I Need an Around the Way Lit Mag!
Skyrocketing submission fees; literary imposters; CLMP-Amazon grant winners; African, Canadian, Chinese, U.S. lit-world perspectives; inspiration;s submissions advice; editor interviews; and more
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magterodactyls,
This week’s news includes an announcement from me regarding submission fees, news on a lit mag imposter, lit-world views from around the world, opinions, advice, inspiration, and more.
It’s another long one, friends, so pour yourself a tall glass of sea salt & caramel nitro brew, settle in, and let’s go!
I begin with submission fees. I was astonished to learn recently that Asymptote, “the premier site for world literature in translation,” now charges $10 for general submissions. I consider this fee outrageous. Should this become normalized, writers could spend hundreds of dollars simply trying to place one work. Many will be barred from submitting at all.
Upon investigation, I’ve found high fees at a surprising number of places. Minerva Rising, a press that “prides itself on building a supportive community of women writers,” also charges $10. Red River Review charges $15. 34th Parallel charges $14.50 for general submissions. Limit Experience charges $11.11. Half and One charges $9.
Clover + Bee does not charge a fee to submit. Yet if your work is chosen for publication, you must pay them.
This has to stop. The transition to online submissions and the use of submissions software was meant to make processes easier for everyone. If the process is harder, and therefore more costly, something is wrong. At the very least, charging $10 or more per submission is absolutely unsustainable for writers.
Going forward, I will not interview editors of lit mags that charge more than $5 for submissions. I don’t know that I ever did, but now this will be official policy here. I will also aim to focus more on magazines that charge no fee at all.
I’ve spoken to Ben at Chill Subs (who, special thanks, helped me gather some of this data). He told me that they will soon be introducing badges to identify lit mag fees ranging from “free” to “low” to “lol, no.”
I also spoke with someone from Duotrope, sweetly termed a “Duotrooper,” who told me that their “development team has been considering strategies for addressing [rising fees]…within our system, with the general idea of providing more information to our users about where publishers fall in terms of fees and various response statistics.” In other words, they are working to help make fees explicit to users.
Both of these initiatives are welcome, especially as so many lit mags that charge high fees do not say so outright. Often the fee is cited as the very last step in the submissions form, which is both deceptive and a time-waster for writers.
I encourage any venue that lists lit mags, interviews editors, announces calls for submissions or highlights literary magazines in any way to adopt any of the aforementioned measures, namely, only showcasing journals that charge $5 or less, only listing markets that charge no fees, and/or making the cost of submissions readily visible for writers.
Enough is enough.
Moving on, remember Jasper Ceylon? Back in April I reported how he submitted work under various pen names and began to receive acceptances for work he considered “trash.”
Well, it turns out I was fooled too. Ceylon is not his real name. It is Aaron Barry. And Barry has received a great deal of news coverage on the heels of a recent Free Press article, The White Man Who Pretended to Be Black to Get Published.
River Page reports,
[One of Barry’s poems] was originally published…under the name b.h. fein (pronouns: “it’s/complicated”). But b.h. fein does not exist. It is one of the many pen names of a straight, white Canadian man, who recently told me he’s spent the last few years inventing minority identities, then publishing terrible poems under these pseudonyms.
…In April, the man behind these identities came clean, writing on Substack that he’d “assumed a series of ‘attractive’ pen names” to “test the limits of the poetry industry and just how much buffoonery it was willing to permit in the present day.”
In How white man became famous as a queer Nigerian poet at Business Day, Obidike Okafor writes,
While Barry’s “social experiment” has ignited fierce debate about diversity, authenticity, and merit in publishing, it’s also prompted deeper questions about the assumptions embedded in the modern literary ecosystem.
Is the industry more interested in identity than content? Are editors unconsciously applying double standards? And what happens when those assumptions are exploited, even cynically?
In ‘Gender-Fluid’ Nigerian Poet Turns Out To Be Normal White Guy at The Daily Caller, Natalie Sandoval writes,
Barry is far from the only white male author suffering from excess privilege.
“Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down,” Jacob Savage writes for Compact.
“[N]ot a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker,” he continued.
The solution is in hand for America’s neglected geniuses. There are plenty of queer, Caribbean pen names to go around.
Speaking of fairness in the publishing industry, CLMP has announced the Grant Recipients of the 2025 Literary Magazine Fund. This is an alliance with Amazon Literary Partnership. “Originally launched with CLMP in 2019, the Literary Magazine Fund furthers Amazon Literary Partnership’s role as a supporter of literary organizations nationwide and helps to build the readership of literary magazines.”
Recipients this year include A Public Space, African Voices Communications, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Electric Literature, Lucky Jefferson, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Narrative Magazine, New England Review, One Story, and others.
While we may be happy to see these deserving magazines on this list (except Narrative), some have questions about how the grant process works. One editor messaged me:
This editor is correct—many of these grant recipients were on the list in previous years. Specific information about the application process also appears to be limited. This editor described the application as “a total black box” and said “it all feels very insider clique.”
