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Literary Journals Segregating Fiction

In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors. 

Granta now has their "New Voices" program, started last year, which publishes new authors online every month. American Short Fiction has began to publish a story a month online. Kenyon Review has done likewise, publishing a number of stories in an online format. Zoetrope has long published their contest winner in on online-only format. And of course AGNI might be the longest-running example, with its AGNI online section. Even the glossies have begun to glom onto a similar strategy: Atlantic Monthly attempted to sell (overpriced) short stories via an iTunes model.

These bifurcated fiction offerings accomplish a number of goals:

• It allows the journal to highlight up-and-coming authors that wouldn't make it into the print issue.
• Maximizes the potential revenue from the print journal (Big names sell mags)
• Provides fresh content online, driving traffic to the website
• Helps the biggest journals appear hip and relevant by launching burgeoning authors, rather than only publishing established authors.

I think it's telling that many of the journals that have adopted this model have been the top in the industry. Also, the top journals have the most sharply demarcated lines between established/print and emerging/online.

But this type of system has a number of problems, as well:

• Perpetuates the stereotype that print is prestigious and online is second-grade.
• Divides the journal brand, where some authors put in their bios "Famous Journal X" and others have to add an additional caveat, "Famous Journal X online." It's a false dichotomy -- if you wrote an online piece for Esquire, you would just put Esquire in your bio, not Esquire Online.
• Creates less of an incentive for journals to invest in a young writer, to stand behind them strongly enough to publish them in a print journal. Instead, younger writers can reliably be shuffled to the (cheaper and safer) online spaces.

I'm guessing this model of original content in both print and online capacities will slowly erode the current dominant model of Print as primary, with a website as the second-tier source of bulletin board and excerpts. Perhaps this is actually a transitional stage: we've seen virtually all literary journals ramp up their online presences in the last five years, and now we're entering a stage where journals are starting to blend their print/online production, and in the future we might see another shift.

Yes, I know about all the online literary journals out there, probably screaming at the screen right now that they've led the way. And Electric Literature and Narrative have plowed a road into that frontier as well. 

But five years ago, big literary journals were still staunchly sticking to print. I wonder if in 2015, how many big literary journals will have shifted to online only. More importantly, how many of them will be able to maintain their prestige (e.g. when you shift online, don't pull a TriQuarterly and fire all your paid staff).

Electric Literature #3 Review

 Issue #3 of Electric Literature just came out, featuring Aimee Bender and Rick Moody, among others. I got my hands on a copy of the print journal, and I'm glad to see that a journal that touts itself as being available on so many digital platforms hasn't let the print side languish. It's a beautiful design, better than many journals only publishing in print. Inside, it showcases the art of Adam Thompson -- simple but fun sketches between the prose, like a genie lamp coming out of a genie lamp and an automatic rifle controlled by marionette strings.

"The Red Ribbon" makes me glad to see the way Aimee Bender's fiction has matured. I thoroughly enjoyed her early stories -- "Girl in the Flammable Skirt" -- as well as her novel "An Invisible Sign of My Own," but this story seems to bear the traces of those early fabulist fictions, while moving on to a more grounded realism. As always, her more fantastical elements are balanced by deep and bracing humanity.

Rick Moody's story, "Some Contemporary Characters," was first published via Twitter (to much fanfare). While I admired the attempt to publish a story through Twitter -- as much for the new form of dissemination as for the natural constraints of 140 characters -- I had a hard time reading it. I started in the middle, where several friends were re-Tweeting the story. Then I backtracked to the source at Electric Literature and tried from the beginning. It never gelled. Thankfully, when I read it here in the journal, I liked it much more. The haiku-like story switches between the points of view of an elderly scholar and a textophiliac girl with "three different hair colors, none of them found in nature."

