At Belletrist magazine (published at Bellevue College in WA state), the pandemic coincided with the sudden defunding of the literary magazine (along with many other arts and extracurricular initiatives that had received funding from Student Programs). It's a long story about the campus politics and confusion about funding policies that had already been brewing on campus, but the way we decided to respond to the double catastrophe was to produce the 2020 issue in a special-edition, McSweeney's-esque "scroll." This would be an issue that could be unfurled to be read, a la a toilet-paper roll (in a nod to pandemic culture). There will be five or six prose pieces in it, none longer than about 500 words, each published as a single long line; the separate pieces will be stacked on top of each other.
As for the funding of this, a third 2020 disaster for me personally was the sudden loss of both my parents. The deaths in the family meant I inherited a surprisingly large sum of money. So, I offered to bankroll the production of the special issue, pending us figuring out (we hope) more sustainable sources of funding from our college in future.
In a related point, I actually did a project last spring where I gathered a list of names of similarly placed lit mags to us (i.e., journals published at two-year colleges or comparable institutions) and sent them a message offering a free ad or link on our site and/or a free issue, in return for their answering questions about how they had gone about establishing sustainable funding. Unfortunately, I got no responses to this. However, maybe just my posting about this here could help--or maybe Lit Mag News could help in some other way, perhaps by hosting a roundtable, like those of old, to talk about funding strategies, especially now when many states and schools might face austerity budgets.
Oh Cara, thank you for sharing these experiences here. First and foremost, I'm so sorry to hear of your loss. I find it so touching that you put some of the inherited money toward funding your journal. I'm sure the magazine's contributors and readers will feel the love you put into this work.
It is interesting to hear your creative solution to the university funding issue. I love what you came up with. Someday someone will chronicle this era, and your journal will be a vital record not only of what kind of art was made but how the art was physically produced, in response to the demands and challenges of our time.
I would love to start a discussion thread on funding models. Sounds like a lot of magazines could benefit from that right now. I will keep this in mind for future threads!
Over at The Ilanot Review, we felt partly responsible for bringing on the pandemic, because our last two themes (selected a year in advance) were "Home/work" (for March) and "toxic" for Sept. To compensate, and make the world right again, we are now reading for our "Delight" themed issue (open through January). In the spring we'll read for our "ephemera" themed issue. http://www.ilanotreview.com/submissions-page/#:~:text=Delight!,submission
Ah, Marcela, I knew this pandemic had to be the fault of a lit mag somewhere!
In all seriousness, thank you for your input here. How wonderful that you are reading with an eye toward Delight--something we all certainly need more of these days.
Our generous and solicitous online host may regret inviting me to answer this query, especially without a word count, but there’s lots to report from Santa Monica Review, the (once) nationally distributed literary magazine which I edit. And I am not shy, especially by way of assessing the moment.
More on the qualifying parenthetical adjectivization of our distribution challenges momentarily, but the good news is that the community college which sponsors our magazine has done its very best, providing so much support. Becky’s call reminded me, father of an eighteen-year-old, of reading over and over the classic Caps for Sale, with me now cast as both a monkey and the frustrated hat seller. Indeed, I am a part-time editor doing a full-time job (which I love), university lecturer, union activist and writer myself. Lots of caps. And lots of monkeys. Oh, and my family has now been evacuated three times as a result of So Cal wildfires.
Yet despite social distancing, furloughs, cancellations of real-life events, and so many institutional challenges, Santa Monica College, where my mentor Jim Krusoe (The Sleep Garden) started the journal three decades ago, got us through production and advertising of the fall 2020 issue, and also shipped and mailed copies to subscribers, contributors, arts organizations and community supporters. Best of all, the engineer and webmaster and staff there made us all look good, with our first-ever online reading, where literary pals and writers featured in the current or recent issues read to a grateful and generous crowd tuning in from all over the nation, even the world. I love the intimate black-box theater at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center where I host our regular readings but was thrilled to welcome faraway literary comrades and fans of the magazine.
I read submissions all year, and we publish in spring and fall. I made no calls for themes, but smart, artful political writing, including even more feminist dystopic fiction, plenty of dark humor and our first-ever COVID story have been welcome if also perhaps anticipated. Lucky me. I get to choose only the best of what is sent our way, and now help perhaps to set the agenda for an artistic critique of the zeitgeist. It took a few months, but thoughtful short stories about our difficult, challenging, absurd(ist) moment will appear in both the spring and fall 2021 issues, where I have tried to present a diverse, realistic, unrealistic (!) and engaging line-up, now perversely easier, in a way.
Some readers might know that both of our long-time distributors helped us celebrate our recent thirtieth anniversary by, yes, going out of business. We are hoping that IndieBound and Bookshop will indeed soon take on lit mags as we really admire their commitment to avoiding the wiles of the naked lady warrior and also helping local bookstores. Meanwhile, I shipped copies of the recent issue (free) to about thirty of my favorite West Coast bookstores, just because we need them --- all of us --- and hope that when COVID is over, they will again feature us on their real-life shelves, where readers can stand and pick up and thumb through, and maybe buy a copy. Our website is still an easy way to order individual copies and back issues. And, old-school style, sending a check via the US Postal Service gets you a subscription.
