New Welsh Review  was founded in 1988 as the successor to The Welsh Review (1939-1948), Dock Leaves and The Anglo Welsh Review (1949-1987) and is Wales’s foremost literary magazine in English, offering a vital outlet for the very best new fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry, a forum for critical debate, and a rigorous and engaged reviewing culture. New Welsh Review Ltd is supported through core funding by the Welsh Books Council and hosted by Aberystwyth University Department of English and Creative Writing. The magazine’s creative content was rebranded as  New Welsh Reader in May 2015, with reviews moving entirely online.

AmeriCymru spoke to New Welsh Review/Reader editor, Gwen Davies about the re branding and the magazines future direction.

AmeriCymru: Hi Gwen, and many thanks for agreeing to this interview. What is the New Welsh Review? How would you describe its mission statement?

Gwen: New Welsh Review , is a literary and cultural magazine working across Wales with eleven publication dates in different formats including print, app, epub and online, through the media of text, photography, video, audio, graphic poetry and animation. This national magazine with international readership and horizons has contributors including Terry Eagleton, Michael Longley, Patricia Duncker, Stevie Smith, Jem Poster, Richard Gwyn, Rory MacLean and Tessa Hadley. Our USPs are that we publish newcomers alongside established writers, are highly professional, develop the work of students and emerging writers, and that we pay contributors. We rebranded in May 2015 to publish creative work and literary essays in the New Welsh Reader (print, app and epub formats), and to publish reviews and comment in the New Welsh Review (online only).

AmeriCymru: Where can American readers go to read more or subscribe?

https://www.newwelshreview.com/

https://www.newwelshreview.com/newsub.php

AmeriCymru: With regard to the recent name change / re branding...what is new in Welsh Reader? Has there been a change of focus?

Gwen: The emphasis, noted above, of creative work in New Welsh Reader, has been appreciated by readers who perhaps aren't so interested in reviews or like to get their reviews more quickly online. Our readers tell us that highlighting our creative work – poetry, creative nonfiction, short stories, novel previews, illustration, photography, graphic books and longer literary essays – in this way gives this type of work more status and room for contemplation, which print, in particular, favours. Publishing eight online supplements of reviews and comment allows us to respond more quickly to new books and topical issues without worrying about the production process. These supplements are published under the old umbrella, New Welsh Review. This move, of course, also saves money in a climate of public funding cuts.

AmeriCymru: What, for you are the highlights of the latest edition of New Welsh Reader?

Gwen: As it happens, am American contributor, Peter E Murphy www.murphywriting.com , whose essay is a fictionalised family memoir about  his family's connections to Wales. His father and grandfather, longshoremen Eddie and Teddy Murphy, were billeted together in Newport and Belgium during the Normandy landings. Teddy was a nasty piece of work and Eddie was a tall-tale-teller of the first order. Other highlights in our autumn edition are former British serving officer Daniel Jones' story about an Afghanistan posting, and newcomer Crystal Jeans' dirty urban story about how a mother's sexual fantasy of Bukowski propels her to seduce the local alcoholic tramp: 'I lean over to my knicker drawer and pull out a condom. Bukowski wouldn't use a condom. Or he would, but right at the end he'd yank it off, sink his d*** back in and say, "You can have my seed and like it, you w****.' But you can take something too far.'

AmeriCymru: What can you tell us about the New Welsh Writing Awards program. Are there any upcoming publication plans? What will be the theme for next year?

Gwen: To elaborate on the rebranding you mentioned above. We rebranded around the term 'New Welsh' since that encapsulates all our work, and we have further sub-brands of the  New Welsh Writing Awards which this year ran under the banner of writing for nature and the environment and was sponsored by WWF Cymru with further support from CADCentre (a software company working with early school leavers) and writing centres Ty Newydd and Gladstone's Library in north Wales.

The Awards' USP is that it celebrates essays or books of at least 10,000 words and part of the prize is publication in Kindle ebook form. Our fourth brand is New Welsh Rarebyte which is our new ebook imprint and publishes the winner of our writing award, this year (publishing on 15 October) 26-year old Eluned Gramich's Woman Who Brings the Rain , A Memoir of Hokkaido, Japan. It's available for pre-order internationally here as a Kindle ebook via Amazon. We are currently seeking sponsors to run next year's Awards, either from commerce or from education as we are looking into the possibility of combining work on the Awards with a university placement programme that would give experience to students, either with a literature background or in business or marketing, to work on a large event such as running a prize and ceremony. We hope that we will get enough funding next year to run an extra category, so that would be nature and the environment as before plus memoir. The prize should interest expats with a Welsh connection as our Terms & Conditions welcome international entries by people who were born in Wales or educated here.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the members and readers of AmeriCymru?

Gwen: The publishing climate for journalism is very hard as we are hit five times over by the change in reading patterns caused by the internet, ie people accessing free stuff; writers having become willing to publish their work for free, thus undermining their own value and that of  curated publications who see payment as part of the professional service they offer; the democratisation of the internet which, despite its many positive points does undermine the old hierarchy of choice and curation which publishers offer; the feedback and sense of community offered to writers by social media which used to be provided by magazines and authors' societies, and, finally, the current British austerity climate which has led to public funding cuts in the arts as elsewhere. We really do feel, in respect of our current mix of subscriber-exclusive and free-to-view content, that we are sucking it and seeing. We don't know how things will develop, how much will people pay to read in future in a world in which originally only very few of the big newspapers opted for the paywall model.

At New Welsh Review, however, we have been working creatively to track down alternative funding sources. Mainly this has been with the institution in which we are physically housed, our host and sponsor Aberystwyth University, to create a student work placement scheme producing a multimedia programme that provides us with audio and visual features, clips, reviews, interviews and creative showcases that exercise the students' skills in research, presentation, camerawork, editing, performed reading, animation, graphics, getting on with authors and working as a team as well as being responsive to an editor's demands and real-time deadlines. This relationship gives us a home and allows us to pay and develop the skills of a greater range of contributor. For the university, it ticks their employability boxes. To AmeriCymru I would humbly ask: does anyone want to sponsor an exciting Awards scheme and/or work with us to replicate our student placement model over the pond? Last year, during the Dylan Thomas centenary, many Americans learned of or visited the many beautiful west Wales locations associated with the poet. In Aberystwyth we are just down the coast from Laugharne and New Quay. If you would like to sponsor or develop any of the ideas outlined above to further strengthen the links of Wales and the US, and to put our mutual traditions of great writing on both our maps, contact me at editor[at]newwelshreview.com.