'Sonora Review' Hits The 15-Year Milestone. By Hannah Glasston ACROSS FROM THE Sixth Street stadium, the University of Arizona's monument to sweat, looms another sweat equity presence--the headquarters of the highly regarded literary magazine Sonora Review, which celebrates 15 years of writing with the publication of issue 31, Milestones. Behind the scarred back door of the decaying home the university-based magazine shares with warehoused teaching assistants, the Review's staff--all volunteers at the completely student-run publication--are getting ready to hand off the teeny-tiny computer and its friend, the grimy, curling mouse pad, to the next set of students who will create the publication, which features a mix of local and national writers. And with its successful track record comes the magazine's reputation, which some current editors say influenced their decisions to do graduate work here. As it turns out, that's just what the founding editor of Sonora Review used in his original sales pitch for funding when he decided to take over the sleepy in-house Graduate English Papers and turn it into a full-fledged literary magazine in 1980. In pitching the magazine to a group of deans and department heads, "I sort of called on my previously dormant old Jewish mercantile background," remembers Steven Schwartz, now an associate professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. "I said, 'This is tremendous advertising for the MFA department. We can recruit people just on the basis of this.' Of course I didn't believe it at the time. "But once you start winning a few prizes--Pushcart, O. Henry, some of the things that have happened to Sonora Review--word gets around and it does become a sort of advertising." He also remembers pitching that "the magazine would give students editorial experience and therefore some kind of foot in the door" in publishing. Fiction editor Blair Benjamin says that's what he's hoping when he looks for a job this summer. Fiction writer Julie Newman, this year's co-editor-in-chief, also says that reading a vast number of manuscripts has taught her a lot about her own writing, an invaluable point Schwartz says he also touted to university types when begging early seed money. Currently, the magazine is just one of about 700 literary magazines published in the United States, and there is no shortage of people looking to have their work published, as evidenced by the 1,000 or so submissions in fiction, poetry and non-fiction Sonora Review staff had to choose from. Milestones boasts intriguing work by Beth Kephart Sulit, Michael Pulley, John Bensko and Jack Martin, among others. The staff also solicits work--"It's a good way to get in touch with writers whom you admire without looking like a sort of raving fan," notes co-editor-in-chief Alicia Saposnik--and sometimes the magazine takes its cue from elsewhere. This year poet Imogene Bolls wrote from Ohio and asked if they were going to do anything special regarding Southwestern writer Frank Waters, who died in 1995. Although none of the editors was familiar with Waters' work, says Saposnik, they started reading and asking around and got excited enough about the part-time Tucsonan's work that they ended up including a special commemorative section on the author, featuring writing by his widow, Barbara Waters, and the author's friends, writers Richard Shelton, R. Gray Kampfe and Bolls. The result is a delightful coming together of exceptional voices in tribute to Waters. Perhaps this openness to ideas is what has kept the magazine vibrant. Past issues showcase work by award-winning writers as diverse as David Wojahn, Antonya Nelson, Barbara Anderson, Richard Russo, Tony Hoagland, Thomas Lux and Pattiann Rogers, among many others. Success followed writers Wojahn, Nelson and Hoagland, all Sonora Review editors at one time, points out Schwartz, who has had his own success, most recently as the author of the novel Therapy. "After the tenth year I became very proud of its longevity and staying power," says Schwartz, giving credit to all the editors who followed him and made the magazine better. He recalls talking to editors from Redbook and Penguin in New York who knew of the magazine. "I don't think we ever envisioned a day when anybody outside of, say, the Friends of Sonora Review would be familiar with the magazine." Despite its success, there is always the funding scarcity. But Newman is confident two major sources, the Tucson Pima Arts Council and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, will continue their important support. "This magazine has, in the past, gone up and down as far as its viability," says Newman. "There aren't a thousand people clamoring for our positions; we don't get paid, we don't get (university) credit; it's just really good to know that if we didn't do it, it wouldn't get done," she says, eyeing Hannah Haas, next year's editor-in-chief, who is already gently shuffling manuscripts on her lap. Sonora Review 31 is available for $6 at local bookstores. To submit manuscripts or purchase a subscription, write Sonora Review, Department of English, University of Arizona 85721.

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