It's nice that this third issue has begun to highlight emerging writers. The first two issues were stocked full of brand names -- Michael Cunningham, Lydia Millet, Jim Shepard, Lydia Davis, Colson Whitehead -- and now the journal has built the cachet to explore lesser known names, like Matt Sumell. Sumell's story, "Little Things," starts like this:

"I folded my arms. They felt big, capable of anything. Lifting, carrying, digging, feeding cows PCP so they revolt with unexpected and tremendous violence -- anything. Wrapping gifts in tissue paper and busting teeth out of Christian heads. Pumping bicycle tires, pumping gas, pumping iron, bagging my own groceries and skipping boulders across the Long Island Sound all the way to Connecticut. Cracking eggs with one hand and folding laundry. Pushing my Mexican neighbor's broke-down car across the street Thursday mornings to avoid street sweeping tickets and tossing my cell phone to a friend who needs to make an important call to his mom. Opening every jar for every lady. Helping. I felt like helping. I felt like I could help." 

The strong voice carries this short piece about a family dealing with their dying mother. Not an original topic, but certainly told in an entertaining way. There are fisticuffs between brothers, a father losing his gallbladder, the man who never stopped walking (like "The Unnamed," yes), murders with chicken soup cans, Catholic girls dying for human touch, and icing that scalds. Miraculously, it all sticks together. 

By surrounding the story of the mother's death with the violent, odd, and melancholy ephemera heard on the news or happened to friends, the normally isolated event of death is seen with a wide-angle perspective, a single star in a constellation of pain. In fact, I like that this story precedes the Rick Moody story, because the way that a Twitter story communicates is only through and amongst the welter of thousands of other tiny stories. It's important to recognize that no single narrative takes primary stage -- it's always filtered through all the other tragedies of the world -- and Sumell captures that well.

It's tough to characterize the aesthetic of any journal, but E.L. hovers in that liminal space between traditional and experimental. At least in regards to the first three stories in this issue, it could be called innovative without sacrificing the foundations of fiction. But whatever you call it, it's good.

TriQuarterly Shuts Down

Okay, so let's get the order of events correct.

First, Cliff at Perpetual Folly tipped me off to Evanston Now, a local online news source in the Northwestern area (where TriQuarterly is published). Evanston Now reported that the Northwestern University Press, which publishes TriQuarterly, would be scaling back a number of its operations. Mentioned in the article is the idea that TriQuarterly would move to an online venue rather than print.

Okay. That didn't sound disastrous to me. A number of new journals have used the online format rather than print. Plus, two powerhouses are now in the online arena -- Electric Literature and Narrative. I think they lend a lot of credibility to the medium.

Is it a shame to all us print-and-ink nostalgiacs that TriQuarterly has to stop printing after 45 years? Absolutely. But does it ruin the literary journal? Not at all. In fact, I think that in the future the hierarchies will be reversed, and online publication will be more highly prized than print.

But then Hannah Tinti of One Story tipped me off to this new post on Work In Progress, which says TriQuarterly isn't moving online, it's being shut down. Apparently, "moving online" was a euphemism for cutting all paid editorial positions and giving some open-source software to students. Bleh.

Apparently, associate editor Ian Morris apparently sent out this email:

"After terminating TriQuarterly’s print operation and our editorial positions next April, Northwestern University will be giving the name TriQuarterly to an online “open source” student-run journal in the university’s department of continuing studies."

I'd like to wait and see what shape this new journal with the old name takes, but cutting all the funding virtually guaruntees a plunge in quality.

The real question on everyone's minds: Which literary journal will be next to fall?

Short Stories as Moles; or, the Literary Journal Scene in Germany

Thanks to Absinthe Minded (great name, by the way), for referring me to this article in the Goethe Institut about the literary journal/short story scene in Germany. Love the opening:

"Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and publish against the mainstream. And they sometimes feel out trends that later rock the literary scene with truly eruptive success."

The article goes on to discuss the career of Günter Eich, how circulations run between 30 and 30,000 (ha! -- love the lowballing), and the stubbornly long literary journal name "das heft das seinen langen namen ändern wollte."

Rolf Grimminger, quoted in the articles, notes the changing role of literary journals:

“The significance of literary magazines has changed greatly in recent decades. In the 1950s they were still a real medium of information about what was going on and about authors and the possibilities of writing. Then competition came in the form of features articles in newspapers and audio-visual media”. Today the charm of many magazines is precisely their niche existence and their subversive subterranean activities."