Happily accommodating both a tremendous recent increase in highest-quality submissions and COVID, I am flirting with the idea of presenting limited, “exclusive” online content, perhaps featuring a monthly short story and author profile at the website, in addition to our regular print issue, still a simple, elegant collection of words, fiction and nonfiction only, no poetry, photos or art --- except for a gorgeous cover, usually from a Southern California painter or photographer. We admire Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, but don’t have their staff, so hope to both stick to our long-time model of simplicity and straightforwardness but maybe amp up the website, social media and subscriber base.
We’ll present another online reading, to celebrate the spring issue. Folks can watch the recent one on YouTube, for free, accessible through our website, and anticipate a mid-April invitation for the next. So, yes, we are thriving, thanks to committed administrators at the college, supportive subscribers, and generous literary pals who perform their work for SMR and share the magazine with their students, fans, and editors. I’ll conclude (see, I warned you I was a gasbag!) by offering a free sample issue to anybody who writes to me at SM Review, 1900 Pico, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Sure, I’m generous but the punchline (or only clumsily buried lede) is that a whole lot of the 3,000 extra copies of our spring 2020 we’d planned to distribute in person to attendees of the cancelled Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, LitFest Pasadena festival and dozens of summer writing workshops are stacked in the basement of my Santa Ana Mountains home, where they have, thankfully, survived the fires, as has our magazine. Oh, and by the way, I personally subscribe to the admired magazines I mentioned above. Just sayin!
Andrew, this is great! Thank you so much for providing this insight into your magazine and what's been going on with you personally--three evacuations, oy!--as well as all the effort involved in bringing your journal to fruition. I love what you said about editors setting "an agenda for an artistic critique of the zeitgeist." Indeed, the role of editors to curate the narrative about this moment in history is so important. Given how much you have going on, it is so heartening to see your commitment to the magazine remains steadfast. (Sounds like you genuinely love the work and love sharing great writing with the world!) I'm thrilled to read this, and wish SMR a continued future of thriving and publishing all that important, political, dystopian, absurdist, darkly humored and overall excellent writing.
At Belletrist magazine (published at Bellevue College in WA state), the pandemic coincided with the sudden defunding of the literary magazine (along with many other arts and extracurricular initiatives that had received funding from Student Programs). It's a long story about the campus politics and confusion about funding policies that had already been brewing on campus, but the way we decided to respond to the double catastrophe was to produce the 2020 issue in a special-edition, McSweeney's-esque "scroll." This would be an issue that could be unfurled to be read, a la a toilet-paper roll (in a nod to pandemic culture). There will be five or six prose pieces in it, none longer than about 500 words, each published as a single long line; the separate pieces will be stacked on top of each other.
As for the funding of this, a third 2020 disaster for me personally was the sudden loss of both my parents. The deaths in the family meant I inherited a surprisingly large sum of money. So, I offered to bankroll the production of the special issue, pending us figuring out (we hope) more sustainable sources of funding from our college in future.
In a related point, I actually did a project last spring where I gathered a list of names of similarly placed lit mags to us (i.e., journals published at two-year colleges or comparable institutions) and sent them a message offering a free ad or link on our site and/or a free issue, in return for their answering questions about how they had gone about establishing sustainable funding. Unfortunately, I got no responses to this. However, maybe just my posting about this here could help--or maybe Lit Mag News could help in some other way, perhaps by hosting a roundtable, like those of old, to talk about funding strategies, especially now when many states and schools might face austerity budgets.
Thanks for this forum!
Oh Cara, thank you for sharing these experiences here. First and foremost, I'm so sorry to hear of your loss. I find it so touching that you put some of the inherited money toward funding your journal. I'm sure the magazine's contributors and readers will feel the love you put into this work.
It is interesting to hear your creative solution to the university funding issue. I love what you came up with. Someday someone will chronicle this era, and your journal will be a vital record not only of what kind of art was made but how the art was physically produced, in response to the demands and challenges of our time.
I would love to start a discussion thread on funding models. Sounds like a lot of magazines could benefit from that right now. I will keep this in mind for future threads!
Over at The Ilanot Review, we felt partly responsible for bringing on the pandemic, because our last two themes (selected a year in advance) were "Home/work" (for March) and "toxic" for Sept. To compensate, and make the world right again, we are now reading for our "Delight" themed issue (open through January). In the spring we'll read for our "ephemera" themed issue. http://www.ilanotreview.com/submissions-page/#:~:text=Delight!,submission
Ah, Marcela, I knew this pandemic had to be the fault of a lit mag somewhere!
In all seriousness, thank you for your input here. How wonderful that you are reading with an eye toward Delight--something we all certainly need more of these days.
