Email This Page‘Small Craft’ floats his boat
It’s good to know that Small Craft is flourishing, as noted in the April Bulletin. However, the magazine that
gave rise to it was actually titled The Nulset Review (not The Null Set Review). While Jonathan Franzen ’81 may have jettisoned the name for its “antic nihilism,” the void it referenced was real.
A few years earlier, Nulset founder John Alison ’79 and I were the only ones to show up for a meeting of the previous literary journal. The editors who called the meeting were missing, along with the submissions and the rest of the staff. “We have nothing,” John remarked. We decided on the spot to start our own magazine ex nihilo and arrived at the name in a matter of moments. The spelling was a dash of whimsy on John’s part: He thought it should rhyme with “dulcet.”
Steven Nicholas Swartz ’78
Brooklyn, N.Y.
