Bay Area journal is an improbable success story in world of letters
The quarterly Zyzzyva has been printing the works of first time and established West Coast writers for nearly 25 years. All the while it's kept true to itself.
SAN FRANCISCO — And now, from the boats-against-the-current file, comes the improbable story of Howard Junker and his strangely named literary magazine, Zyzzyva -- a rare tale of success from that imperiled realm known as the printed word.
It begins in the early 1980s. Nuclear plant construction in the United States was becoming an endangered enterprise. Because of this trend, Bechtel Corp., the San Francisco-based construction behemoth, commenced a round of company downsizing.
Soon enough Dr. Layoff reached his long, cold finger into Bechtel's public relations department and put the touch on Junker, a fortysomething technical writer. His response then would be woefully familiar today in this, another epoch of job cuts.
"I was devastated," he recalled, sipping hot chocolate in a cafe called Bittersweet. "I needed a job."
What he had instead fell somewhere between an idea and an impulse.
Another cog in the Bechtel publicity department, an older fellow from Ohio, used to speak lovingly about a literary magazine he had published long ago in Columbus. Junker had been intrigued and now, out of work, decided to make a stab at starting up a litmag, as they are called, of his own.
"It was a redemptive gesture," he said. "Something that I thought I could do and that I could admire. It was like a midlife crisis."
He'd written for magazines and produced pamphlets for Bechtel. And he bore an uncanny resemblance to John Updike, whom he met once at a party. These were Junker's literary qualifications as he began to canvass San Francisco's vibrant literary scene, looking to scrape together money and manuscripts for a magazine he would name Zyzzyva, which rhymes with dizzy-va.
"Zyzzyva," as Junker explained in his initial editor's note, "is the last word, at least in the American Heritage Dictionary, which claims it's a tropical weevil. Unlike its namesake, Zyzzyva has no appetite for the wanton destruction of plants. It does aspire to be, if not the last word, at least an important vehicle for West Coast writers. . . ."
And so, in April 1985, the magazine was launched -- a 150-page paperback collection of short stories, memoirs, snatches of screenplays, excerpts from novels in progress, poems and artwork. The future was anything but certain, yet it was launched.
And now the pages flip forward.
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