Wit & Attitude Quote by James Dickey

A novelist like James Dickey doesn’t stack adjectives like this unless he’s trying to recreate an experience: the feeling of opening a magazine and realizing it has its own weather system. “Amazing” and “intelligent” establish credibility, but Dickey refuses the safe, museum-lit version of literary prestige. He pivots into “crazy… strange,” words that in polite literary culture often function as soft warnings. Here they’re endorsements. The praise isn’t just for quality; it’s for risk, for giving talent room to misbehave.

The sequencing matters. “Creative” is the bridge term, the respectable alibi between “crazy” and “strange.” Dickey is implicitly arguing that the magazine’s value lies in its refusal to be only one thing: not merely tasteful, not merely experimental, not merely serious. It’s a literary space that can hold volatility without apologizing for it. That list reads like a defense against the era’s smoothing forces: institutional MFA aesthetics, cautious editorial branding, and the tendency of “literary” to become a synonym for “predictable.”

Then comes the hard pivot: “indispensable.” After all the ecstatic weirdness, Dickey lands on necessity. The subtext is a cultural one: a magazine can be “indispensable” when it serves as an ecosystem, not a product - a place where new voices show up uninvited, where established writers can take a swing without calculating reputational damage. Dickey’s intent feels less like blurb duty than a stake in the ground: literature needs outlets that are intelligent enough to curate and unruly enough to surprise.