I’ve reached out to CLMP to learn if they will make the application process more transparent going forward. I’ve yet to hear back.
Now for some international news, in The African Literature Ecosystem Used to Be Unstoppable. What Went Wrong? Nelson C.J writes,
There are significantly fewer literary African publications in operation now than there were six years ago. Alongside Lolwe, publications like Akpata Magazine, The Republic Magazine, Brittle Paper, Open Country Magazine, and Isele Magazine are among the few enduring platforms still holding the fort. In Nigeria, book publishing has shifted from literary works to commercially driven titles...In Kenya and other parts of the continent, book publishing continues to dwindle. And most dangerously, the online spaces that facilitated healthy conversations in favor of the ecosystem have all but disappeared.
Literary Magazines Canada Collective has released its annual report. The results of a 2024 survey led the Collective to conclude that the state of lit mags in Canada is “stable but not sustainable.”
We found that literary magazines contribute significantly to the literary and publishing ecosystem in Canada. We estimate that litmags collectively publish 3,000 to 4,000 authors per year and pay $250,000 to $500,000 in contributor fees to those authors. Editors see the primary role and value of literary magazines as…creating a community of writers and readers and…helping emerging writers…
However, literary magazines are doing this work on very small budgets and/or on budgets that are not increasing with expenses or number of submissions…
…Literary magazines need greater support such that they can better support themselves. Litmags need to move beyond “holding on” to reach sustainability.
At Joe Ponepinto’s Beyond Craft, Claire W. Zhang uses a recent plagiarism scandal in China to draw parallels to the U.S. lit scene. In The Writing World Is Full of Cowards, Zhang writes,
And honestly, I agree—at least with the call for a fairer, more open platform to discover writers. That should be the backbone of a healthy literary community. While literary magazines in the U.S. may not be directly state-run or censored (not that they’ve ever been as “independent” as some claim…), we still find ourselves asking similar questions: How many works published in the Paris Review are unsolicited? Does The New Yorker read their slush pile at all if they reject a story they have already published? How many seconds does a big-name lit mag editor give a submission before voting “no, god no?”
For more perspective on the U.S. literary scene, Naomi Kanakia has written a fresh analysis of the benefits and functions of an MFA degree. In A creative-writing degree can be quite useful, she writes,
Success through the 'anointing' process
[I]n the writing world, there is a distinct anointing process that begins at the MFA. When I was applying, there was a Facebook group for prospective MFA students, and each year there would be a few students who would be the hot-ticket students. They would get into many programs and be able to take their pick.
These same students often went on to place stories in high-profile journals, get agents, and sell books to big publishers.
This anointing phenomenon is something every person who's done an MFA has witnessed: you see some names recur over and over, in fellowship lists, in high-profile journals, and on awards lists.
…Anyone who enters the MFA world usually wonders, "How do I get anointed? How can I become that person?"
I don't know. Nobody knows.
For those who need a dose of inspiration, Ryan Stephen Thornton has written about self-publishing a poetry collection. In Read This Before You Wait Another Fucking Year, Thornton offers “A Self-Publishing Manifesto for the Audacious, the Overlooked, and the Unhinged.”
There comes a moment in every writer’s life where the waiting becomes unbearable. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. I mean full body clench. Teeth grinding. Skin buzzing. You’ve polished the poem, crafted the collection, begged the submission portal not to crash, uploaded your soul (in PDF format), followed all the guidelines (except maybe that one about line spacing), and performed a small nervous breakdown in three enigmatic movements, and then... nothing. A vacuum. A void. A quiet so loud you can hear your own imposter syndrome mouth-breathing. Months pass. Maybe years. (Months are years to poets, I promise you!) Or worse—a reply that says, “We love your work, but it’s not quite right for us.” The voice that poured out of you like splintered bloodjet inked through bared teeth is now "not quite right."
Right. Yes. Great. Cheers. Thanks. Love that. Perfect. Just what I wanted to hear.
Thank you so much for your bland, hauntingly efficient email.
And so—eventually, beautifully, inevitably—you choose yourself.
For those of you frustrated by so many lit mags’ “no reprints” policy, Michael R. Burchcovers the Poetry's mafia-like "kiss of death.”
A major problem for modern poets is that after a poem has been published by a journal with a handful of readers, no one wants the poem, due to nonsensical, counter-productive wars over first publication rights.
Thus the best contemporary poems are often read by just a few people.
…When I founded The HyperTexts over 30 years ago, from day one I accepted previously published poems without restrictions and published the poems permanently so they could be found via Google and other search engines.
…I salute the journals that now accept previously published poems…
For those of you that want some advice, Janelle Drumwright at Lit Mag Lounge has written about Factors You Can (and Can’t) Control When Submitting.
At the end of the day, I always remind my students that submitting is ultimately a numbers game. If you’re doing the right things (focusing on the factors you can control) and submitting your work consistently and often, it’s usually only a matter of time before you get an acceptance. Often, it’s because you happened to send the right piece to the right person at the right journal on the right day.
A few interviews also caught my eye this week.
