If humans hadn't taken it upon themselves to create a literary journal at UT, then it surely would have sprouted from the walls of Plant Hall all by itself. Equal parts Alhambra , Tara and Manderley, there's no building in the area better suited to breeding flights of fancy.

Or so it seems on a summer afternoon, when the wide corridors are quiet and the imagination has room to wander. I'm here to meet with some of the people behind the Tampa Review, and as I sit in the cozy, refurbished office of editor Richard Mathews, with its dark woods and tiled fireplace, I find myself thinking enviously, "What a sweet gig."

If only it were that simple, or if this were his only gig. In fact, one of the many remarkable things about TR is that its staff is entirely volunteer — Mathews is an English professor at UT, as are the five editors (two fiction, two poetry, one nonfiction) who help determine the contents of each issue.

Mathews and poetry co-editor Don Morrill do double duty selecting books for the University of Tampa Press, which publishes TR and the winners of the Press' prestigious poetry prize. The bulk of the reading for the biannual journal is done in the fall, with submission deadlines the end of December, so editors take home manuscripts to read and exchange opinions with one another mostly on the fly, between classes or at poetry readings.

The Review used to have students pre-screen submissions. But their judgment wasn't always sophisticated enough, so now the editors look at everything.

"I make my stacks," says fiction co-editor Lisa Birnbaum, who does her reading on the weekends. "This, I'm going to send back. This, I like the first few pages. This, I can't stop reading — and have to get to Kathleen [Ochshorn, fiction co-editor] the next day."

And if she and Ochshorn can't agree, "we send it to Richard."

"Or I hear it," says Morrill, looking at Birnbaum across the table in Mathews' office. "We're married."

Thus begins what Mathews calls "the wrangling" — the difficult process of choosing one story or one poem over another when they're all good and there's only so many pages in each issue. (The book can't weigh more than a pound, clear plastic mailing cover included, in order to keep within budget.) And merely good work may not be good enough: The journal accepts less than 1 percent of submissions.

"If we're going to represent Tampa with world-class material," says Morrill, "we can't publish all the good stuff we get."

Sometimes the deciding factor is subject matter, says Mathews. "We can't print another divorce story… [Or] we just did an essay on that very illness."

Sometimes it's reluctance to print the work of a writer who's appeared frequently in recent issues.

And sometimes it's about agreeing to disagree. "I love this one, I know you're never going to like it," says Birnbaum. "We just make bargains sometimes."

Those bargains get harder to make as the quality of submissions gets higher. The editors get few of the charmingly amateurish variety anymore, like the man who sent a teabag to Birnbaum along with his story to encourage her to settle down with a nice cup of Darjeeling and read his submission in the proper frame of mind. With the Review's profile growing increasingly higher, and with MFA programs turning out more and more competent writers (if not necessarily brilliant ones), the bar has been raised. These days, says Mathews, "good literary magazines work as the initial sanctioning bodies for fiction writers" seeking agents and future publication, so appearance in a book like TR can make a difference to a literary career.

Not that the Review doesn't have competition in that regard. Writers are getting savvy about making multiple submissions, so Birnbaum has found herself pursuing a story only to find it's already been snapped up by another journal. The editors sometimes commission work from well-known writers, but even that can be dicey: Morrill asked Pulitzer Prize-winner Louis Simpson to write a poem, but wound up sending it back. He generally doesn't like to read the letters and resumes that accompany submissions; that policy allows for surprises, like the poem he recently accepted from a writer who turned out to be 17 years old.

The final decision about the shape of each issue is Mathews'; he works with contributing editor Adrienne Golub (a former Planet art critic) to find artwork that complements the writing. The result, the only hardcover literary magazine in the country, is an exceptionally beautiful book.

"This is Richard's brilliance," says Birnbaum. "He puts these things together."

And it's the connections — the subtle thematic links between stories and poems and artwork — that provide some of the journal's most lasting pleasures. For instance, in the final paragraph of Simone Scott's story "Chichigua" in issue 29, a boy is reminded of his late mother as he watches a soaring kite — echoing the photocollage on the cover by Jane Calvin of a disembodied dress, floating. It's the kind of detail that rewards close reading. And when the book looks as gorgeous as that issue, or the latest one (#30), with its haunting Jerry Uelsmann cover photo, you'll want to keep it around to read and re-read for a long time.

The Tampa Review does its hometown proud.

Fall Arts 2006: Choose Me

What to Watch For

This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.