In 1993, Rebecca Wolff graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in poetry and spent two years blanketing every literary journal she could find with simultaneous submissions, tracking rejections on alphabetised index cards. When acceptances did come, they arrived alongside the kind of writing she found deadening — what she called the mediocre narrative lyric that had become the dominant paradigm of American poetry. By 1998, frustrated enough to do something about it, she founded Fence: a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism built on the conviction that the most interesting writing resists classification.
The name was a provocation from the start. A fence is both a boundary and something to climb over, and Fence has spent more than twenty-five years doing both — creating a space for writing that refuses to sit comfortably in either the mainstream or the experimental camp. The editorial model is deliberately decentralised: genre editors often don’t know each other, and the magazine’s identity emerges not from aesthetic consensus but from an intentional engine of dissimilarity. Wolff has described the editorial process as an ongoing negotiation — learning to understand why another editor might sincerely choose something you would not.
From Fence grew Fence Books, launching careers through its Motherwell Prize and Modern Poets Series, and The Constant Critic, an online poetry review journal. Originally an independent nonprofit, the magazine later partnered with the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany, where Wolff teaches. She is also a poet herself — winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series for Manderley, author of Figment and The King, and, since 2019, an elected alderperson in Hudson, New York. For a poet who started a magazine because existing ones made her feel invisible, the trajectory from index cards to elected office is itself a kind of poem — strange, nonlinear, and entirely on its own terms.
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