In The State and Art of Storytelling Richard Hurowitz at The Octavian Report speaks with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker.
Octavian: …I wanted to ask you, since you're the leading editor of short stories in the country right now, how necessary is a specific structure? Is there one that has traditionally worked, the way there is for film? Is it really an art form with a set cadence?
Treisman: No, there’s absolutely nothing rigid about it. You can do anything, I think. Really the only requirement is that you at least get from Point A to Point B. That can be psychologically. It can be geographically. It can be in terms of age. It can be in terms of a relationship. It's just that something has to change or develop in the course of it.
At Aimee Liu's MFA Lore Liu speaks with Shannan Mann, Managing Director of Sub Club and Editor of Only Poems.
Some of the most valuable insights from our chat include Shannan's emphasis on making your relationship with literary journals fun rather than grueling, her detailed breakdown of how to research magazines using tools like Chill Subs, and her refreshingly realistic perspective on payment and recognition in the literary world.
And at Library Journal Jill Cox-Cordova speaks with Laura Pegram, Founder of Kweli Journal. Says Pegram,
Since our humble beginnings, Kweli has grown into a multifaceted community organization with nine programs that offer writing, mentorship, and educational opportunities for underrepresented writers, including the Kweli International Literary Festival, Kweli Color of Children’s Literature Conference, our fellowship program, our reading and conversation series, Kweli’s monthly online writing workshops, and more. We plan to use the proceeds from the sale of Sing the Truth to support our innovative programming, by adding live music and dance and visual art to interpret the author’s words on the page.
And now it is time for Buellers! As always, these are those lit mags and presses where the lights are on but no one seems home. Submissions are open but a new issue hasn’t been out in awhile. Social media might be inactive. The editors are nonresponsive, leaving us all to wonder…
A reader wrote:
I got an acceptance via Moksha from CatsCast (part of the Escape Artist podcast suite) on Feb 8, 2025, but have not gotten a formal contract or any communication whatsoever, despite having reached out. Their social media posts all appear to be 6+ months old, so I'm worried the pod has gone under without an announcement. Any way to check on them? Emails go unanswered, and their Bluesky and Twitter DMs are off.
I’d be remiss if I did not point out how perfect it is that editors affiliated with an entity called Escape Artist have gone missing! But more seriously, if you have info about this journal, please come forward.
As for us, our last interview of July is coming up in just two days. I will be interviewing Neil Clarke, Founding Editor of Clarkesworld. You can learn more about that and register here.
For August, our Lit Mag Reading Club pick is CALYX. This will be the final reading club of our 2024-25 season. We did it! I’m so pleased by all who showed up, month after month, to read and talk lit mags. Thank you!
In August we will read CALYX’s latest issue.
The editors have kindly offered Reading Club participants a free digital copy of this issue. To get the code for that, simply click here and scroll to the bottom of the page.
Also, I’ve got lots of fun stuff lined up for August. The Save the Dates page should be landing in your inboxes within the next few days. Keep your eyes peeled!
And that you ridiculous romantics and languid lilters in the direction of long-lost loves, you with so much pining within you could fill the forest, and sometimes do, you with secrets saved for only the sauciest of soulmates, you sharing sundaes on a Sunday with no one but your truest of sweethearts, you with a wish for every falling star, you with daring and dazzling daydreams daily delivering you from doldrums, you with your fond fantasies, you with magic in your spine and twinkles in your inner eye, you of wondrously large wants and you of happy humble hopes, you, everywhere, imagination blooming and fancy flights in your every footstep, you wonders, you ever-bright beings, you exceptional eels of impossible electricity, right here, right now, always, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most marvelous week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
Becky, again I thank you! You have taught me so much; though I'm an old man closing in on his 9th decade [gulp!], I am a kid in terms of the publishing world, having been first published less than 8 years ago, I've been fortunate to have been published some 480 times since then without paying a damn dime in fees, so I am glad you are coming down on these 'word crooks' who gotta be lining their pockets when email/snail mail would cost anyone little to nothing. But why stop at 5 bucks? If I had paid even that the 8 years, it would have taken several months of the bags of peanuts I get from Social Insecurity--and then what would I eat?
Copying this comment from the previous Jasper Ceylon / Aaron Barry article. In short, he’s cherry picking mags with high acceptance rates and then claiming “all my bad poems got accepted” to make the purported woke lit world look bad.
“ I checked out the acceptance rates of these mags on Submission Grinder / Chill Subs. One of them (Corporeal) has an 80% acceptance rate, and others accept 30-50% (Roi Faineant, Bitchin Kitsch, Afterpast, Rogue Agent). They are obviously not that selective - which is their prerogative, especially if their goal is to champion certain voices. But regardless of your view on that, frankly, this is a poor experiment. If you submit a “bad” poem to a few of these mags, you will almost always get an acceptance just based on the numbers. Vs if you submit that poem (under any name) to 3 mags with a 1-5% (or even 10%) rate you will almost always be rejected. I don’t think he shared the full data but my guess is that his experimental / statistical methods are suspect.”