He's right about the persevering charm of literary magazines -- for many of them, it is about filling a (admittedly small) niche. In the U.S., though, I doubt that feature articles in newspapers were ever offering competition. The rising competition is certainly audio-visual media, especially since publishers are now wanting books themselves to be multimedia shows.

The course for most journals seems not towards mainstream status and struggling against the parameters of their niche, but working on embracing, exploring, and digging deeper into those niches.

John Freeman on Literary Journals

Here's John Freeman brilliant description of the role of literary journals:

Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.

Narrative Has Competition! (Hello, Electric Literature)

Narrative has become the current gold standard for online literary magazines, wading in the fray and dominating the competition in a relatively short time.

Well, watch out. Electric Literature just launched, and it looks like a doozy.

True to the name, EL is distributing electronically, through a host of formats: e-book, Kindle, and iPhone, plus print-on-demand. It seems a smart new path for literary journal distribution. Plus, EL actually provides a business model that might work, as stories are sold for .99, a much better distribution model than wrangling a few copies into independent bookstores, many copies of which are unsold and scrapped.

Might I mention the lineup is as strong as that first issue of Black Clock that took the literary world by storm?

• Michael Cunningham
• Jim Shepard
• T Cooper
• Lydia Millet
• Diana Wagman

As far as money, they say this on their submission page (a backhanded jab at Narrative?):

We pay writers, they don't pay us. We are proud to support writers who entrust us with their work.

They also pay at a Subtropics rate ($1000 smackers a story). But it's pretty hilarious that a journal with "Electric" in their name doesn't accept electronic submissions. [CORRECTION: Though initially confused by the set-up of the submissions page, I have now verified that they do accept electronic submissions.]

Plus, if all that isn't enough, they have pictures of hot girls doing weird things on their website (But not as explicit as Fence, though).

Best (?) Five Lit Journals

The Daily Beast has an article about the five best literary journals, but two of the journals -- N+1 and The Believer -- I'd describe more as book reviews.

One Story deserves its place on this list, but it's interesting that Quick Fiction gets a nod -- as the name implies, it's all fiction under 500 words. They have excerpts only available online for each story -- no, I'm joking. (Remember the 6-word story craze? Try excerpting the Hemingway one: "For Sale: Baby . . . " -- Now pay to see the rest). But explore the Quick Fiction website, because it's a nice design.

Lastly, there's Subtropics, about which Lizzie Stark writes:

"Subtropics is the most traditional literary magazine on this list."

If by traditional she means not publishing exclusively flash fiction and coming out twice a year instead of every three weeks, then yes, Subtropics could be considered traditional. But I wouldn't call the aesthetic of Subtropics traditional. Consider John Brandon's "Naples. Not Italy." Or Chris Bachelder's "Gatsby's Hydroplane."

Oldest is a Matter of Pride

In the spirit of Harper's Readings, I offer this trivia about literary journals. Below are the journals that use the adjective "oldest" as a badge of pride. And no -- despite readers' assumptions that only one journal would use the term "oldest," with others using only "older" or "not as young as most," quite a few use creative qualifications to lay claim to that trophy of all trophies: the geriatric-est literary journal.

• Northwest Review: "among the nation's oldest"
• Carolina Quarterly "one of the oldest"
• Prairie Schooner: "One of the oldest literary journals"
• Southwest Review: "third oldest quarterly"
• Chattahoochee Review: "Atlanta's oldest literary magazine"
• Poetry: "oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world"
• Poet Lore: "oldest continuously published poetry magazine"
• The Pinch: "one of the oldest literary journals in the country"
• Catch: "oldest continuously published student-run literary journal in the country"
• Watershed: "one of the oldest continuously published student-edited literary magazines in the nation"
• Sonora Review: "oldest student run"
• Red Cedar Review: "the oldest undergraduate-run publication"
• Reed Magazine: "one of the oldest student publications west of the Mississippi"
• 13th Moon: "oldest continuously published literary journal founded in the second wave of feminism"
• New River Journal: "oldest literary journal devoted to digital writing"
• The Blue Moon Review: "the oldest living literary magazine online"
• Columbia Review: "oldest college literary magazine in the nation"
• North America Review: "the nation's oldest literary magazine"
• Harvard Advocate: "oldest continuously published college literary magazine"
• Sewanee Review: "oldest continuously published literary quarterly"
• Yale Review: "oldest literary quarterly"

Journals Accepting Electronic Submissionss

For all my readers who are writers, click on the link to the left under Pages: Journals Accepting Electronic Submissions. I found there wasn't a good list up anywhere, and decided to make my own. It's a list which will change fairly frequently, but I'll try to keep it updated.

