In 1987, Marc Smirnoff left his home in Marin County, Calif., and embarked upon a cross-country excursion. Two months into his six-month trip, the beat-up BMW he was driving died in Oxford, Miss. Now the magazine that he founded there in 1992 may soon suffer the same fate.

The possible demise of Oxford American is sad news indeed. During the course of its sometimes sporadic existence, this often engaging publication has explored Southern culture intelligently and in a number of ways—through fiction pieces, essays, articles and, most notably, its annual music issue, which has typically overflowed with Nashville writers and subjects.

Smirnoff first got the idea for Oxford American while working at Square Books in Oxford. Feeling that the South needed a strong literary magazine that could give voice to the rich mix of established and aspiring writers in the area, he borrowed $8,000 and published the first issue in 1992, dubbing it “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing.” “I thought it was outrageous that if a good Southern writer wanted to get a piece in a decent magazine, they had to send it to New York,” he says.

The premier issue offered such varied voices as John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., Larry Brown, Barry Hannah and John Grisham. Grisham’s essay “The Faulkner Thing” was a treatise on the comparisons that every Mississippi author faces laboring in the shadow of the Old Master. (Grisham stressed in that piece that he had no illusions of creating literature, just high-quality commercial fiction.)

Despite the somewhat amateurish graphics and several typos in that inaugural issue—which Smirnoff says can still be painful for him to look at—something fresh and bold was afoot. And no one was more surprised than Smirnoff when he wrote to some of his favorite authors asking for submissions—and they complied. “I knew there wasn’t a writer in America that wouldn’t want to appear in a magazine that had published an Updike piece,” Smirnoff told Adweek in 2000. Other Southern writers such as Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Willie Morris, Donna Tartt, Bobbie Ann Mason, Hal Crowther later followed suit.

Over the years, the publication has included many Tennessee authors, among them Tony Earley and A. Manette Ansay. Musicians Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash and Marty Stuart have contributed pieces, as have Nashville-based music journalists Bill Friskics-Warren (a Scene contributor) and Michael McCall (a former Scene contributor). In the September/October 1999 issue, one of Earley’s students at Vanderbilt, Kevin Wilson, had his piece featured as a cover story.

Although Smirnoff may have offended some Southern sensibilities when he recently published an in-depth feature about Georgia pornographer Michael Strother, response to his publication has been largely positive over the years. By the time the magazine hit its stride in the mid-’90s, Oxford American’s blend of essays, music reviews, fiction, poetry, profiles, photography and artwork was second to none. In 1999, it published a double issue devoted entirely to Southern women writers. But the most exciting project the magazine has undertaken is its annual music issue, with a CD enclosed. Published each summer, the music issue has featured articles on, and selections by, alternative country, bluegrass, folk, jazz and blues artists. It has provided great exposure for singer-songwriters such as Kelly Willis, Trisha Walker and Kim Richey—people who’ve received limited coverage in the mainstream music press.

Oxford American began as a quarterly, but often suffered through sporadic production schedules; some years it published only two or three times. Then in late 1994, John Grisham came on as a backer, and the magazine became a bimonthly in 1995, producing six issues consistently for several years. Even with increasing readership, however, it still continued to lose money. In 2000, Grisham and Smirnoff decided to resurrect the old serialized novel that was common to many publications in the 19th and early 20th century. Grisham’s A Painted House was published over the course of six issues, and the power of the author’s name helped boost subscriptions from 16,000 to about 37,000. “We should have been able to capitalize on that more,” Smirnoff says. “Subscriptions should have quadrupled.” Grisham subsidized the magazine over the next two years but recently decided that he had hemorrhaged enough and announced that he would be pulling his sponsorship.

So why hasn’t Oxford American been able to move forward, particularly with such great writers and strong financial backing? Smirnoff says unflinchingly, “It’s our fault. We should be at least breaking even by now. John’s been very patient, and he’s done that in the face of many mistakes.” Recently, subscription numbers have fallen back to about 35,000. “If we would have had more subscriptions, we would have had more ad revenue,” Smirnoff adds. “If we had more revenue, we could do more promotions and increase our subscriptions.”

There’s no question that the magazine has attracted the right kind of reader. According to Adweek, the average Oxford American reader has a household income of $82,000, has a postgraduate degree and reads an average of 31 books a year. This may be demographically very attractive to Madison Avenue—but only if the magazine can attract such readers in larger quantities. By contrast, the Atlantic Monthly has 400,000 subscribers, Harper’s has 200,000 and The New Yorker has about a million.

Recent attempts to grab more readers have included a Southern travel issue (à la Condé Nast Traveler) and more daring features, such as the “Southern Porn King” article. “If your magazine isn’t connecting, then obviously you should be doing something differently,” Smirnoff sighs, though he admits that he is running low on ideas.

“Ironically, we’ve actually been oddly hopeful the past few weeks,” he says. “We have had a number of serious inquiries. There is a group coming to talk to us next week. And we have a few other leads. If someone does come on board, though, they have to be willing to commit for at least one year.” Currently, the spring issue is stalled at the printers, and Smirnoff says if the magazine does not find a backer by May 29, it will be forced to close its doors after 10 years and 42 issues.

“I still believe there are a lot of smart, sophisticated Americans out there who would enjoy this magazine,” Smirnoff concludes. “If you think that it’s worthwhile, you have to keep trying. It’s like bluegrass music. Some people thought there would never be a market for it again, but the people who loved it hung in there, and now look what’s happened.”