Memoir of a Magazine #2: Changing Landscapes
Gary Raymond answers the questions of readers and writers of Wales Arts Review.
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.
In this latest series, I’m hoping I can give some valuable insight into how something like Wales Arts Review was built, how it operated, and how it survived as long as it did.
Last week, I spoke a little about how we started, what we hoped to achieve, and whether I thought we did achieve any of those things.
This week might be a little more controversial. I hope I don’t drive anyone to a rage - that’s not my intention. I’m just trying to be as honest as I can be from my experiences.
*holds breath*
*submerges*
How did you see Welsh cultural life changing during the tenure of WAR?
I don’t know how much it changed or how much I changed. But I never saw the cultural dominance of Welsh nationalism taking the hold it has not only across the arts institutions, but across the body of artists, too. Stupid really, because I often warned against the infiltration of the executive positions of the cultural institutions of Wales by Welsh nationalists, and yet I suppose I never believed it would have a material effect on the day-to-day running of things. Not really. I should have taken the shift more seriously when it was happening.
When we started out, the founders of Wales Arts Review were understood and respected as English speaking Welsh writers. By the end of the twelve years we are something of an anomaly. The Welsh language is not the priority of Wales Arts Review (there, I said it) and it is the priority of the executive class of Wales’s cultural industries now (and I mean, it is a priority in the face of everything else - everything). So, in that sense, WAR is old fashioned and outmoded.
During the life of Wales Arts Review, our attitudes to the publishing of Welsh language content fluctuated, but not for the reasons you might think. In the earliest days, I don’t remember ever discussing it. I don’t remember it coming up, and I don’t remember any funding body ever asking us to turn our attention to it. This may have had something to do with the fact in those times the Arts Council had an English CEO (in Nick Capaldi), and English Arts Development Executive (in David Alston), and a famously anti-Welsh language Chair (in Dai Smith). By the time the Books Council funded us (from 2014) we were funded from the English language magazine fund, so any desires, had there been any, for us to publish in Welsh, were moot.
But the Arts Council, who funded special research and business development projects we ran throughout the life of WAR (for small funds of money that would rarely amount to more than £10k a year), slowly began to ask us more about what we were going to do to provide Welsh language content on the website. Eventually, promising to overtly worship at the temple of Cymraeg was the very least we could offer for any hope of a successful grant application.
But we also began to realise that publishing some Welsh would be a better representation of Welsh culture to our international readers (which were growing at a fast pace from the very start - in 2021 WAR could for the time boast a majority readership from outside of Wales ). The main obstacle during the time we tried to address this was - lo and behold - money!
Okay, so we had an issue: that if we wanted to bring into the fold a “Welsh language editor”, then they would have to work for the same scrap levels of remuneration the rest of us aspired to; this while editing work with proper monies attached was available in Welsh language magazines. Most people I approached had the good grace to not want to waste my time by even meeting with me. I did have meetings with other people, but the lack of money was always going to be a problem. When, eventually, funders began to suggest that special grants could be gotten for us to employ a Welsh language editor, a further, more discomforting realisation revealed itself. There was potential here that I was going to be turning around to my editorial team, some of whom were taking around £500 a half year as a token payment for work on WAR, and introduce them to our new Welsh language editor, grant-funded by the Arts Council (for instance) to the tune of a nice tasty part-time role, fully compensated to industry standards. That would have meant a mutiny of my editorial team and the implosion of WAR.
The balance of things when you’re running a magazine with no money is the greatest challenge, and that has sometimes meant turning down money, because in the longer term it would have damaged the delicate ecosystem. Long-term funding (and perhaps, even, commercial sustainability) was always the goal for WAR, and short term solutions were always eyed with suspicion. Over the years the political perspectives of the funding executive have become more pronounced than their cultural ambitions. There has been a gradual lack of understanding what it is something like WAR does, what is there for, and how it could have survived.
During Covid, the Books Council was charged with administering a one-off fund (it was subsequently repeated) to encourage publishers to platform more ethnically diverse pool of writers and editors. As we didn’t feel we were underperforming in this area, I decided we would not apply for it. WAR has always believed in not applying for public money simply because it is there. In a business made uncomfortably competitive in this way, I always felt that if we could leave the route to funding clear for others in circumstances where someone else needed it more than us, then we would. WAR has never been a glutton for public money. When we had our annual appraisal with the Books Council that year (I think it was 2022 - maybe 21) we were questioned as to why we had not applied to the fund. I made it clear that we did not feel we were unrepresentative or that we had a problem with publishing and platforming writers from “diverse backgrounds” (and we had data to back that perception up).
I was fully prepared to be argued down on our decision, and be disavowed of my perspectives, but nobody in that meeting could offer any argument, let alone one that convinced me I was wrong to not apply for the fund. Instead, we were told that if we suffered a cut in the upcoming funding review (the one that has just taken place in 2023; the one that saw Planet and New Welsh Review axed, and for which WAR decided not to apply) then it would almost certainly be because we hadn’t done enough in the area of diversity. Not applying for that fund, regardless of our well-argued reasons and supporting data, would count against us.
Later that year, a second iteration of that fund was opened and we did apply. Ben Glover put together a pretty strong (I thought) project looking at publishing artists with invisible disabilities. Perhaps rather cynically, I said to Ben before he submitted the application, the Welsh Government-backed Books Council aren’t going to like the word “invisible” attached to their diversity push. Our application was turned down.
But all of this is bureaucracy, and I realise it’s not necessarily in the spirit of the question you asked. How have I seen Welsh cultural life change? Many of the changes have been the same as anywhere in the UK. The thing that marks Wales apart is the new dominance of the Welsh language in every corner of its cultural institutions. Which was the aim all along. As has been the case in Wales for a hundred years or more, a select group of cultural bureaucrats at the executive level of our institutions decide what Welsh culture will officially look like, and I am not one of those people.
If you have a question for Gary Raymond about the life of Wales Arts Review email him at gary@walesartsreview.org
Thank you again this week to Tomos Williams, musician and band leader, writer for Wales Arts Review, friend and Welsh nationalist, for those questions.
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 for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books