The Future of the Literary Magazine
Essays, interviews, reprints, and so on regarding the direction of the literary magazine.
Submissions Wanted / New Feature: The Future of the Literary Magazine
Posted on July 21st, 2010 at 2:59 pm
We are looking for pieces to publish on a new series on The Future of the Literary Magazine. (We also have a current series going on Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in Indie Publishing.)
We have asked some writers and editors to weigh in on the direction of lit mags and will also be republishing some stuff on the topic. The usual stuff: digital publishing, the graphic lit mag, literary journalism, financial obstacles, submissions, the environment, and so on.
There has been a lot of discussion recently on the future of the literary magazine. Such as
PEN America hosted editors of Granta, Tin House, and PEN and writers Rodrigo Fresán and Stamm in a conversation about “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future” (video)
Ted Genoways of VQR launched a ribald discussion of lit mags & fiction in his Mother Jones article “The Death of Fiction,” which continued over at the VQR blog
Following that, Carolyn Kellogg wondered at the LA Times “What is the future of printed literary journals?”
Fictionaut founder Jurgen Fauth posited his vision of lit mags future at Huffington Post with “Transcend and Include: Fictionaut and the Future of the Literary Magazine”
Joshua Harmon pondered “on the future of higher-ed-subsidized literary magazines”
I talked with editors of Opium, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and Antioch Review about the subject in a panel during the 2010 AWP Conference “The Future of the Literary Magazine”
Roxane Gay of PANK has been writing about this subject almost constantly at HTMLGIANT
And Jim Hanas recently blogged about individual publishing overthrowing lit mags, “Nobody Likes the Slush Pile. Let’s Get Rid of It.“
We want to continue this. Essays, fiction, interviews, poems, drawings, etc. Submit via our submissions manager or query lunaparkreview <at> gmail.com.
Let me see if I have this right. You’re going to run a new series on the future of the literary magazine, and you also have a current series going on Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in Indie Publishing. Now, I hope I don’t seem like a hopeless Limbaughite if I observe that Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality have been just a trifle overdone. (I say this as a member of a gay Episcopalian parish that just helped elect a lesbian bishop.) So what can we expect from any series you might run on the future of the lit mag? New ideas? Any insights at all? I’m not going to hold my breath.
But here’s one observation I can make: markets that are generally regarded as “selective”, markets that pay or don’t pay, markets that are prestigious or not, all seem to publish stuff that’s at the same order of badness, which is to say, misused words, strained similes (my recent favorite is a village in a valley like a tongue in the mouth of a wolf, making me wonder if Al Gore was going to show up in the story), stereotyped characters and situations.
Why is this? Can it be that those who staff these zines are about as original as the folks who think we need more chin over race, gender, class, and sexuality?
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“We have asked some writers and editors to weigh in on the direction of lit mags and will also be republishing some stuff on the topic.”
You never asked READERS??!?
And then will just be republishing the same old stuff??!?
And you want “Change”?
I think I’ve heard this song before!
As you might deduce from the fact that only a few lone outsiders have even bothered to leave comments here, this is a problem that might generate some precious articles in the journals, but it is not going to be a problem solved by the authors of thes articles, or by the journals themselves, as they stand today.
You are asking a bunch of addicts to solve the drug problem. The problem with literary journals today, from the Yale Review and Ted Genoways’ VQR on down to Cimarron Review, Southern Review, Cincinnati Review and Crab Creek Review, with all of them, is that they cater to professors. They have to, because they are university run journals. They have to play the game, pat each other on the backs. Profs need to publish for tenure. Here are all these precious journals no-one reads, all run by profs, a perfect forum for back-patting. So they do. Result? Contrib notes in any one of these will be all profs and students (who are studying to become profs), not a real writer among them. And no real readers, either.
You reap what you sow … I say time to apply some strong herbicide!
I feel like I have to offer up my two cents, as much of the reason I became interested in literary magazines was such commentary as this, which I think is filled with some misconceptions about literary magazines—though understandable ones.
True, a bunch of the stuff published is boring, maybe even bad, and not just in literary magazines. This is the same for all mediums. Not everything hanging in an art gallery is a Jasper Johns or whatever and not every film opening isn’t The Hurt Locker. And for literature this has been the case for at least 600 years. Most of the poetry and plays published in Shakespeare’s day aren’t read anymore for pleasure, and rightly so.
But I would like to impress upon you, if you are interested, that there is some great stuff being published in lit mags. I would check out, for starters, some of the magazines I have listed at right (under “Good Mags”). Some of these are indies, some are university supported, but all are more often than not sources of really great writing, art, and design.
John: I see that you have been published in the literary magazines that you seem to want to condemn (and in some mags that I often read, such as PANK and Word Riot). And, has really race been overdone? Are we done talking about gender? These things are no longer relevant? I guess I just can’t see that.
Jane: I would love (love!) to get some commentary about lit mags from readers such as you. That’s why I posted this call for submissions. Please spread the word!
V Pritchard: I understand that lit mags are often seen by writers on a career-track as a CV line—but this isn’t always the case (and even if it is the case at times, I am not sure that you can then write-off all of that writing). There are many, many, many writers publishing in lit mags who are not doing it to get a job. Some of it is bad, some is mediocre, some is good, and a bit of it is downright fantastic. I would recommend picking up a copy of McSweeney’s or American Short Fiction or VQR—as these places usually across the board publish fantastic writing.
And, as for “no real writers” publishing in lit mags, I think that’s a hard sell. Hemingway, Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Jim Shepard, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Conrad, Donald Barthelme, Mary Gaitskill, Raymond Carver, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ian McEwan, T. S. Eliot, and many more were all first published in lit mags. And current issues of lit mags include work by Ann Beattie, Sam Lipsyte, T. C. Boyle, Yiyun Li, D. A. Powell, Jonathan Lethem, Daniel Alarcon, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche, Bill McKibben, Roberto Bolano, Robert Coover, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Seamus Heaney, Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, Victor Lavalle, and so on. Real writers if I ever saw one. (And those are just the “name” writers I am using here to make a point. Otherwise I would also mention Kelly Link, Matthew Zapruder, Laura van den Berg, and many others.)
To some extent, it seems to me that the context of your original call for submissions has been overtaken by events –[this section had been deleted]– You can say bad writing has been going on since Shakespeare, but a big difference is that Shakespeare then, and others since, have satirized pretentious writing and hypocritical writer-smoothies. Now, it seems like nobody wants to say anything about the current awful state of writing because it might damage their chances of being published in xyz.
What about B.R.Myers’s Writer’s Manifesto? His stylistic objections are spot on, but nobody seems to mention his diagnosis of the problems. For that matter, he observes that contemporary writing is meant to be skimmed, not read, and I think he’s correct there, too. What would happen if a serious journal elected simply to publish stories meant to be read, not skimmed? Your argument that bad writing has always been published sort of evades the idea that editors should be trying to publish good writing.
I try to get published where I can, and if now and then some second or third-rank zine takes my stuff, I’m not going to withdraw it, but I still cringe, frankly, at some of the other stuff they all run. And none of the ones in your own great-zine list have touched my stuff.