Threepenny Review marks 25 years of doggedly panning for literary gold

When Wendy Lesser was 27, she worked as a volunteer for the long- defunct, not particularly distinguished San Francisco Review of Books. The editor, a laconic sort, was fond of taking off the month of August. So when Lesser asked him if she could guest-edit an issue in his stead, he said yes.

It was audacious -- an act of crazy chutzpah for someone with no editing experience. But such is the life of the tenacious, sharply focused Lesser. The experience of guest-editing was so rewarding, she says, that she decided then and there to start her own magazine.

It didn't occur to her that the job would be difficult -- that finding good writers, designing layouts, negotiating with printers and establishing a distribution network were all mammoth tasks. But in January 1980, three months after making her vow, Lesser introduced the first issue of Threepenny Review, a literary quarterly that today is celebrating its 25th anniversary and 100th issue.

The landmark will be celebrated with a five-part series of conversations at Herbst Theatre, presented by City Arts & Lectures, starting Monday. Lesser will interview author Jonathan Franzen ("The Corrections"), actor-magician Ricky Jay, painter Wayne Thiebaud, poet-librettist Anne Carson and filmmaker Frederick Wiseman.

"I'm a self-starter, obviously," Lesser says when asked how she founded a magazine and then operated it, almost single-handedly, all these years. "Other people may have thought it was foolhardy or audacious, but I just don't think that way. If I want to do something, I just do it, for the most part."

It's pouring rain, and Lesser, 52, is sitting in the drafty Threepenny offices in north Berkeley. Utilitarian and badly in need of new paint, the rooms occupy the upstairs of an old house converted to a duplex. Chez Panisse, Peet's Coffee and other landmarks of Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto are just around the corner, but the atmosphere here is strictly low-rent -- one of the ways in which Lesser keeps her baby afloat.

She invites her visitor inside, offers a quick tour of the magazine operations and sits down to business. No small talk. One gathers quickly that this is someone who never suffered any detours of self-doubt or equivocation. In her 1999 memoir, "The Amateur," Lesser describes a lifelong tendency to make "an instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things."

"I am a bit like a tank," she wrote in "The Amateur," one of her six books, "running roughshod over everything. ... I am brash, impatient, judgmental, loud and energetic."

She's also loyal, dogged, fiercely intelligent and forever in thrall to the magic of words and ideas. From the first days of Threepenny, which takes its name from Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera," Lesser knew she wanted a magazine that was Bay Area-based but not remotely regional.

"I was really tired of all this stuff about the Beats and everybody who was so stuck in their San Francisco identity," she says in a voice that's sharp and direct. "I'd lived though the Haight-Ashbury period and everything else here, but I thought, 'I don't want it to seem to be a San Francisco artifact.' That's partly why it has a name that isn't attached to this place or really any place."

She also wanted to cast a wide net -- to offer poems, prose and book reviews, of course, but also pieces on the performing arts and visual arts, the occasional political piece. In the first Threepenny Review, Lesser roped in several graduate-school pals ("They told me later they thought it would plotz within a year"), a couple of ex-boyfriends and a piece by her mother, the author Millicent Dillon ("A Little Original Sin"). The late Thom Gunn, whom she met at UC Berkeley, had a poem in it.

Today, Lesser's ideal of a broad-ranging cultural journal is still intact. The 100th issue features an essay by David Mamet, an imaginary interview with Henry James by Cynthia Ozick; poems by August Kleinzahler, Kay Ryan, Louise Gluck and Anna Ziegler; a short story by Sigrid Nunez; and a symposium on memory with reflections by several writers, Oliver Sacks and Stephen Greenblatt ("Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare") among them.

On the cover of the anniversary issue is a photo of a young girl, circa 1958. She's dressed like a tiny Caroline Kennedy and stands at a magazine rack filled with kids' books: Flash Gordon, Woody Woodpecker, Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody. Is she the spirit of Wendy Lesser, the child reader who became the editor dynamo? Or are the kids' books a way for Lesser to suggest that Threepenny Review aims to entertain as well as enlighten -- to not take itself too seriously?

