Efron to share behind-the-scenes stories of Paunch

It began as a way to ease the transition of moving to a new job in Buffalo. But Paunch, the journal of literary criticism founded by longtime UB English faculty member Art Efron, endured for 37 years and became a home for radical ideas and different genres.

Efron, who retired from UB in 2005 after more than 40 years on the faculty, will share behind-the-scenes stories of Paunch at 7 p.m. June 2 in Tower Auditorium at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State.

Select back issues of the journal also will be available for sale.

Although he started Paunch before coming to Buffalo — Efron spent nine years at the University of Washington in Seattle, beginning as a freshman and leaving with his PhD — the journal fully developed during Efron’s tenure at UB.

The name came from his admiration for Don Quixote’s companion, Sancho Panza — whose name loosely translates to “sacred belly” — and it explored as its central theme the human body and its importance in literature during a time when these issues were first coming of age.

The journal published the early fiction of retired UB faculty member Max Wickert and a poetry series, “Looney Tunes and News,” by the late UB faculty member Mac Hammond. Lyle Glazier’s novel “Stills from a Moving Picture” was published first as a special issue of Paunch. The journal also published a 25-page sequence of poems entitled “Reef” by the Icelandic-Canadian poet Kristjana Gunnars.

Some issues were guest-edited and others served as tributes to radical thinkers, among them experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and philosopher Stephen C. Pepper.

The first 19 issues consisted of a few mimeographed pages. With issue 21 came a cleaner, full-page format. Priscilla Bowen began a 34-year run as cover illustrator with issue 25. And a few years later, Paunch morphed into a printed journal.

The journal charged for subscriptions — libraries were very supportive — and Efron says it succeeded through 1999 without “ever making a cent and losing only a few dollars.”

Efron also published outside the journal, most notably a book on Cervantes, “Don Quixote and the Dulcineated World” (University of Texas Press, 1971), which he called “completely out-of-sync.”

In addition to Cervantes, Efron taught the work of Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, and is interested in the theories of his University of Washington mentor Wayne Burns, anarchist theory, theory of the novel, “World Hypotheses” by Stephen Pepper, Wilhelm Reich and “Art as Experience” by John Dewey.