I'll Be Working My Way Back to Lit Mags, Babe!
New editor of BASS; staff resignations at Chestnut Review; end of NYTimes poetry column; teaching writing to the CIA; thoughts on Kafka; advice for submitting; hundreds of markets & more
Welcome to the first 2024 edition of our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Maguretors,
Lit Mag News news-roundups are back! A lot has happened these past few weeks. Please buckle up and hold on tight as we get through it all.
First, I’ve received word that there will be a new editor for the Best American Short Stories series. Heidi Pitlor, who has done an incredible job curating the selections over many years, will be passing on the torch. The new series editor for 2025 will be Nicole Lamy. I have not seen an announcement anywhere but I was told this in person by Nicole last week. Consider the news announced!
Editors and writers (yes, writers can submit work too!), be sure to submit your nominations for Best American Short Stories (for stories published in 2024) to this address:
Nicole Lamy, Series Editor The Best American Short Stories Mariner Books ATTN: Jessica Vestuto HarperCollins Publishers 195 Broadway, 23rd Floor New York, NY 10007
Moving along, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East continues to roil the lit mag space. Several editors stepped down and one was fired from Chestnut Review last month, following an incident regarding a writer’s bio.
After having work accepted by the magazine, writer Gabrielle Spear sought to include a statement in her contributor bio. Spear tweeted:
Editor James Rawlings declined to publish Spear’s work with this updated bio. The magazine’s X account subsequently announced that they would be “donating to medical aid for Palestinians” and would “open free prose submissions to anyone who has been affected by geopolitical conflict.”
In response, editors Fran Fernández Arce, Rashna Wadia and Cass Garison stepped down from the magazine, as well as reader Allison Thung. Garison posted a resignation letter which called the donations announcement “lukewarm and performative” and criticized the retraction of Spear’s publishing offer, stating, “We are a magazine that has been consistently platforming marginalized folks…censoring those trying to speak out feels naive and irresponsible to writers who entrusted us with their work…”
Editor A.R. Arthur tweeted that he was fired from the magazine “with no reason and just as I was submitting my resignation letter.”
The Poetry Question, a site dedicated to showcasing and reviewing poetry collections, tweeted that they “denounced…[Arthur’s] unjust firing” and “will no longer be reviewing [Chestnut Review] titles effective immediately.”
Rawlings has since emailed a “mea culpa” to his magazine’s readers and tweeted, “I recently made a decision to forgo publishing the work of an artist whose bio contained a message in support of Palestine…My intention was not to silence an individual, but rather, to avoid making a political statement…”
In related news, The New York Times has announced it will end its poetry column after nine years of publication. This follows the November resignation of Editor Anne Boyer “over the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza.”
And a new lit mag has launched in response to the ongoing crisis. Green Golem is “the first and only modern Zionist literary magazine.” In December, they tweeted, “We are eager to collaborate with Palestinian authors and artists.”
In other news, many of you know I’ve long been fascinated with the CIA’s role in the formation of lit mags and creative culture at large. (You can read more on this here.) So I was pleased to find this piece on the Paris Review’s site, in which Johannes Lichtman recounts his experience teaching a creative writing workshop at CIA headquarters:
I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda…The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece…But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.
Lichtman goes on:
I began by asking what people were writing. Surprisingly, none of the CIA writers were writing spy novels. They were working on short stories. Self-published dystopian sci-fi. A presidential biography. Upmarket fiction. A personal blog, which I was told to check out if I ever wanted a really good muffin recipe.
Speaking of Paris Review, Aaron Britt has written a pithy short piece about an apparent “merch war” between this magazine and The New Yorker. Britt writes of Paris Review merch,
The top sellers are caps, t-shirts, and totes, in that order, and the aesthetic is punchy and of the moment. Call it boxy normcore with a downtown edge, Gen Z meets MFA. A far cry from the New Yorker tote, which basically says “I give money to Joe Biden and I can direct you to a farmers market.”
Meanwhile, if you’re feeling glum about your inability to build your writing reputation through lit mag publishing alone, you’re in good company. In an interesting piece titled Why the word ‘Kafkaesque’ should be banished forever, Tim Smith-Laing writes,
What Kafka would make of our use of “Kafkaesque” is a moot point. He would almost certainly be too busy getting over the surprise that anyone knew his name at all. Though he lived for writing, he published only two slim short-story collections before he died of tuberculosis, aged 40…His scattered contributions to literary magazines did little to establish a reputation. Beyond a small circle, Franz Kafka was nothing more than a functionary at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague – just another office clerk, even if his reports were unusually well-written.
In a similarly interesting piece, Max Chapnick has credited lit mags for the discovery of a certain writer’s pen name. In How I Discovered a Likely Pen Name of Louisa May Alcott, a delightful tale of author sleuthing, Chapnick writes,
Before Louisa May Alcott published the bestselling “Little Women”…she wrote melodramatic thrillers, selling these short stories to magazines to bring in cash for her impoverished family…From the mid-1850s onward, Alcott regularly churned out stories, and yet the record leaves a noticeable gap between spring 1857 and late 1858. In one of Alcott’s letters from the period, she wrote to a friend asking if the magazine Olive Branch would be interested in more of her work. Years earlier, in 1852, Alcott had published “The Rival Painters” in that magazine. Until now, all scholars assumed it was her only story published in the Olive Branch.