Writer Database

Columbia College Chicago has put together a database of literary journal information. It gives you a snapshot of the type of fiction/poetry published in each journal, with currently more than fifty journals listed. While Duotrope's best information is statistic based -- how many submissions a journal receives and how quickly they reject/accept -- and the reviews of Newpages focuses on the overall journal performance, these reviews go story by story, classifying according to genre, length, POV, and rating how difficult it would be for an emerging writer to break in.

One terribly annoying factor is that every single Market Sheet (one page of information about the journal) is a PDF file, which ends up cluttering up your computer with files and doesn't allow for easy switching between reports. Also, some of the reports aren't as helpful as they could be, offering the POV (another omniscient third person narrator) yet not making clear whether the story is magical realism or straight realism. But if you can't read every journal that you submit to -- although you should, of course, at least once -- this might help you determine whether to send that story to Black Clock or Quarterly West.

Minnesota Review Extinction?

The Minnesota Review is in danger of shutting down, due to Carnegie Mellon's intransigence regarding funding. It's an age-old struggle between English departments squeezed for money, who want to shift funds to other seemingly more tangible benefits, and literary journals that are rarely self-supporting.

David Kaufer, the head of the English department, insists that The Minnesota Review should seek outside funding, but most literary journals operate on a budget funded by three roughly equal sources: revenue from sales/advertising, outside grants/funds, and university support. If you take away the last leg, most university-affiliated journals would collapse.

The Chronicle of Higher Education weighs in on the situation in a blog post, and the student newspaper offers a more extended take, including extensive quotes from all involved.

Literary Journal Rankings

On this lovely Monday morning, I'd like to direct your attention to the left column, under "Pages." I've added a new one: Ranking of Literary Journals. Although I realize the dangers of such an attempt and the impossibility of creating a list that will not be debated, I wrote this because when I was first starting to send out to literary journals, I wanted a guide to help steer me.

Unfortunately, other than a top-eleven list or two, there isn't much out there. So this list should help you to know when you're sending out to one of the most difficult journals, and also know it if you're sending to a mid-list journal. There are multiple strategies out there -- break in at the lower levels and build your way up, or pound away at the big boys until a story breaks through -- but I'll leave those choices up to you.

This list of the top literary journals is not meant to be exhaustive. Actually, the opposite: it's meant only to highlight great journals and create a hierarchy of the best journals. It excludes online literary journals because I have ranked them elsewhere. Some of the sections (especially IV and V) have very little differences in status between them. The most incomplete list is section V, which could have twenty or thirty more journals added, and there is space for a section VI, but it would include a good hundred or more journals. Consult Duotrope for those options.

My ranking criteria included perceived reputation, frequency of appearances in literary news, appearances in newly published collections, my personal experience with these journals, other ranking attempts and Duotrope rankings. Although the actual list is broken down into sections based on the difficult of getting published, this is just a convenient way of smashing all the above criteria into one easy-to-label format. Also, in ranking these journals, I tried to evaluate their current status, not (if applicable) their former glory.

If you have suggestions or critiques, I welcome them in the comments section of that page.

Publication: Round Two!

So recently I've been seeing a number of publications that seek out pre-published material. Think of it as a second chance for your piece to find an audience. Here are three different magazines focusing on round two.

Second Writes is a new literary journal specializing in material already published. The publishers of the journal are frustrated that all everyone wants is First North American Rights. What about Second Rights? And so was born Second Writes. Their first issue contains an essay from the New Yorker, which doesn't seem to need the publicity of a second go-around, but I'm hoping that future issues will focus more on the back roads and byways of publishing, to highlight the overlooked but not under-talented. Best of all, they pay $150 per piece, which isn't shabby considering First Rights have already been sold.

