Memoir of a Magazine #1: Origins and Ambitions
In a new series, the co-founder of Wales Arts Review answers the questions of readers and contributors about any and all aspects of the history of the magazine.
Gary Raymond co-founded Wales Arts Review in 2012. It was born out of a conversation in a pub during half-time of a football match that was on the tele. Twelve years later, Wales Arts Review is read all around the world by hundreds of thousands of people. It has published the finest writers and artists of several generations that Wales has produced, and on a stunning range of topics. Over the next few weeks, this series will aim to explore and celebrate the life of the magazine.
If you missed the full introduction to this series, you can find it here.
When you started Wales Arts Review what did you hope to achieve?
When we started WAR we were explicit within the group about several things. We wanted to emulate publications like The Paris Review and The London/New York/ LA Review of Books. We wanted to give Welsh writers a place to write about anything they wanted to write about, not restrict any of us to “Welsh” topics. (That self-imposed restriction came later - and it became very important to us).
We were explicit that we would publish things that were unashamedly highbrow, but stuff that was accessible, non-academic, and with a sense of humour and maybe even a sense of mischief if called for, and trashy if we were so inclined. Anything, really. Good writing was all we were interested in. No political motives, no activistic motives; just the desire to publish good writing. And, as a sort of supportive, secondary ambition, we wanted to improve the standard of public debate in Wales on arts and culture. That was why we set it up.
But we also set it up because Dylan Moore and I had the magazine bug. Dylan had invited me to write something for his first magazine CFUK, which I remember getting some very sniffy looks from punters at the Hay Festival when he was up there handing them out on street corners. CFUK was as underground as it gets, and I think Dylan used to print them out on the photocopier in the school he taught at (back when you could get away with things like that). When the gas ran out of CFUK, which I seem to remember ran for a year or two, Dylan came to me and asked if I would be interested in setting up a new magazine with him. I had just been on the editorial board for the creative writing magazine as an undergrad at my university, so I had a keen interest in branching out and up and seeing what I could do with complete creative freedom and more of a grip on the direction of things. So, we had that bug, and at the same time. What we made was a print magazine called The Raconteur.
The Raconteur did some really good things. It lasted maybe six issues and we published some really fine writers such as Rachel Trezise and Niall Griffiths and Joe Dunthorne, and even Alain de Botton and some others from outside of Wales. The Raconteur taught me that editing a magazine could be a very serious plaything. We learned our trade on that mag, Dylan and me - how to structure something, how to balance content, how to design and create some kind of buzz. That was then Dean Lewis started illustrating inside and designing covers for us. He was an old drinking pal of mine - a welder with an animation degree from Newport. He has a very memorable eye-catching style, and he did excellent ink renditions of the likes of Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow and, I’m sure, a show-stopping Dylan Thomas. Dean, like Dylan and I, was very eager to push his own boundaries and try new things.
What happened with The Raconteur was it was bloody hard. Fun - enormous fun and very rewarding - but bloody hard. Every sale was a huge achievement, even though we had a really good magazine, and there was a general feeling we had the support of the Welsh literature scene, enthusiastic to see some new initiatives taking place. But eventually, the financial cost of putting it together became too much. Dylan was a teacher and I was working behind a bar, so we weren’t rolling in spare cash. I think the Books Council gave us about a grand a year (maybe two) and we put that into our printing costs. Our final edition was a book-sized version published by Parthian Books (in the spirit of unveiling some of the workings of the magazine industry as we operated in it: the Parthian edition of The Raconteur was a book because Parthian had a spare ISBN number we could use, whereas if we’d put out a magazine like the previous iterations, we’d have had to purchase a new ISSN). They had come to us with a hugely generous offer of absorbing the costs and lending some acumen and distribution and probably a load else which really did move us up a league or two. But something didn’t click - something didn’t work - and by the time it was done we all wanted to take some time off and it gradually dawned on us we wouldn’t come back to it. The product was excellent, but it hadn’t been quite so much fun.
A while later, in 2011, Dylan invited me to a Cardiff pub to watch the football and at half-time we decided we’d start a website - we would produce the website just like a periodical, at first to be weekly with the articles sent out via links in an email newsletter. Back then I was living in a damp-riddled one-bedroom flat above a charity shop storage room in Newport, and at the kitchen table of that grotty den was where one evening we mapped out the entire mission of Wales Arts Review. The vision barely altered from that meeting until now.
We also decided at that meeting - and this was part of the ethos we wanted to establish - that we would see who else wanted to be involved from the ground level. Dean Lewis was already committed to whatever we wanted to do next after The Raconteur, and Phil Morris had written for us too and was an obvious figure to bring in (Phil went on to become our managing editor and was a central role in the successes of the first half of WAR’s existence. He very sadly died in 2022, and you can read my tribute to him here).