For those of you who love lists (and who doesn’t love lists!), Longreads has posted Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024. Selections come from Passages North, The New Yorker, Colorado Review, and others.
These four magazines got some press and are interested in “original Indian writings,” translation, and work “from all over South Asia.”
In the Chill Subs newsletter, Ben Davis talks to Journal of the Month Founder Jenn Scheck-Kahn about lit mags “most likely to publish unsolicited submissions,” lit mags with the “best visuals” and more.
On X, writer Adam Morgan asked which lit mags “publish the best short fiction these days?” Here are the replies.
And for those of you seeking advice when it comes to submitting, KM Elkes has written all about it. In What I have learned about submitting to publishers and writing competitions, Elkes writes,
I’ve read hundreds of flash fictions and short stories, and learned there are many talented writers out there who understood the submissions process and rules, send in their best work, and are humble, whatever happens. It remains a privilege to be entrusted with people’s work, not least because I know how hard it is to send stuff out, make yourself vulnerable, get rejected, and go again.
But I have also been amazed at how many people sabotage their chances of being published through laziness, sloppiness or plain arrogance. Often it is down to making avoidable mistakes or just not doing that final edit - you know, the final edit you need to do after the one you think is the final edit.
For those of you seeking to improve your writing, X-R-A-Y journal offers a variety of classes, including an upcoming class on “drafting as play.”
The Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections conference will be taking place in April 2024 in Washington, DC. This is a great chance to meet & mingle with fellow writers and editors. (I moderated a panel here this past fall, and the conference vibe was super chill, fun, informative and friendly.) Submissions for conference session proposals are now open.
For those of you seeking homes for your latest & greatest:
The Winning Writers newsletter provides “over four dozen excellent free poetry and prose contests with deadlines between January 15-February 29.”
Erika Dreifus’s newsletter this month offers “dozens of carefully curated, fee-free opportunities that pay for fiction, poetry, & creative nonfiction.”
Erica Verrillo lists 86 Calls for Submissions in January 2024 - Paying markets and 43 Writing Contests in January 2024 - No entry fees.
Authors Publish has Opportunities for Historically Underrepresented Authors: January 2024 and 26 Literary Journals Open to Publishing Reprints.
At Authors Publish, I also had the great fun last month of talking about what I do. In the first of The Other Side of the Desk series, I shared my own backstory and my journey to becoming a professional letter-writer:
When I was a kid, I was always leaving notes for my mom in the kitchen. These were often long and occasionally funny, and would contain all kinds of weird drawings. Also, as a student, when I finished an exam early, I would flip over the paper and write long letters to my teachers. I would tell them all about my weekend, ask them if they had seen any good movies, and so on. (My teachers later told me they thought this was hilarious.)
My mom used to say that when I grew up I should be a professional Letter Writer. Of course, I thought that was ridiculous. No one writes letters for a living!
But, that is exactly what I have grown up to do!
I also got to talk with writer Natalie Serber about some of my favorite pieces from our Lit Mag Reading Club readings, as well as my weird approach to making butter cookies:
As for us, dear friends, there is lots coming up this month. Check out the Save the Dates page for upcoming events.
Reminder: You can now find the registration links to these events here.
This month’s Lit Mag Reading Club selection is American Short Fiction. There is still time to order your discounted subscription and participate in the discussion and interview with the editors! You can get the discount and learn more about the Lit Mag Reading Club here:
2023-2024 Reading Club Schedule & Discount Codes
The Reading Club has been an absolute blast so far—fun, educational, interesting and just lovely. I hope you’ll consider joining!
And that you macro-planners and eaters of micro-greens, you plotters and pantsers and everything in between, you trying to grab the slippery eel of your ever-evasive and evolving ideas and you with your head in the cloudy daydream marshmallow space of perennially purpose-driven lives, you with a vision board, you on your vision quest, you with an inner child jumping rope to the flipping melody of your wildest and most unruly misadventures along every line of every page, you with your hopes of completion, you with your reckless hunger for more, you and you, everywhere meeting your own work and winning because all it takes is you, every day showing up, you for whom this will most definitely be the year you grab that beast by the horns and tame that rodeo ride and sway your own sauntering strutting struck-by-magic and ever-curious ever-humble yet simultaneously superstar selves into the best time of your best of all possible lives, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most excellent week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
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There's been an awful lot of sideshows in the lit scene of late in relation to the horrors going on in Israel/Gaza. And honestly, I think they diminish the seriousness of what's happening and has been happening there for many years. Granted, being online it's good to see that there are writers speaking up. I know I have, while more or less casually observing what's happening in the lit scene and otherwise ignoring it. But, I took more notice of what happened with Chestnut Review, where a publisher was pressured to publish something he was reticent to publish, decided not to, and was then collectively branded as having censored a writer. The online discourse was such that even he came to agree with the allegation, which I'd say is false. Reason being, the bio was submitted after the poet's work was accepted with an ultimatum that if the EIC didn't publish it, then the writer would rescind their accepted work. Given the circumstances, saying no to that--regardless of the editor's political position on *any* matter--is an expression of his freedom to publish what he wishes to publish. Had he done otherwise, it would have been compelled speech, which is what all those who accused him of censorship were actually advocating.
Can someone elaborate why the intent “to avoid making a political statement” provoked such a response? If an editor objected to my bio, I would expect them to have final say over what they published. What am I missing?