Memoir of a Magazine #3: The Pen and the Sword
Gary Raymond answers the questions from Wales Arts Review writers and readers.
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.
First things first. In the last newsletter, I rather flippantly referred to Professor Dai Smith as “anti-Welsh language”. This was wrong and without doubt gives the wrong impression of Dai’s life work. It was an overly simple phrasing of what I meant, made all the more narrow by me squeezing it into parenthesis. Dai Smith is not anti-Welsh language, but rather has been a vociferous and often fearless champion of the Welsh experience as lived through English. This has often brought him into conflict with those who believe the English language lessens the Welshness of those who speak it, and certainly with those who seek to minimalise this cultural majority. That is a very different thing to what I wrote, but I hope you can see now I have explained it better, it’s what I meant.
Dai Smith did not ask me for this correction, by the way. But it’s correct to make it, and also, I think, contributes to the tone of honesty and candidness that I want this series to have.
Now… on to the next question…
You've stepped up and spoken out in some strong editorials over the years in a way that one doesn't see from other publications in Cymru. Which one of said editorials are you most proud of? And secondly, is there something you wish you'd spoken on at the time but didn't?
I’ll try and answer those two questions as one. Firstly, (although it’s an answer to your second question), I don’t ever remember not writing about a subject out of fear or an attempt at being politic. I have always tried, as a writer and editor, to be honest and sincere. People have always said Wales is small, if you piss people off they will get you in the end - but I suppose I’ve always had more faith in Wales than that. I still don’t think the fears are founded. But maybe I just haven’t ever really pissed off the right people.
But, of course, there have been many times when I’ve wanted to write about something and haven’t. But that lack of action has always been about time and resources. It’s not a matter of running your mouth of. An editorial like the ones you’re talking about require research, sometimes long conversations with people, meetings, and then drafting and redrafting, editorial conversations, and in extreme circumstances, discussions with the board. In one editorial I wrote, I asked if a particular figure had been blind to the possible ramifications of his actions. After all of the stages I just mapped out above, I shared the piece with our advisory board just to see what came back (and for general feedback). One board member commented that she had heard somewhere that figure had recently been diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition and so asking if he was “blind” could - maybe - be grounds to attack the article for insensitivity. I cut that phrasing. Those articles - in fact every word I have ever written for Wales Arts Review - were done without pay. So, I feel a personal sadness that I couldn’t write more of them, but it was more often than not impossible with our resources.
Do I wish I’d worked harder to write more of these pieces? Yes. But I would have burned out quickly. I wish I’d written something about the brilliant Sonya Douglas when she was disgracefully cancelled from the Arts Council-funded Critically Speaking podcast for refusing to giver her pronouns at the head of the interview. In the last six or seven years, freedom of speech has become a contentious issue, and we should have published more on this subject directly.
I wish, at various points, I’d written something about the diminishing of Wales Book of the Year under the often confused and unambitious visions of Literature Wales (difficult, seeing as WAR hosted and sponsored the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award for many years). I wish I’d written something about the inability of the Welsh Government to appoint a culture minister who has any real interest in art and literature. I could have done that at the point any of the culture minsters were put in office with one exception (Dafydd Ellis Thomas).
I also wished I’d sourced and published more out-and-out satire. A slight tangent, I know, but just in case I never get asked about it, I think Wales is a country ripe for the taking and yet it has a very poor satirical tradition. I think the short series we published by “Rhod Beard” which including perhaps my favourite piece of satirical writing ever to come out of Wales, the takedown of NTW titled “National Theme Park Wales”. (Rhod Beard was Phil Morris, by the way, if you didn’t know).
The piece I am most proud of is probably the piece I wrote about the Hughes Report, and the reason is not just that I believed in the rightness of my position, but because it placed WAR where we all had hoped it would one day be: at the centre of cultural debates in this country, helping set the agenda. On a personal note, it was very pleasing to write something where I could entirely stand on principle, as I was not defending Lit Wales (as was a common misinterpretation), I was attacking the amateurish laziness of the attempt to destroy it. It made Wales look bad.
Even during the peak identity politics moment, WAR always felt focused on the culture rather than whatever happened to be the cause célèbre . Did it feel like a personal responsibility to maintain that critical integrity? And what does that say about your values and ambition, both WAR as an institution and yours personally as a writer and broadcaster?
I fundamentally believe that the purpose of a cultural magazine is to platform debate, maintain or improve the standards of debate, reflect, analyse, and evaluate. I wanted WAR to do these tings with wit, integrity, and maybe a little bit of arrogance (it seems to get some attention). But I utterly believe also that a magazine should not mistake itself for an activist organisation. When I argued this point in public several years ago, the next day the two PhD students who had been running our podcast wrote to me to say they were quitting making the podcast because they so passionately disagreed with me about whether magazines should be activist organisations. I just say that to give you a taste of the way the world was evolving when this happened in 2021. We respectfully disagreed over the point and parted ways.
As for my critical integrity; I don’t get paid enough for my integrity ever to be threatened.
And as for values? I think “values” are currently things that are talked about far more than they are displayed. I think (I hope) the values of Wales Arts Review have been apparent the whole time. And perhaps if anyone cares to look, mine are too.
If you have a question for Gary Raymond about the life of Wales Arts Review email him at gary@walesartsreview.org
Thank you to novelist Richard Owain Roberts 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