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View from the Riverbank
The Riverbank Review is a small magazine. I am the only full-time staff person. A committee of five (including me) shapes the editorial content, and we have just three people working in the office. In addition to editorial responsibilities, I'm often the one who answers the phone, and I spend as much time lugging heavy boxes around as I spend engaged in creative editorial activity. That's all right with me. By the time an issue makes it to the printer, I feel as if every muscle in my body and every part of my brain have been called into action. The work may be tiring, but there's immense satisfaction in it.
From the beginning, our vision has been to create a magazine that is a pleasure to read and to hold—a magazine that has an effect on adults parallel to the
effect that a beautiful and engaging book has on a child. Rather than getting up on a soapbox and preaching about the importance of reading however many minutes a day, we want to draw adults in and let them re-experience the
pleasures of children's literature for themselves. If adults are inspired, they will be likely to pass that on to children. The original illustration that is specially commissioned for each cover and the considerable design
skill of our art director help us to achieve this aim with each issue.
The kinds of thinking that are required in putting the Riverbank Review together include big, free-roaming discussions that touch on themes we'd like to cover and artists and writers we'd like to pull into the mix, moving into increasingly specific fine-tuning of each issue. I've been told that the magazine has a strong personality, and that there are books publishers think of as "Riverbank books." This is interesting to me, because there is so much (generally friendly) disagreement on our committee when we sit down and hash out what titles should be reviewed in the magazine or considered for the Riverbank Review's
annual Children's Books of Distinction Awards.
Though I've learned to behave professionally most of the time, it still hurts when the larger group doesn't share my enthusiasm for a certain book, and I know
it is the same for each of them. The main reason we're engaged in this work is that we care deeply about children's books. We make every effort to be fair-minded, which means factoring our own preferences and weaknesses into
the equation and respecting one another's judgment. But I wouldn't say any of us is objective. Nor do we aspire to be.
My first experience with editorial work was as a twenty-two-year-old, serving as poetry editor of a literary magazine at the University of Wisconsin. Working
with a committee of ten, one of the first things I had to decide was how to deal with difference of opinion. Guided by instinct more than experience at that point, I had a natural aversion to adopting a system of consensus—or
even voting by majority. I wanted to find a way to honor passionate minority opinions. I didn't want the published magazine to reflect only what we could agree upon; I also wanted to publish work that excited the strongest
responses. It seemed to me that this would result in a more interesting magazine.
I still feel this way. If the Riverbank Review were a pure reflection of my personal aesthetic, there is a lot of interesting work that wouldn't find its way onto its pages. Though, as a reader, I'm responsive to a wide range of books, there is some work each season that fails to move me—not because it isn't high quality, but because I'm a bit thickheaded when it comes to certain kinds of books. Knowing this about myself is actually freeing in a way. It makes me receptive to the input of others, and ensures that I won't be tempted to try to control every piece of the magazine.
The structure of the Children's Books of Distinction Awards nicely accommodates the notion of valuing a range of opinions and aesthetics—with ten finalists
and three winners in each category, every year there are titles on our list that some of us love and others aren't as in tune with. But as a group, we're always excited to put all the titles forward.
What, then, is a "Riverbank book"? It's a book that we think will make a difference to those who read it. It may be what some would think of as a
"literary" work. By this I don't mean fancy or esoteric language, but powerful writing, pleasing production, and striking, expressive illustration. If there is a "Riverbank reader," it's someone with a
strong interest in children's literature as literature. This includes librarians, teachers, booksellers, and parents—groups that are usually treated as if they were different species, but are in fact engaged in
important work together: inspiring a love of reading in children.
Martha Davis Beck is editor of the Riverbank Review of books for young readers, a quarterly journal offering a lively discussion of children's literature with book reviews, essays, interviews, and other features for those seeking high-quality books for young readers. To learn more about this publication, visit the Riverbank Review's website at www.riverbankreview.com.
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