It's Your Job to Find Out Where You Belong

10 rules to write by from RW Spryszak, Editor of experimental lit mag Thrice Fiction

Welcome to another column on the ins and outs of lit mag publishing. This week’s contribution comes from RW Spryszak, Founder and Editor of Thrice Fiction.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work. - Yves Tanguy

I have never sought publicity or notoriety. Shut up and work; this formula has always worked for me. - Albert Adrià

For me writing, the creation of stories, or the action of putting something resembling a thought on paper, is going to happen whether I want it to or not. The idea that someone else might be interested in it tickles me, but it isn’t why I write. I’m going to write whether something gets published or not. And accepting this as a lifelong condition was a matter of sanity.

In 3rd grade, I had a fascination with the newspapers that were always around our house. I told my father I wanted to be a columnist when I grew up. Because I was so little he made the joke “He wants to be a communist when he grows up.” Heh. Little did he know…

In grade school, we would be asked to write a paragraph. This was the “learning what constitutes a paragraph” part of standard English lessons in the early 1960s. I would return with a paragraph that was seven pages long because whatever I was doing turned into a story and there had to be an ending. Little did I know I was anticipating, at eleven, what an avantgarde piece would look like just a few years down the road; a dense piece of block text where the thoughts run together like a steam engine.

I took journalism classes in high school and ran out of the available elective courses. We made an “underground” newspaper in high school. It was the era of Vietnam and we had a lot to say. I wrote for a local paper. I took writing classes at Columbia Chicago. I stormed an author’s agents’ office (Max Siegel, I think his daughter started Barbara’s Books) without an appointment or anything to show him.

I joined the Southside Writers Workshop in Chicago in the early 70s. I submitted garbage after garbage to literary magazines, for which I had no possible chance of being accepted because I was not a prodigy, did not have a formal degree, and - most of all - had no voice and didn’t know the first thing about submitting work to a literary magazine. My stuff was all dense blocks of text where the ideas all ran together. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning how to do this, starting from stupid.

I took a break. I raised a family. And it wasn’t until my youngest was 8 that I went back at it. I discovered I had a lot to say. I went off blind. Unaware of what was being written, what trends existed, what people were interested in these days. The only thing I knew was I didn’t like mainstream writing or writers. In fact, I hated them with an incandescent, righteous, self-immolating flame. But I couldn’t explain why.

I have no idea how I found the community I found. There was no internet. There were only things, and they were flying around. Art newspapers. Things that used to be head shops that now delved in wicked, strange, and sometimes god-awful poetry. Readings at The Green Mill. Hanging around jazz clubs that still did be-bop until four in the morning.

I threw stuff together and started aiming at publications that existed on the far fringe of the times. It was the 1980s. The era of the Poetry Slam, mailart, altzines, litmags put together on found paper and nickel after nickel fed into the copying machines to create eight pages that could be folded into a 36- page magazine that came and went and was never heard from again.

A thing called Factsheet5 put it all down on newsprint. You could find out about who was publishing what anywhere. It was the underground press gone literary. It fit in with doing the precious little work for the IWW I could brag about later that was mostly grunt stuff. Then I got a poem in something called Sub Rosa out of New Jersey or Boston or something. I was on the moon. The poem was called Kissing the Hermit Buddha and it was about a part of my life that was going south at the time. Then something else got published. Then something else. Then something else.

Let it be sufficient to say that nothing I have ever written would ever in sixteen million years be in any college literary review or long-established magazine of literature (as opposed to lit mags, which are something else altogether for those of us born in the 50s).

So… what happened?

What happened was I was accepted into the world to which I belonged all along. There is an old Steely Dan song “Any World That I’m Welcome To.” Yes, that’s it exactly. I was writing what they were using and didn’t know it until I found them. A clue to a good rule.

In the 90s I took over one of these crazy lit mags and had a well-known poet about to go on a national tour with Lydia Lunch send me a story called “And the Corpse Had Numerous Tattoos.” A story about a woman with lots of tattoos, first-person, who dies of a heroin overdose. The next weekend on the front page of the Sunday paper was the name and a picture of the woman who sent me the story. She was in the paper because she had a lot of tattoos and died of a heroin overdose the night of the day she sent me the story. Her name was Lorri Jackson.

Fast forward twenty-some-odd years and I edit a collection of her work under the auspices of her family who trusted me with it. It is still on Amazon. “So What If It’s true” it’s called. Three years later I published my first book with Spuyten Duyvil called “Edju.” It came out 90,000 words in flawed stream-of-consciousness.

What happened? How did all this happen?

It happened because I found my world. And here’s the first rule for you if you’ve yet to be published or are finding it difficult to find your place.

1. Stop sending shit to places that don’t use your stuff, for god’s sake. They’re not going to change their whole worldview on account of your brilliance. It’s your job to find out where you belong. Do that, not the other. But be careful.