According to the May/June issue of Poets and Writers, New Millennium Writings also accepts any stories for contests that have not been published in journals with circulations above 5,000. So that's 97% of lit journals. (According to my completely facetious calculations).

Lastly, here is one that many more of you are familiar with: Utne Reader. They are always on the look for reprints, culling all the best out from the jetsam and flotsam of modern culture. It's a bit like the logic of Harper's Magazine Readings section, except on a much grander scale. Unlike the two above, Utne focuses solely on nonfiction:

Many of the articles in Utne Reader are reprinted from the hundreds of magazines, newsweeklies, newsletters, and literary journals we receive regularly, and we welcome previously published submissions. (Yes, this includes online sources.) We do not accept fiction or poetry.

Interview with Jeanne Leiby, Editor of the Southern Review

Interview with Jeanne Leiby from Sam Armstrong on Vimeo.
I talked with Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review, about a weak-kneed and shaky-voiced solicitation of Philip Levine, Bret Lott's aesthetic changes to the journal, a special issue about the circus, and cultivating the emerging writers of this generation.

Interviewer: John Matthew Fox
Videographer: Joel Champagne
Video Editor: James Roland

Top Twelve Online Literary Journals

Here are the top twelve online literary journals, at least according to the number of Million Writers Award nominations each journal has received in the last five years.

• Eclectica (31 nominations)
• Pindeldyboz (26)
• Agni (16)
• Strange Horizons (16)
• Word Riot (16)
• Narrative Magazine (15)
• Fiction Warehouse (13)
• The King's English (12)
• Mississippi Review (12)
• Blackbird (11)
• Blithe House Quarterly (11)
• Storyglossia (11)

Literary Rejections and Slush Pile Wars

There’s been a flurry of discussion in the blogosphere lately about what an editor should and should not say about submissions. LROD started with some complaints about VQR editor Ted Genoways, then Howard Junker of ZYZZYVA condemns Ted Genoways, and Ted Genoways responds, and Will Entrekin takes issue with the editor of Fence, the editor of Clarkesworld and myself.

The ethical issue in regards to cover letters might simply be about publishing private correspondence: writers submit a private text to the editor, and expect (in an unspoken contract) that it will remain private. Editors, by talking about or excerpting that text, break that contract. However, I believe that when this “private” correspondence is a mass submission to hundreds of journals, and when the letter betrays a complete lack of familiarity with the journal – calling it by the wrong name, or no name at all; misspelling the name of the editor, or writing a former editor, or no editor name at all; submitting an 85 page manuscript to a journal that publishes nothing over 20 pages – that this contract no longer retains its former strength. Also, as long as the editor offers the cover letter anonymously, they are only showing their submitters that the basic, professional courtesy of passing familiarity with the journal needs to be exercised when they submit. I don’t believe that it is abusing or disrespecting normal submitters in any way. 

That would be the end of it except for those who are skittish and fearful. These are the people who are scared that their work will be ridiculed next. So when these people see the comments by the readers at VQR – “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read” – they are worried that the object of scorn is their own work. It seems rather obvious that these individuals are unpublished, because published authors are quite aware that part of the risk of publishing, or even trying to be published, is fraught with the possibility of ridicule. Look at Scott Snyder: he lands a story in VQR, quite a laudable feat, and people post on Literary Rejections on Display quite nasty things, like they couldn’t make it past the first paragraph, that the entire story lacked authenticity, and that the writing was terrible. I imagine this to be the case with every published story and book (if anyone talks about it all). Once you publish, prepare for an onslaught. There will always be someone out there telling you that your work is subliterate. There will always be someone, no matter how high your accomplishments, that will tell you that you couldn’t cobble together a fourth-grade-level sentence. If you think editors wield a heavy critical stick, try the general public. Which is not to excuse everything that an editor says: they too must exercise judgment. But offering anonymous slush pile critiques is nothing compared to what you’d actually receive in book reviews. 

