Against the ferment: Bluestem celebrates blog relaunch

Bluestem has been many things since its founding in 1966. First, it was Karamu, a slim staple-bound journal boasting its price, one dollar and twenty-five cents, on its lower left cover. As one might expect of a cultural artifact from the late 60s, Karamu’s first issue was deeply concerned with breaking out of customary ways of thinking and seeing. They envisioned a quarterly publication produced by faculty, students, and staff at Eastern Illinois University, but independent of it, so as to have the freedom to “try out the idea that has lain so long grumbling inside them.” This idea was magazine as cultural meeting place; indeed, the African word “karamu,” Humanities Editor Ray Schneider wrote, means “meeting place,” the place in the village where people gather to talk, to laugh, to express concerns, to take a look at their “cultural ferment” and see if it could be brought to vital life again.

If this all sounds a bit too sixties, Bluestem continued to morph and grow; more women came into the university and onto the staff of the magazine, shaking the magazine out of its own “ferment” of pages full of men’s words and ideas. As technology got better, the magazine became a sturdy perfect-bound print journal. When Roxane Gay came aboard a decade or so back, she wisely suggested a name change, away from the appropriated Africana and into an embrace of what we are most: of the prairie, nestled here in east central Illinois among cornfields and, yes, bluestem.

As many other journals have done, we transformed from a print journal to an online journal, recognizing the need for something less expensive and more accessible. As our masthead shifts and changes, as publications’ should and must do—Schneider was really onto something with that cultural ferment—we look back fifty-seven years into the past and wonder what the founders of Bluestem would think of us now sharing words over Squarespace and Submittable, with our staff of so many genders, ages, ethnicities, sexualities, abilities. Would they have had any conception of a meeting place in cyberspace, where poems about Buffy the Vampire Slayer collide with prose about a vibrant moment feeding an apple to a horse? 

In its recent history, Bluestem has produced, on-and-off, a blog, a supplement to the central work of the magazine that allows for more frequent conversation: thoughts on literature and books, on publishing and the marketplaces, on writing and the lives of those of us who chose to make art in difficult times—just as our founders did. We’ve decided that 2023 is the right time to restart that conversation. We invite you into the dialogue that started over half a century ago. Long may it continue.