Cormac McCarthy Journal and Penn State University Press

Starting in 2015, the Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press. This is great news for McCarthy scholarship. I think also this move demonstrates the high quality of the contributions already published in the journal thus far.

Stacey Peebles, editor of the journal, comments on the announcement:

I’m happy to announce that beginning in 2015, The Cormac McCarthy Journal will be published by Penn State University Press, which will be a boon for us in terms of design, prestige, visibility, production assistance, and availability in libraries and databases like JSTOR. Although our upcoming 2014 issue will be published before Penn State UP takes over our hard-copy production, we have already worked together to create a website for CMJ on their journals page. Clicking “Submissions” on that site will take you to our new online submissions website for the journal.

Although I’m still happy to field inquiries from my gmail address as I’ve done in the past, I’ll now direct submissions to the website, as well as use the site for readers’ reports as much as possible. We also have a new email address specifically for the journal. Access to previously published articles will soon be available through JSTOR (and hopefully MUSE) links on our Penn State UP website. When those links have been established, we’ll take down our old journal website, which has been hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

Members of The Cormac McCarthy Society who pay for “Membership with Journal” will continue to receive a subscription at no extra cost, and Penn State UP will handle subscriptions for non-member individuals as well as institutions.

This has all been possible because the community of McCarthy scholars has produced such great work over the years, and because there’s so much still to be done! Thanks to everyone who has supported CMJ by submitting work, commenting on others’ essays, subscribing, and reading with interest.

Here’s to keeping the critical conversation going!

See also,

• Cormac McCarthy Journal page at Penn State University Press website
• Current website for the Journal (latest issue: vol. 10, no. 2)
• Stacey Peebles' original announcement at CormacMcarthy.com
• Online site for submissions to the Journal 

Running Toward a Reckoning

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it.

A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

–Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 5.

J. Frank Dobie and Cormac McCarthy

Sometime in 1987, a courtly, middle-aged gentleman approached the front desk at the Special Collections library at the University of Texas at El Paso. The man was well known by this time to those who worked at the library. He'd been coming in regularly over the past decade, doing research on Texas and Mexico and the Southwest. Some people knew that he was a writer, knew that he'd even won a MacArthur "genius" grant for his work—although few readers had heard of him and he toiled in obscurity.

At the help desk, speaking in his a soft Tennessee accent, the man asked for a slender volume kept in the reserve stacks, housed inside a red pamphlet box. The item is a reprint from an article originally published in the American Hereford Journal in 1954. Its title is, simply, "Babi'cora," and its author is the great folklorist of the Southwest, J. Frank Dobie of Texas. . . .

The researcher at UTEP in 1987, Cormac McCarthy, paid very close attention to Dobie's Babicora article. McCarthy arranged to have the story photocopied, and he made exacting pencil marks in the margins of particularly interesting passages. McCarthy went on to make substantial use of Dobie's work as he fashioned his novel in progress--a book that would be published seven years later as The Crossing.

–Steven L. Davis, "Mining Dobie: Cormac McCarthy's Debt to J. Frank Dobie in The Crossing," Southwestern American Literature 38.2 (Spring 2013): 52.