Before we had our next meeting, John Lavin joined us (who would become WAR’s de facto books editor), as did Steph Power, two brilliant and passionate writers (Steph also a highly accomplished musician and composer who would go on to run the musical content of WAR for over half its life). That meeting took place in Dylan’s Pontcanna flat. By the third meeting, which was held in the Rummer Tavern on a Saturday afternoon, we had added more to the discussion, including a poetry editor from Swansea, Carl Griffin (a softly spoken Swansea City supporter with a tattoo of a Kalashnikov on his forearm). Laura Wainwright was also at those early meetings, as was the more established figure of Jon Gower, who became quite an influential presence in those early days. Ben Glover, who eventually replaced Phil Morris as Managing Editor of Wales Arts Review in 2016, was also around from the beginning, keen to bring political commentary to the pages of whatever we would eventually publish.
So, it is quite incorrect for me to remember WAR as my vision - although I was central to the development of the vision it did have. Those involved all had similar motivations, similar outlooks, similar beliefs in what a cultural journal should be and what art was for. WAR was immediately all-consuming. We were all obsessed with it, because it felt like we were on the cusp of making something important. It was a great team, and it was all about passion, as there was not a penny between us.
Do you think you reached what you were aiming for?
I think we succeeded on each of those points for different lengths of time. I honestly believe at its peak WAR was not emulating those titles mentioned above, but it was actually entirely its own thing with a strong identity and style. It was us.
And I have never been embarrassed by those pretensions, which is not an easy thing to carry off in Wales, a place so chronically embarrassed by anything that might for a moment look like a lofty ambition from the wrong corner of the country.
Here’s an anecdote for you: In 2014, WAR was given some money by the Arts Council of Wales to build a new website that would mean we could sell advertising space on it (our original website had no such facility). The story that led to ACW supporting us at that time, and the part ACW Chair Professor Dai Smith played in it, will no doubt come up in the answer to another question in future, but for now, just to say we relaunched with a day-long drop-in event at the Murenger House pub in Newport. It was a big day for all of us and was the biggest day of my writing life up to that point. Not many people dropped in, but some did, and some press did, and we had a good time and drank to the work we’d put into the new look WAR.
But also that day a new twitter account started called Wales Farts Review which mocked us for our long articles and self-importance, and, well, I suppose, our intellectual ambitions for the magazine. We all thought it was funny, and I must admit (in the spirit of honesty I have promised for these answers) I find it less funny looking back on it. Pisstakery being the highest form of flatter etc. but now I’m tired and middle-aged, I see how clearly some people took against us. But the other thing I remember is when novelist Matthew David Scott came in to raise a glass with us that day, he was convinced we had set up that parody twitter account ourselves, and I was quite annoyed that we hadn’t thought of it. We never did find out who set it up. Some dickhead.
As time went on, we realised that to make the most of the early success we would have to streamline the idea of who we were. This was probably around the same time as the new website was being created (by the excellent Virtual Pudding - Newport boys bored of making websites for local authorities). And so, the idea of every published piece having some explicit connection to Wales came in, either be it through the author or the author’s subject. That was a big shift for us. It marked us out as having a specific remit, and that was probably our most important marketing decision.
As for that secondary, but not small, ambition of improving the standard of debate on arts and culture in Wales. I think, for a while, we did improved the standard of debate around the arts of Wales. But we do not leave either Wales nor WAR in those heady spaces we may have touched at some point in the last decade. The level of public debate about the arts in Wales is in a worse place than when we started, I am sure of that. WAR was not been able to sustain its peak, through no fault of our own (a topic for another time).
A footnote on that last point:
You may not know, but WAR partially came out of a real desire to improve the way art was discussed in Wales. And not by us. By National Theatre Wales. John McGrath, when he was Artistic Director there, set up a critics mentor scheme in which aspiring cultural writers in Wales were paired with professional critics/arts journalists with broadsheet careers. Dylan Moore was on that year-long scheme (as was Adam Somerset, if I remember rightly, a presence in the pages of WAR throughout its twelve years), and when Dylan and I were discussing what would become WAR in 2011, he was doing so in the mindset of someone looking to put the experiences he had on that programme into practice.
It also meant that when we launched we had the full support of National Theatre Wales, something that was invaluable. That support lasted, as far as I recall, as long as McGrath was at the helm. We knew from the off, then, that improving the standard of debate could only happen with the support of major cultural institutions. John McGrath instinctively understood the importance of a healthy critical culture to the health of Welsh theatre. Not everybody at NTW believed that, and when McGrath left, that support, engagement, and respect between us and them quickly dissipated. That was a great shame.
Thank you to Tomos Williams, musician and band leader, for those questions. He has more questions I’ll address in the next newsletter.
If you have a question for Gary Raymond about the life of Wales Arts Review email him at gary@walesartsreview.org
Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years, and is currently its executive editor. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is available now for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books.
W.A.R.
Could I submit either an article on the state of mental health care given by NHS Wales or quite dark short story for consideration ? Thanks.G.K.Brightmore