But to come back to what Genoways talked about, trying to reassure submitters – that none of the people mocked by the slush pile reviewers were the complainers. I’m sure he was right. I know, from my experience reading slush piles, the vast majority of pieces are merely mediocre. Mocking only comes about in regards to the 1% that is jaw-dropping terrible. If you really, really worry that you’re in that 1%, then either you have self-esteem issues or you need to work a bit longer on your craft, because you have to be in the top 1% to make it into these journals. To assume that all submissions don’t merit humor is simply to have never actually read a slush pile. However, I know that laughing in the slush pile room among fellow editors is vastly different than publishing those sentiments on the Internet. So is the problem with witnessing the mockery rather than simply knowing that it exists behind closed doors? Because it will always exist behind closed doors: no way to stop that. 

If the people complaining have no fear that their manuscripts are being mocked, and they are only concerned with protecting others less talented than themselves, then that is a different topic. Then it becomes: Is an editor acting professionally by talking about their slush pile? I believe it to be an editorial choice. I have no problem with editors that talk about outlandish submitters, and I have no trouble with editors that don’t talk. I see nothing intrinsically disrespectful about complaining in an abstract, anonymous way about the quality of submissions received. Only the people with thin skins are likely to be put off. The people with thick enough skins to handle it are likely to be the better writers anyway. 

But that’s cover letters. Let’s consider the manuscripts themselves. I would avoid publishing or talking about the actual text of submitted story or stories. There are many bad writers out there, and it does little good to condemn them. Even in a workshop setting, I believe it necessary to praise the author for something, even if the story on the whole needs vast improvement. But I don’t know an editor that has made slush pile manuscripts available – Ted Genoways shared the comments of his slush pile readers, which I believe are fairly typical of slush pile readings (if you’ve ever read a slush pile, you would likely say similar things). On the back cover of ZYZZYVA, Howard Junker often offers excerpts from cover letters, which are funny or naïve. But I’m not aware of editors that actually share bad manuscripts, and I hope that it stays that way. 

Let me say it: I admire the vast percentage of people who submit to the Southern California Review. To anyone who doesn’t screw up our basic identity, I offer a fair and careful consideration of their manuscript. I admire people who submit for the eighth time to our journal, because even if we don’t accept that eighth one, I admire their tenacity. I love that rush from finding a brilliant manuscript. I love the whole process because I am engaged in this same process, the same postage-and-manila-envelope scheme, collecting the same stack of rejection slips. So fight on, and know that if you have even the slightest bit of respect for the literary journal, the literary journal will extend that respect right back to you.

Scott Snyder and the Voodoo Rejections

I just started reading Scott Snyder's "Voodoo Heart," a wonderful collection of short stories originally published in venues like One-Story, Epoch, and Tin House, and published as a collection in 2006. There's an interview with him over at Literary Rejections on Display, but I just wanted to excerpt this staggering anecdote:

I once sent a story out to a journal – I won’t say which one – and quickly got my SASE back in the mail with a form rejection inside. Which was fine, except that about two weeks later, I got another envelope in the mail, this time one the magazine’s own envelopes, with their own postage, my address hand-written on the cover. And inside was another form rejection for the same story. Which had me wondering, was the story that bad? You had to reject it twice? On your own dime? And then, about three weeks later, I got another letter from the same magazine, rejecting the story again! In one of their own envelopes, own postage, etc. So they actually paid to reject me twice more than necessary. They hated the story that much! Now fast forward to about six months later. I’m doing a small reading with some school friends. I have one friend who runs a small art gallery in Brooklyn (South First – it’s a great place) and she asked if some of us wanted to read there to promote an upcoming show that had a literary theme. I was thrilled to do it. I hadn’t really done many readings at all. So at the reading I read the story that had gotten rejected 3 times. And afterwards someone comes up to me who happens to be an editor at that same magazine that rejected the story so many times and asks if I’ll show it to them. A couple months later, a tuned up version of the story is published in that same magazine.

The Death of Simultaneous Submission?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about a new software called CrossCheck, which is billed as a plagarism program. Most writers, who unlike academics are not quoting and paraphrasing, are hardly ever in danger of plagiarism. But the program actually goes one step beyond crosschecking other previously published articles, and also checks other currently submitted articles: "At Elsevier, a leading journal publisher, an article submitted simultaneously to two Elsevier publications will be automatically flagged."