Host University?
Lol
No I sell em one by one. Now that there’s no small press fests, it’s very difficult selling poetry chapbooks
Ah that's a great point about the lack of small press festivals now. I had not even thought about that!
Our generous and solicitous online host may regret inviting me to answer this query, especially without a word count, but there’s lots to report from Santa Monica Review, the (once) nationally distributed literary magazine which I edit. And I am not shy, especially by way of assessing the moment.
More on the qualifying parenthetical adjectivization of our distribution challenges momentarily, but the good news is that the community college which sponsors our magazine has done its very best, providing so much support. Becky’s call reminded me, father of an eighteen-year-old, of reading over and over the classic Caps for Sale, with me now cast as both a monkey and the frustrated hat seller. Indeed, I am a part-time editor doing a full-time job (which I love), university lecturer, union activist and writer myself. Lots of caps. And lots of monkeys. Oh, and my family has now been evacuated three times as a result of So Cal wildfires.
Yet despite social distancing, furloughs, cancellations of real-life events, and so many institutional challenges, Santa Monica College, where my mentor Jim Krusoe (The Sleep Garden) started the journal three decades ago, got us through production and advertising of the fall 2020 issue, and also shipped and mailed copies to subscribers, contributors, arts organizations and community supporters. Best of all, the engineer and webmaster and staff there made us all look good, with our first-ever online reading, where literary pals and writers featured in the current or recent issues read to a grateful and generous crowd tuning in from all over the nation, even the world. I love the intimate black-box theater at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center where I host our regular readings but was thrilled to welcome faraway literary comrades and fans of the magazine.
I read submissions all year, and we publish in spring and fall. I made no calls for themes, but smart, artful political writing, including even more feminist dystopic fiction, plenty of dark humor and our first-ever COVID story have been welcome if also perhaps anticipated. Lucky me. I get to choose only the best of what is sent our way, and now help perhaps to set the agenda for an artistic critique of the zeitgeist. It took a few months, but thoughtful short stories about our difficult, challenging, absurd(ist) moment will appear in both the spring and fall 2021 issues, where I have tried to present a diverse, realistic, unrealistic (!) and engaging line-up, now perversely easier, in a way.
Some readers might know that both of our long-time distributors helped us celebrate our recent thirtieth anniversary by, yes, going out of business. We are hoping that IndieBound and Bookshop will indeed soon take on lit mags as we really admire their commitment to avoiding the wiles of the naked lady warrior and also helping local bookstores. Meanwhile, I shipped copies of the recent issue (free) to about thirty of my favorite West Coast bookstores, just because we need them --- all of us --- and hope that when COVID is over, they will again feature us on their real-life shelves, where readers can stand and pick up and thumb through, and maybe buy a copy. Our website is still an easy way to order individual copies and back issues. And, old-school style, sending a check via the US Postal Service gets you a subscription.
Happily accommodating both a tremendous recent increase in highest-quality submissions and COVID, I am flirting with the idea of presenting limited, “exclusive” online content, perhaps featuring a monthly short story and author profile at the website, in addition to our regular print issue, still a simple, elegant collection of words, fiction and nonfiction only, no poetry, photos or art --- except for a gorgeous cover, usually from a Southern California painter or photographer. We admire Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, but don’t have their staff, so hope to both stick to our long-time model of simplicity and straightforwardness but maybe amp up the website, social media and subscriber base.
We’ll present another online reading, to celebrate the spring issue. Folks can watch the recent one on YouTube, for free, accessible through our website, and anticipate a mid-April invitation for the next. So, yes, we are thriving, thanks to committed administrators at the college, supportive subscribers, and generous literary pals who perform their work for SMR and share the magazine with their students, fans, and editors. I’ll conclude (see, I warned you I was a gasbag!) by offering a free sample issue to anybody who writes to me at SM Review, 1900 Pico, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Sure, I’m generous but the punchline (or only clumsily buried lede) is that a whole lot of the 3,000 extra copies of our spring 2020 we’d planned to distribute in person to attendees of the cancelled Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, LitFest Pasadena festival and dozens of summer writing workshops are stacked in the basement of my Santa Ana Mountains home, where they have, thankfully, survived the fires, as has our magazine. Oh, and by the way, I personally subscribe to the admired magazines I mentioned above. Just sayin!
Andrew, this is great! Thank you so much for providing this insight into your magazine and what's been going on with you personally--three evacuations, oy!--as well as all the effort involved in bringing your journal to fruition. I love what you said about editors setting "an agenda for an artistic critique of the zeitgeist." Indeed, the role of editors to curate the narrative about this moment in history is so important. Given how much you have going on, it is so heartening to see your commitment to the magazine remains steadfast. (Sounds like you genuinely love the work and love sharing great writing with the world!) I'm thrilled to read this, and wish SMR a continued future of thriving and publishing all that important, political, dystopian, absurdist, darkly humored and overall excellent writing.