SPD shutters & leaves publishers in shock; Editor of Guernica resigns; Poetry Foundation issues statement on boycott; thoughts on editing a lit mag, running a poetry contest, going digital; & more
The Guernica story is truly pathetic. Even in her resignation letter, the editor felt the need to make it clear that she regards Israel as a violent state. In other words, she is on the same side of the issue as every other member of the far left. Can you imagine the firestorm that would erupt if a lit mag editor actually supported Israel? But of course none of them will do so publicly, for fear of losing their jobs. All of which again illustrates that there is no real diversity in the lit mag world. Everyone is forced to march in lockstep with the crowd, and no contrary opinions are allowed.
And because the MFA/lit world is filled with academics in love with word games, everyone has latched on to "lockstep," rather than your main point that even this person who essentially agrees that the Israeli government is doing horrible things...is getting pilloried. That seemed to be your point. People, stop splitting hairs over words and playing word games. Honestly, when academics and especially MFAs with no sense of anything outside the writing world (with no training or grounding in anything but writing) start getting into these debates, it so quickly goes south. Let's at least read each others' posts in good faith. And recognize that this conversation started out focusing in a lit mag's decision to pull an article.
No, I’m okay with Israel trying to defeat an enemy that invaded their country, raped and killed their women, beheaded their babies, and took hostages to hide behind.
The better way to defeat that enemy would have been not to help support Hamas in the first place, which the admittedly far-left rag the New York Times has reported Netanyahu did. But then, Israel has always used violence, including rape and child murder itself, to maintain itself.
Actually, we don't even need to use the g-word, because that will probably just get you on your high horse. Let's just stipulate that supporters of Israel are okay with starving and bombing children in the name of their cause. To say this is to make a factual observation, not to be in lockstep with the far left. Thanks.
Of course not. But I've noticed that you always like to say that to anyone who disagrees with you in this thread. But that high horse is getting awfully tired! :)
I agree with Chen and have been disgusted by the Stalinist right and lefts positions on the war issue. We as creative arts people, of all peoples, should be in the best position not to be swayed by propoganda and agitprop. I like edvidence based facts. These are very hard to come by in any war situation. The Middle East is a hornet's nest of waring nationalist and dictatorial ambitions shored up by extreme religious fascists and nationalists. Anyone who claims the visions of a prophet or seer is simply a con.
As a retired journalist and professor I seek balance and discussion as the way forward. Eventually this most recent bloodbath will end. What follows is what will either point a way out of this quicksand that the Gazian and Israeli peoples are caught up in as the crazy nationalists and fanatics in power on both sides of this make ordinary people pay the price.
There are peacemakers on both side more than willing to come up with working solutions but the current leaderships in Hamas (the attacker) and Israel (the revenger)only care for their agendas. Thus no hostages have been freed since the first attempts and the relentless bombing, shooting, and unacceptable starvation and displacement of the Gazan civilians continues while the fanatics in the West Bank commit atrocities against the Palestians Arabs there. The history is so complicated that one hardly knows what words to use to describe the indigenous peoples of this region throughout history and since 1949.
This is why I supporrt Chen and deplore the hatchet job that Guenica committed against her, their editor and a well written piece on the situation. Chen's is a respectful, and balanced point of view. But this kind of self censorship and blatant censorship across the cultural continuum. It is happening among creatives. It ignores as well the planted operatives, especailly in liberal and left organizations where ignorant, well meaning, ahistorical individuals who deplore war violent act out their anger. As well as among privileged people who want a feel good while never having been to war. It is a great jump on the bandwagon opportunity for attention getting and a moment to act out their hostilities.
What the divisionism does is fuels antisemitism here and abroad and it completely misunderstands how this undermines democracy as opposed to dictatorships, it loves to blame government, especially Americas when the current administration is doing all in its power to try and stop the bloodshed and negotiate a solution while still desperately trying to support a long time ally.
I follow the White House briefings-do the critics? I read foreign takes on the on-going conflict, do the demonstrators? I write "not in my name," and I don't hop on to the blame and shame bandwagon--do you?
Neither Chen nor I are for war but we are careful about what language we use, the meanings of our terms and how not to be driven by emotions and impulses. Are the critics? You decide for yourselves where you stand and try to find your own ground so you can come up with possible solutions to end the conflict. Leave the justice to come within the laws of conflict to those who are far more qualified than me or thee are in a position to make.
I hope you learn that in this fight, there is no room, no room whatsoever, on the left for Israel's legitimacy or even suffering. The fact that Joanna Chen is a British-Israeli author is sin enough and that she dared to recognize any suffering or goodness in any person of Israeli Jewish descent is only worse. I hope people like her/you wake up to what you're witnessing here - it's antisemitism and a call for the destruction of Israel. If you disagree you must be an Islamophobe (sarcasm). The heinous (real and physical) violence of Hamas and other fundamentalist islamic groups is not problematic to these people at all; just the "violence of words" that disagree with them. Please, please wake up.
John, it appears that in the emergence of generative AI, we have reached the final technological embodiment of the catchy truth proclaimed in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." That saying is from his book, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man.