Every writer I know ignores the prohibitions against "Simultaneous Submissions" (Or Sim Subs, if you want to be informal about it). And since print submissions are still in vogue, it would be difficult to enter all submissions into a database and crosscheck them against other journals to guard against simultaneous submission. But now that electronic submissions are becoming increasingly popular -- especially the program offered by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) -- it would be very easy for code to be written that would flag articles that had been submitted simultaneously. And it would even be worse than in the academic realm, because there are far more programs to upload submissions in the academic realm than in the creative realm, and so only one program might apply to a large number of journals. While my first move to escape detection would be to use different titles for the same story -- just like a writer does in the short story collection by Robert Bolano, "Last Evenings on Earth" -- a program like CrossCheck would check the entire story, not just the title. Those damn computers: Sometimes I feel like I'm playing chess against HAL.

For now -- and I should emphasize the "now" -- this program is only available to academic journals, and hasn't yet crossed over to the literary realm (as far as I know). But I think this kind of possibility might serve as a slight deterrent to those writers who continue to cry and beg and implore journals to switch to electronic submissions. Let it be said: there are some definite downsides to the electronic format. Although I have to admit -- with postage rising yet again, it might be a downside I'll eventually be willing to accept.

Stephen Corey on Genre Numbers

Stephen Corey, editor of the Georgia Review, wrote a piece for the May/June Poets & Writers. Here's an excerpt in which he quantifies the shifts he's seen with nonfiction, poetry, and short stories:

Well, more people are sending out and publishing what they now call (forgive us, Father Montaigne) "creative nonfiction." In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least four-fold . . . The number of poems circulating seems to have held fairly steady, while the number of short stories, on the increase for a long time, has diminished in the past few years. I think the publishing industry has worked overtime of late to eradicate the short story form, and I think some of the writing programs may have been helping too. Story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories - all these au courant designations are attempted endarounds in the pro-novel, anti-short story game of book marketing. The pressures on our potential new Flannery O'Connors and Ernest Hemingways to "get past" their story writing and into novels as quickly as possible may be opening a sad and profound gap in our literature.

Literary Journal Correspondence

Over at Fence there's a exchange between the editor and a contributor that devolves incredibly quickly into rather shameless namecalling (via Chekhov's Mistress). Despite the nastiness, I have to say that just getting any response from an editor of a literary journal is difficult, so an editor responding multiple times should earn at least some respect. I've failed to hear from editors about a submission going on thirteen months (never responded to two emails), contributor copies (or even if they've finally published the issue in which my work was supposed to appear), and had stories accepted only to find all the emails on the journal site turned into non-functioning addresses that just pop back all my nicely phrased queries. So yes -- politeness is key, and so is staying on top of your correspondence. Not that I've done that at all for the Southern California Review, but hey, I can advocate some things on principle.

Short Roundup

Dan over at Emerging Writers Network points out a new trend among literary journals, such as Fence and American Short Fiction, to "pay what you can" for a subscription to their journal. A smart move, I believe. Journals need some kind of marketing to jumpstart their subscription base.

How literary journal rejections that take over a year at least let you imagine that you made it past the first five readers (only to be squashed by the sixth).

A low-residency MFA program that went terribly, terribly, wrong.

An interview with Benjamin Percy, whose two short story collections ("Refresh, Refresh," and "The Language of Elk") have made waves.

Black Clock

Edition Five of Black Clock is out, and despite the journal being relatively new, it's commanding some well-known voices (David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender). The editor and creator of the journal, Steve Erickson, talked at the LA Times book fair in a panel on LA Fiction (hosted by Janet Fitch), and now Black Clock is now targetting Los Angeles fiction. This focus on LA fiction is great for LA writers, because guess what? Not all the writers in So Cal use FinalDraft.

Anyways, here's the event: Black Clock Reading - at Skylight Books in Silver Lake. June 22, a Thursday, at 7:30 pm. LA Times Post

And, if you haven't read Steve Erickson's latest and greatest - Our Estatic Days - do so now at Powell's Books.

Labels: Steve Erickson