Fugue

Fugue is an American literary journal based at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Founded in 1990, it is edited entirely by graduate students in the university's English and creative writing programs, and it publishes poetry, fiction, essays, hybrid work and visual art from established and emerging writers. The journal appears twice a year in a distinctive paired format: a print issue for summer and fall and a digital issue for winter and spring. It hosts an annual competition in poetry and prose, is associated with the Palouse Literary Festival, and is pronounced, as its own reference entry helpfully notes, fewg, like the musical form whose interweaving voices its title evokes.

Founding in 1990

Fugue was founded in 1990 under the editorship of J. C. Hendee. From its beginning it has been a graduate student enterprise: the journal is managed and edited entirely by University of Idaho graduate students, with help from graduate and undergraduate readers. That structure has persisted for more than three decades, making Fugue one of the longer-lived student-run literary journals in the United States. Its International Standard Serial Number is 1054-6014, and its issues are numbered sequentially; by the later 2010s the journal had reached its fifty-first and fifty-third issues, a pace consistent with semiannual publication since 1990.

The journal's front matter in those issues describes it as a journal of new literature edited by graduate students in the university's English and Creative Writing programs, made possible by funding from the English Department and the Creative Writing Program. Ron McFarland, a longtime University of Idaho professor, served as faculty advisor to the magazine, an example of the light faculty scaffolding that supports an otherwise student-run operation.

Moscow, Idaho, and the Palouse

The journal's home, Moscow, is a small city in northern Idaho, home of the University of Idaho, the state's land-grant university. The surrounding Palouse, a region of rolling wheat-growing hills shared with eastern Washington, gives the journal its regional setting and lends its name to the Palouse Literary Festival, with which the journal is associated. A literary journal in a small agricultural city might seem remote from American publishing's centers, but Fugue's contributor history shows the opposite pattern: national writers publishing in a journal edited by graduate students in Idaho, read wherever literary journals are read.

The university's MFA program in creative writing is the journal's engine. The program's curriculum has formally included an internship in Fugue, so editorial work on the journal is woven into graduate training rather than treated as an extracurricular extra. Students learn the field, as one of its editors wrote, by doing the work: reading hundreds of submissions, choosing cover art, conducting interviews, checking proofs and managing contests and marketing.

What Fugue Publishes

Fugue curates fiction, essays, poetry, plays, interviews and visual-text hybrids, and its own descriptions add hybrid work and visual art to that list. The hybrid category is notable: the journal explicitly welcomes work that crosses genre boundaries, a stance also reflected in its visual-text category, where image and language are combined in a single piece. In addition to established authors, Fugue actively publishes up-and-coming writers, and its submission guidelines have invited up to five poems, two short-shorts, one story or one essay at a time, with submissions in more than one genre sent separately.

Contributors are paid and receive a complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears, according to the journal's published front matter. Simultaneous submissions have been accepted on condition that the journal is notified immediately if a piece is accepted elsewhere. Submissions have historically been accepted from September 1 through May 1, following the academic year, with material received outside that window returned unread.

Print and Digital: The Two-Issue Year

Fugue's publishing model splits its year between media. The summer-fall issue is a physical, print journal, while the winter-spring issue is digital. Subscription terms published in its print issues priced a year, one print issue and one digital, at ten dollars, and two years at eighteen dollars, with institutional subscriptions at higher rates and a supplement for international subscribers. The model preserves the tactile object that literary readers value, the print issue with commissioned cover art, while using the digital issue to contain costs and widen reach.

Cover art is treated as part of the publication rather than packaging: the journal's issues credit their cover artists individually, with examples including Jason Brammer's painting Sonic Outpost on Issue 53 and Dee Nelson's Red 3 on Issue 51. The attention to covers mirrors the journal's inclusion of visual art and visual-text work inside its pages.

Notable Contributors

Fugue's documented contributors include Kathy Acker, Jacob M. Appel, Samuel R. Delany, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Raymond Federman, Brenda Hillman, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, James Reiss, Pattiann Rogers, Virgil Suárez, Robert Wrigley and Charles Baxter. The list spans experimental fiction, mainstream literary poetry and the literature of the Northwest: Wrigley is a poet closely associated with Idaho itself, while figures such as Acker and Delany represent traditions far from regional writing. That range supports the journal's claim to publish established and emerging writers without a house style constraint.

Sharon Olds's connection to the journal also appears in the University of Idaho's own records: faculty advisor Ron McFarland wrote of working with Olds in Idaho, and Olds is among the writers whose appearances in Fugue's pages the journal's editors have used when introducing the magazine's history to new readers. For a student-edited journal, such a roster is the product of accumulated reputation: each notable contributor makes the next one's participation more plausible.

The Anne Sexton Rediscoveries

Fugue's most striking single publishing event came in 2018, when it published four rediscovered poems and an essay by Anne Sexton, written between 1958 and 1959 and originally published in The Christian Science Monitor. Sexton, one of the central figures of American confessional poetry, had been dead for more than four decades, and the appearance of recovered early work in a graduate student journal in Idaho drew attention well beyond the journal's usual readership. The episode demonstrated what a literary journal can still do in the archival dimension: shorter periodical work by major poets can fall out of the collected record, and a journal willing to print it performs a service to scholarship as well as to readers.

Contests and Festival

Fugue hosts an annual competition in both poetry and prose. Contest work is part of the journal's rhythm: editors have described marketing the upcoming contest alongside reading regular submissions, and the competitions give writers a second route into the journal's pages. Market listings for the journal note a three-dollar submission fee for written work in some categories, with fee-free submissions available on request in cases of financial hardship and no fee for reviews and interviews, a hardship policy that widens access to its contests and reading periods.

The journal is also associated with hosting the Palouse Literary Festival, extending its role from publisher to convener: a festival brings writers and readers physically to the region the journal calls home. Together, journal, contests and festival make Fugue the center of a small literary system in Moscow rather than merely a magazine office.

Student Editorship as Training

A guest account by Fugue editor Stacy Miller, published in 2018, describes the enterprise from inside: readers working through hundreds of submissions on Submittable, marketing editors publicizing contests and mining the archives, and an editor-in-chief checking final proofs. Her conclusion was that there is almost no better way to get a feel for what is happening in the world of writing than to work on a journal. That is the educational theory of the student-run magazine, and Fugue has practiced it continuously since 1990 under successive cohorts, with editorship passing from Hendee's founding through editors such as Jordan Durham in the journal's fifty-first issue era.

The model depends on institutional memory: funding from the English Department and Creative Writing Program, a faculty advisor, published guidelines and an archive of past issues carry the journal across the rapid turnover of graduate cohorts, which typically serve only a few years each.

Reading and Submitting

Readers can subscribe to Fugue's print-plus-digital year, buy individual issues, and consult its website, fuguejournal.com, for current mastheads, contest deadlines and guidelines. Digital issues widen access beyond subscribers. Writers should check current guidelines before submitting, since a student-edited journal's reading windows and contest rules are set anew by each cohort; historically, submissions opened September 1 and closed May 1, contributors were paid, and new work in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and hybrid forms was welcomed from writers at every career stage. Three and a half decades after its founding, Fugue remains what it was designed to be: a working journal, edited by students, publishing writers of national standing beside writers appearing for the first time.