The ramifications are several: 1. content - nearly worthless subject matter, growing more worthless by the minute (remember, the medium is what really matters), 2. publisher - a now undefinable concept (is it a "press" or a person, like Julian Assange?), 3. book - a suddenly anachronistic medium, 4. editor - an anachronistic content intermediary and superfluous synonym for the ancient word scribe, 5. intellectual content - unprotected and unprotectable subject matter previously generated only by humans, but now "mined" by machines, 6. publishing - a once profitable and prestigious business, rendered non-viable by the proliferation of "content" and by secondary "monetization" via ubiquitous, free, unfiltered, sticky, targeted electronic media carefully designed to stimulate human dopamine receptors.
The question concerning AI has nothing to do with technology. The question concerning AI is this: "What are People For?" (here I borrow the words of Wendell Berry's eponymous essay). I've written my own 10,000 word essay on the topic of AI from a humanistic perspective. But I don't expect it ever to be published or read... because I too share your concern (observation), whether there is "any future in writing."
Here is how it works: The creation of celebrity must come first, also known as a "platform." The publisher is immaterial to the process, the publisher alone has no purchase. The command of a medium is the other raw essential. Content itself is worthless. The medium IS the message. And that is not a 1964 prophecy.
In the end people could wind up as glorified janitors taking care of the god machines.
Man's fate is that of the
Maytag repairman.
It's difficult to get this sort of dystopian message across in an infantalized culture.
Many people, especially the young, seem eager to surrender what little autonomy they retain to some external authority.
The writing that matters most to me now is 19th century Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky. His intuitive understanding of what was talking shape in Russia then seems eerily relevant now as I watch the new leviathan take shape before my eyes.
When I read about the SPD closure, I immediately thought of Jenn Scheck-Kahn's Journal of the Month. Fancy, if she were to expand into small presses, offering monthly bundles of books by subscription. A year's subscription—of say four titles (chapbook, novella, story collection, novel, memoire, essay collection, etc.) from four presses per quarter—could give readers (& writers looking for places to submit a book proposal or MS) a fairly comprehensive idea of the small-press market.
#Lit-Mag-News - A pleasant surprise: my recent poetry submission to a campus lit mag sparked an interview request. Naturally, I agreed. How many formalists who are not named Richard Wilbur [1921 - 2017] get a chance to discuss the joys and challenges of formal verse in a full-length interview?
It especially pleased me to have a lit mag soapbox to explain that my WIP "Past Tense: Poems & Portraits of Suicides" evolved from real-life suicide notes - - and how it found expression via derivative poetry forms such Golden Shovels, Centos, Erasures, etc.
In contrast, my WIP on real-life crimes has relied on the Mesostitch Acrostic poem format, Echo Verse, and nonce forms meant to look "jagged" on the page.
And now, dear colleagues, I look forward to reading your Lit Mag News today! :-)
Guernica - another cancellation, another forced resignation, just another day in the arts & literary world. I hope people like her will wake up and see the progressives for what they are. They want compliance and they want it now with a 100% alignment and fealty. Or you will be denounced.
I say this as someone appalled by both the Israeli government and the leaders of Hamas, who seem to be made for each other right now, in terms of how they're propping each other up (now that my disclaimer is over with...): If Guernica can't stand by a human-angle story about a child-welfare advocate who clearly felt pained by the loss of life on both sides, then what can it stand by? And let's remind ourselves that this debate isn't about the conflict, writ large. It's about a magazine's response to an article, just so we don't act like a bunch of dumb MFAs (as usual) with no sense of history, spouting off about global politics before we've done nothing more than read a few headlines or tweets from the professor of our Advanced Topics in Poetry class. Let's stick to what we know. Guernica. A lit mag desperately scrambling to placate everyone and placating no one. And now we have silence around the experience of someone involved in both Palestinian and Israeli children's welfare--someone who might have shed some light on how conflicts get perpetuated. Shame on Guernica for retracting that article. If they had any guts, they would have stood by it and let it be a means to a real conversation. BTW, I just read the article. Has anyone else so enraged by it? And if so, what about it "normalizes" violence? Seriously. Give me some specifics. Because the author talks about violence? Don't so many groups try to shed light on violence to call attention to injustice? Isn't that what Guernica purports to do? If some had quibbles, why not give the author a forum to explain any comments people felt normalized violence instead of throwing her under the bus for crimes that seem, honestly, to have been committed by others.
Love the Booth segment! How cool to feature a lit mag on local TV. I was just back in my home ground of Indiana (was born there and later went to grad school at IU MFA) for the eclipse, and it just warms the heart.
I am so appreciative of your Substack column. The updates and insights into the earthquakes in the publishing world are so helpful - I rethink who to support, why I read this but not that.
I love that there are so many presses, so many journals. But it’s a treacherous landscape for them, and for any editor or publication that does not satisfy the “correct” political stance of the moment.
It does make me appreciate so much more that ancient world of cranking out a poetry journal on a mimeograph machine, beholden to nobody, and the number of “published” poets so small that everybody read everybody, and even if you called a poet a pig or an idiot you still would read their work. I’m just sayin’…
I'm looking forward to the Florida Review dates. I read the editor's note yesterday and it made want to subscribe to another 28 lit mags while I still can.
