The last time I saw Ed Hogan, founding editor of Aspect Magazine and Zephyr Press, was in June for a huge Sunday breakfast at the Somerville Diner, mere blocks from the house where he was born, and five months before he was to drown in a canoeing accident in Maine.
It was a neighborhood of triple-deckers, wire fences, and closely packed buildings. The food was “good,” the lines for a booth were long, and we chose to sit at the counter. We both ordered pancakes, bacon, homefries. Ed was tall and thin; he ate like a fat man. But he biked everywhere, sometimes riding the same three-speed he used commuting to Northeastern University more than twenty years before. Our conversation that morning was typically wide-ranging. Ed loved to talk—he had enormous affection for his friends and he loved remembering them almost as much as he relished rehearsing, in indefatigable detail, his latest Zephyr project.
Ed was one of the first people I came to know after moving to Boston in 1976. He was also one of the most helpful. He treated all of us out-of-towners with respect and patience. He introduced me to people; he typeset Agni. We often talked about collaborating together on some project. For a while it looked like Zephyr might publish our 20th anniversary anthology, but then a grant didn’t come through. We laughed a lot at the strange business we were in. When we began our work as “literary publishers,” small was still considered beautiful. Small was a destination, not a designation. You began small and you stayed small because then you could be personally involved in everything that had your name behind it. Small presses were intentionally alternative—now many small publishing houses seem like New York wannabes. Which is not necessarily a bad thing; it depends. Certainly, after twenty years, we were both tired of explaining to people why we stayed with it. Debt plagued Ed and Zephyr: he knew he was playing a game in which he competed with the trust fund set. Yet his achievements were remarkable. Not only was his collected Akhmatova a triumph, selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year, but his Ukrainian anthology From Three Worlds was an equally important first which has won him an appreciative and loyal following on both sides of the Atlantic. During our three years of work on it, I was repeatedly moved by Ed’s determination. Despite considerable obstacles, he wanted to see the project through to its end. Here again his success can be measured: at his death, the anthology was about to go into a second edition. Ed was in fact one of the heroes of American small press publishing, earning a place for himself alongside the likes of Harriet Monroe, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Hitchcock, and Sylvia Beach. I’m pleased to announce the creation of the Ed Hogan Award, which will be given annually to a small press editor for excellence in publishing.
After breakfast, Ed made me walk over to his car so I could admire the shiny new red canoe still strapped to the top.
pictured: Ed Hogan (right), Askold Melnyczuk (center)
photo courtesy of Marie Aronson
Askold Melnyczuk is the founding editor of AGNI and contributes a series of essays called “Shadowboxing.” He is professor of creative writing at UMass Boston. Excerpts from his anti-memoir in progress have appeared recently in The Threepenny Review and Epiphany. The Epiphany excerpt, “Turbulence, Love,” was cited as Notable in The Best American Essays 2010. His third novel, The House of Widows (Graywolf Press), won the Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 2008. His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2001) was called “exquisite, original” by The Washington Post, and his first, What Is Told (Faber and Faber), was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994.
In 1997 Melnyczuk received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including The McGraw-Hill Book of Poetry, Literature: The Evolving Canon, and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He has edited three volumes in the Graywolf Take Three Poetry Series, as well as a volume of tributes to Father Daniel Berrigan and a livre d’artiste on painter Gerry Bergstein. He also coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine.
He previously taught at Harvard University, the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars, and Boston University, where he edited AGNI until its thirtieth anniversary year in 2002. A research associate of the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard, he has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and PEN New England and has been a fellow of the Boston Foundation. In 2001 he received PEN American Center’s biennial Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as well as PEN New England’s “Friend to Writers” Award.
Melnyczuk founded AGNI in 1972 as an undergraduate at Antioch College and Arrowsmith Press in 2006. (updated 10/2022)
See him interviewed on New England Authors.