Freeman’s: Arrival, choice writing curated by Granta ex-editor

John Freeman’s new literary journal has a simple premise: ‘A collection of writing grouped loosely around a theme.’

Supplied Editorial Freeman's

“Very little in the world that is interesting happens without risk, movement and wonder,” writes author and literary critic John Freeman. New York-based Freeman has certainly taken a risk with his latest venture, an eponymous, book-length literary journal that combines verse, short fiction and creative nonfiction.

The premise of Freeman’s is simple: “A collection of writing grouped loosely around a theme.” The inaugural theme is Arrival, which could seem self-congratulatory in less capable hands, but Freeman, former editor of Granta and president of the US National Book Critics Circle, gives it heft.

The act of reading, he writes in an introduction, is its own form of arrival: “Stories and essays, even the right kind of poem, will take us somewhere else, put us down somewhere new.” It is this nomadic longing for “somewhere new” that drives the enterprise. Freeman does not advance a lofty aesthetic manifesto for his journal; merely the genuine hope that, twice a year, it will deliver a “collection of writing that will carry you”.

When too tightly conceived, themes can breed repetition and tedium, but Freeman’s contributors seem to have been encouraged to explore and interpret Arrival broadly. No two pieces arrive in the same way. Colum McCann captures the spirit of the issue in his short untitled essay: “When it comes to departures and arrivals, the dead, and even the living, meet in many forms.”

Arrival is not a gimmick; it’s a heartbeat. Listening for its pulse from one page to the next encourages dual enjoyment, first with each individual piece, and then the pieces in conversation. As a consequence, the first issue of Freeman’s often reads more like a curated anthology than a journal. With more than 25 contributors and 270 pages of writing, the Arrival issue is a substantial stand-alone offering.

The collection opens with National Book Award Winner Louise Erdrich and closes with Man Booker International Prize Winner Lydia Davis. Between these impressive bookends sits previously unpublished work from a host of luminaries including McCann, Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell and Dave Eggers. Of the big names, contributions by Murakami and Davis are the most engaging.

In Drive My Car Murakami revisits some perennial themes (memory, music, estrangement) to tender effect as an ageing actor recalls a past friendship with his late wife’s lover: “Once you really get into a role it’s hard to find the right moment to stop. No matter how it taxes your emotions, you have to go with the flow until the performance has taken the shape it must, the point where its full meaning becomes clear.”

Davis’s On Learning Norwegian chronicles her attempt to decipher an untranslated Norwegian novel with no knowledge of the language and no dictionary, only a smattering of childhood German and, some would argue, misguided determination. “I’m searching for a way to express just what this project was like — it was like confronting a rock face, or a mountain which I had to climb. The fact of doing it by myself, independently, without help, was part of what made it exhilarating. No one was going to lift me up that mountain. I would have to find the handholds and footholds by myself.”

It’s an oddly captivating essay. Davis is the master of misdirection; her work often hides emotional rawness and existential unease ­behind the guise of intellectual inquiry. As her language skills become more complex, so does her relationship with the reader. What ­begins as documentation ends as meditation.

While Freeman’s high-profile contributors will undoubtedly draw most interest, the new, emerging and unfamiliar voices add much life. From Bangladesh to the West Bank, Bosnia to Jamaica, Sudan to Iceland, the focus is refreshingly global. Reading Arrival feels like sitting in an airport cafe eavesdropping on the conversations of fellow travellers — journeys beginning and ending, lives intersecting and diverging; a group of people brought together by transit, but united through storytelling: that most human of impulses.

This geographic breadth, and profound sense of borderlessness is what most distinguishes Freeman’s in the increasingly crowded marketplace of literary journals. Notable pieces include Aleksandar Hemon’s In Search of Space Lost, a candid and vulnerable account of his parents’ immigration from Bosnia to Canada: “This displacement is the central event of their life, what split it into the before and the after. Everything after the rupture took place in a damaged, incomplete time — some of it was forever lost, and forever it shall so remain.”

Fatin Abbas offers a compelling debut with On a Morning, a story set in her native Khartoum, which explores the fragility of the space between conflict and calm: in “this poor, troubled corner of the country there was room only for victims and saviours”.

The standout piece comes from Jamaican-born Garnette Cadogan, whose reflections on learning how to walk in public as a black man in America offer a timely and powerful contribution to an important conversation: “Walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.”

While the tone of the first issue is contemplative, Freeman remarks that “comedy lurks in all arrivals”, and he makes much-needed space for levity. Eggers, Etgar Keret and Helen Simpson all offer refreshingly comic turns. Balance also comes from the mixed presentation of verse and prose, fiction and essays, and short and long pieces.

Freeman writes: “Any true reader always wants more — more life, more experiences, more risk than one’s own life can contain. The hard thing, perhaps, is where to find it in one place.” If this first issue is an indication of what is to come, this journal will prove a good place to start. Freeman’s has arrived.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer based in Virginia.

Freeman’s: Arrival

Edited by John Freeman

Text Publishing, 304pp, $32.99