Things we need:
1. Money
Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I've returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary magazines' funding practices, especially in light of renewed interest in eliminating the government allocations for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (whose FY2018 allocations are still under congressional consideration).
Each time I revisit this tweet, I imagine being in the conference room for this theoretical planning meeting in Iowa, and I think of the similar scarcity-driven discussions I've participated in both as poet and editor, largely-in either role-as unpaid labor.