Falling in love with reading came naturally to Lesser. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and she grew up in Palo Alto, in a house filled with her mother's books. At 8, she sat on the couch with her younger sister, Janna, and listened to her mother read aloud from "David Copperfield" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." At 11, Lesser was reading "Don Quixote" on her own.

Nothing was enforced, but by example she learned that reading opens doors to treasures -- that the reading life is anything but passive and staid.

"(My mother) didn't say, 'Would you like to read "Don Quixote"?' All the books were there in the house and the implication was that families like ours liked to read. And my husband (Richard Rizzo, a retired education professor) and I did the same thing with our son (Nick Rizzo, 19, a student at New York University), and it worked. My son is the kind of person who liked to read, from when he was very young."

Little wonder, then, that Lesser has done such a shrewd job of skewing Threepenny to a specialized readership. "The magazine is shaped by Wendy's taste, personality and vision," Greenblatt says. "Fortunately for everyone, those are discriminating, exuberant and capacious."

"Even 20 years ago and more," poet Robert Pinsky says, "when it was little more than a graduate student rag-let, the magazine had striking panache and intelligence. That continuity is amazing." Adds Kleinzahler: "It's full of life, strong opinions. It takes culture as seriously as the broadsheets take sports, stock prices and sordid divorces: in other words, as a fundamental, necessary part of life."

Upholding those standards on a meager budget is tough. "I have a good business mind on a penny-pinching level," Lesser says. A glance at her office furniture -- bookcases made from cinder blocks and funky boards, desks formed by laying a discarded door over a pair of file cabinets -- attest to her frugality. In a good year, Lesser is able to pay herself a salary of "somewhere in the low five figures."

Production, printing and mailing costs run to 10,000ドル per issue, but when salaries (Deputy Editor Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Associate Editor Elise Proulx), office expenses, writer stipends and subscription campaigns are factored in, it comes to 60,000ドル per issue, 240,000ドル per year. With subscription revenues at 95,000ドル per year (7ドル per issue off the rack) and 60,000ドル in donations and varying income from grants, it's a wonder that Lesser makes it all work.

Lesser's budget is so tight that she pays just 100ドル per poem, 200ドル per prose piece. And yet, because of the high quality she's maintained in Threepenny Review -- and her own powers of persuasion -- she's been able to draw quality writers and occasional heavyweights such as Gore Vidal, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Drabble and the late Susan Sontag.

"It's hard for me to get fiction writers because we don't pay enough. My goal for this year is to find a patron to donate 35,000ドル a year for five years. Then I could double writers' fees. It's not going to be a huge amount, but it could put me on a par with other places that are of comparable visibility.

"I'm not complaining," she adds. "I get a lot of writers giving me their work. And 'giving' me is the operative word at this point."

Looking back on 25 years, Lesser says there are "two kinds of great moments" that give her a thrill: "the kind when you open up an envelope, you've never heard the person's name. And it's gold." She mentions Dutch writer Bert Keizer, diarist Lars Eighner and Alaska writer Natalie Kusz as examples. "The other kind is where you write to somebody because you admire them so much and they write back with a piece of writing that you can publish."

When she started Threepenny, Lesser says, "I didn't really have long-term plans. If you'd said to me, 'Is this going to be going in 25 years?' I wouldn't have been able to say 'Yes' or 'No.' I wouldn't have intended it not to, but I didn't view things in those terms: 'This is going to be something for the ages.' It was just something I felt I needed to do then."

Monday: Jonathan Franzen, novelist.

Jan. 20: Ricky Jay, sleight-of-hand artist, author, actor.

April 20: Wayne Thiebaud, painter.

May 9: Anne Carson, poet, librettist, classicist.

June 13: Frederick Wiseman, filmmaker.

All events are at 8 p.m. at Herbst Theatre. Tickets: 18ドル.50 per event, 82ドル.50 for all five. City Box Office: (415) 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com.