the summer of 1987, and in that issue you gave Albert Murray the Callaloo Award. In the same issue, you featured work by Samuel R. Delany, Carolivia Herron, Cyrus Cassells, Essex Hemphill, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Carolyn Beard Whitlow-all of whom I read for the first time in Callaloo. When we began The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989, our first two or three schedules were straight out of Callaloo, and people who weren't reading Callaloo gave us so much credit for being good programmers when all the while we were biting you. Even then, you were educating us. How did you do it? Having edited a little myself, I know it takes more than just sitting back and reading what comes in the mail.

Rowell: Thank you for your very kind and generous comments on Callaloo. Your question is not as simple as it might sound, for it not only deals with the goals I continue to set for the journal; it also literally involves my life-for the last twenty-one years. That is, Callaloo, since I founded it in 1976, has been the center of all I do: to make it the forum I have wanted, Callaloo has taken preference over my academic, social, political, and economic life. Even to this present day I continue to spend some of my personal money on the journal.
       First and foremost, Callaloo, at this point in our history, is a forum for creative writing (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction prose, etc.) by African Americans in the United States, and a forum for critical or scholarly work on African American literature and culture by individuals of various backgrounds. In addition to publishing work by veteran creative writers and academics, I want to continue to identify, en-courage, and nurture new and developing African American creative writers and scholars. You are absolutely on the mark, so to speak, when you say that "it takes more than just sitting back reading what comes in the mail." We accept for publication only 5-10% (if that much during some quarters) of what comes in the mail. In order to create an issue, I must often write and telephone-literally beg, sometimes-various new and established writers for poetry, fiction, interviews and other kinds of texts for publication.
       Although the first commitment of Callaloo is to the writing and academic communities in the United States, another goal I have set for the journal is the publication of work by other writers of African descent who, like African Americans in the US, constitute what is known as the African Diaspora. Geographically, I am referring mainly to parts of Europe and the Americas. Yes, we have published work by African writers, including many in North Africa, but the focus of Callaloo is the African Diaspora-not only its English-speaking sectors; I am talking about our publishing work in English translation from a variety of languages, including French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese. It might interest you that the only issues for which we have received an award are those devoted exclusively to "Haiti: The Literature and Culture" (Vol. 15, Nos. 2 & 3, Spring & Summer 1992). The 1995 Fall number is a bilingual issue on "African Brazilian Literature" (Vol. 18, No. 4)-a project we launched in three cities (Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Salvador da Bahia) in Brazil during activities that mark-ed the 300th anniversary of the assassination of freedom fighter Zumbi, a black leader who fought against enslavement in seventeenth-century Brazil.
       Then, too, there are other special issues which do not focus exclusively on people of African descent-e.g., there is the Native American Issue (Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1994), and there is also the Puerto Rican Women Writers Issue (Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer 1994), the latter being the only gathering (or anthology) of these women writers to date (1997). Consuelo López Springfield, the guest editor of that issue, tells me that it, like other special issues we have published, is being used in university and college classrooms. In the near future you will see other special Caribbean focused issues-e.g., a Dutch Antillean Literature and Cul-ture Issue and an issue focusing on the literature of the Dominican Republic. During the fall of 1998, we hope to publish an issue devoted to black literature in Chicago before the 1960s. We have also devoted parts of issues and complete issues to literary and cultural subjects, and to individual writers inside and outside the United States: issues on Jay Wright, Aimé Césaire, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Ernest J. Gaines, Rita Dove, Nicolás Guillén, Wilson Harris, Etheridge Knight, Alice Walker, Emerging Women Writers, and the Dark Room Collective, for example.
       Mounting issues such as those devoted to the literatures in Brazil and in Haiti required travel to those countries, where I conducted taped interviews with many writers. I have also traveled to England and to Guyana to conduct interviews and collect materials for future special issues. I hope that explains how we-not me alone-did it, whatever it was that we did beyond providing a forum which, again I hope, maintains a high quality that honors the people, for they, like the ancestors, will, in time, make us accountable.

Interviewer: Will you talk about the history of your poetry and your desire to finish a first collection, and what that would mean for Callaloo?

Rowell: The history of my writing poetry goes back to the end of a love affair I was trying to get over during the mid-1970s, and this kind of creation, the poem, remains a functional form for me personally. Writing poetry is a necessary catharsis; I need to do it to stay alive in a state of sanity. But since I wrote "Window," I have not been prepared to share with readers the little I have written. I will soon. By the way, my writing poetry is also related to my formal study of literature in English, most of which was poetry. If I have a mastery of any traditions of literature, it is British poetry from Beowulf to the poems of William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and it is African American poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Rita Dove and Jay Wright. I know less about the traditions of European American poetry, and yet it is from the examples of poets like T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O'Hara-along, of course, with those of African American poets (Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Jay Wright)-that I learned to write poetry. My relation to British poetry is academic, formal. My relationship to African American poetry is both cerebral and spiritual. When I get the blues or an uncontrollable sense of outrage, I write poems in my personal journals. I write them to keep my sanity, and I write them to re-visit and re-compose myself.

Interviewer: Talk about the politics of editing.

Rowell: In my editing Callaloo, I literally think of myself as a worker for the ancestors, and for the common good of the people in the African Diaspora. And in that position as worker I sincerely hope that what I do as an editor makes a positive impact on the lives of people, those contributing, reading and listening.

Interviewer: What kind of man and editor would you like to be remembered as?

Rowell: Tom, your question frightens me; it sounds as if you think I'm in my dotage and ready for my dying bed. Well, let's set the record straight; I am not. I'm still in my youth; I am only 56. What I mean is this: I hope that my vision has retained the positive elements of youth while mastering itself toward old age. Then, Tom, I am not certain I will be remembered at all. In this country, we have short memories. No one cares a hoot about editors. Who respects them or the work they do, for that matter? If I am at all going to be remembered, let it be as a man who loved beauty and required it in his life, and as a man who worked very hard to share the beauty in his life with others. And as an editor-to be remembered as a worker for the ancestors and for the people who continue to survive the European and European American crime against humanity.