It’s kismet that I found a job at Moberly Area Community College (MACC). Jack Conroy was born in the Monkey Nest coal-mining camp near Moberly, MO in 1899. He grew to be involved in progressive politics and championed proletarian literature through writing, publishing, and promoting. Life took him to Chicago where he worked until he retired to Moberly in 1965.
I was born in Chicago and life took me to Moberly. MACC holds Conroy’s personal books in the Kate Stamper Wilhite Library. One of Conroy’s legacies is editing The Anvil and The New Anvil, literary magazines that published writers like Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. (See “Phidias & Heidegger” for the divide between the worker-crowd and the New Partisan theoretic-crowd).
One of my goals when I got the job was to start a literary magazine for student work that would pay homage to Jack Conroy’s using literature to forge a more just society, while opening space for art’s for art’s sake. Even proletarian writers can be experimentalists! That’s the Anvil & lyre. Art works and art plays, constructed from student portfolios in creative writing classes. The cover image came from MACC student artists and instructors. Hundreds of students had work published in the Anvil & lyre.
Below are a collection of typical covers. A complete set of Anvil & lyre (22 volumes) can be found at the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Kate Stamper Wilhite Library at MACC.
| Elise Martin | Felicia Leach | Felicia Leach | Shelby Mobley |
| Mike Barrett | 2010 MACC Painting class | Renee Brochu | Renee Brochu |
| Komina Guevara | BenLee Travitt | Felicia Leach |
Mike Barrett Archive 