The Guernica story is truly pathetic. Even in her resignation letter, the editor felt the need to make it clear that she regards Israel as a violent state. In other words, she is on the same side of the issue as every other member of the far left. Can you imagine the firestorm that would erupt if a lit mag editor actually supported Israel? But of course none of them will do so publicly, for fear of losing their jobs. All of which again illustrates that there is no real diversity in the lit mag world. Everyone is forced to march in lockstep with the crowd, and no contrary opinions are allowed.
And because the MFA/lit world is filled with academics in love with word games, everyone has latched on to "lockstep," rather than your main point that even this person who essentially agrees that the Israeli government is doing horrible things...is getting pilloried. That seemed to be your point. People, stop splitting hairs over words and playing word games. Honestly, when academics and especially MFAs with no sense of anything outside the writing world (with no training or grounding in anything but writing) start getting into these debates, it so quickly goes south. Let's at least read each others' posts in good faith. And recognize that this conversation started out focusing in a lit mag's decision to pull an article.
Yes, but who in good conscience could possibly support Israel at this point. I mean, at long last.
Millions of people support Israel, all of them in good conscience.
Okay, but at this point, that means they're okay with supporting genocide. And I think you know that that isn't just a "far left" viewpoint.
No, I’m okay with Israel trying to defeat an enemy that invaded their country, raped and killed their women, beheaded their babies, and took hostages to hide behind.
The better way to defeat that enemy would have been not to help support Hamas in the first place, which the admittedly far-left rag the New York Times has reported Netanyahu did. But then, Israel has always used violence, including rape and child murder itself, to maintain itself.
And the Palestinians shouldn’t have overwhelmingly voted Hamas into power, a group that has sworn to destroy Israel.
Actually, we don't even need to use the g-word, because that will probably just get you on your high horse. Let's just stipulate that supporters of Israel are okay with starving and bombing children in the name of their cause. To say this is to make a factual observation, not to be in lockstep with the far left. Thanks.
And you are apparently okay with the animals who raped and killed Israeli women and beheaded innocent babies. Good for you.
Of course not. But I've noticed that you always like to say that to anyone who disagrees with you in this thread. But that high horse is getting awfully tired! :)
I agree with Chen and have been disgusted by the Stalinist right and lefts positions on the war issue. We as creative arts people, of all peoples, should be in the best position not to be swayed by propoganda and agitprop. I like edvidence based facts. These are very hard to come by in any war situation. The Middle East is a hornet's nest of waring nationalist and dictatorial ambitions shored up by extreme religious fascists and nationalists. Anyone who claims the visions of a prophet or seer is simply a con.
As a retired journalist and professor I seek balance and discussion as the way forward. Eventually this most recent bloodbath will end. What follows is what will either point a way out of this quicksand that the Gazian and Israeli peoples are caught up in as the crazy nationalists and fanatics in power on both sides of this make ordinary people pay the price.
There are peacemakers on both side more than willing to come up with working solutions but the current leaderships in Hamas (the attacker) and Israel (the revenger)only care for their agendas. Thus no hostages have been freed since the first attempts and the relentless bombing, shooting, and unacceptable starvation and displacement of the Gazan civilians continues while the fanatics in the West Bank commit atrocities against the Palestians Arabs there. The history is so complicated that one hardly knows what words to use to describe the indigenous peoples of this region throughout history and since 1949.
This is why I supporrt Chen and deplore the hatchet job that Guenica committed against her, their editor and a well written piece on the situation. Chen's is a respectful, and balanced point of view. But this kind of self censorship and blatant censorship across the cultural continuum. It is happening among creatives. It ignores as well the planted operatives, especailly in liberal and left organizations where ignorant, well meaning, ahistorical individuals who deplore war violent act out their anger. As well as among privileged people who want a feel good while never having been to war. It is a great jump on the bandwagon opportunity for attention getting and a moment to act out their hostilities.
What the divisionism does is fuels antisemitism here and abroad and it completely misunderstands how this undermines democracy as opposed to dictatorships, it loves to blame government, especially Americas when the current administration is doing all in its power to try and stop the bloodshed and negotiate a solution while still desperately trying to support a long time ally.
I follow the White House briefings-do the critics? I read foreign takes on the on-going conflict, do the demonstrators? I write "not in my name," and I don't hop on to the blame and shame bandwagon--do you?
Neither Chen nor I are for war but we are careful about what language we use, the meanings of our terms and how not to be driven by emotions and impulses. Are the critics? You decide for yourselves where you stand and try to find your own ground so you can come up with possible solutions to end the conflict. Leave the justice to come within the laws of conflict to those who are far more qualified than me or thee are in a position to make.
I hope you learn that in this fight, there is no room, no room whatsoever, on the left for Israel's legitimacy or even suffering. The fact that Joanna Chen is a British-Israeli author is sin enough and that she dared to recognize any suffering or goodness in any person of Israeli Jewish descent is only worse. I hope people like her/you wake up to what you're witnessing here - it's antisemitism and a call for the destruction of Israel. If you disagree you must be an Islamophobe (sarcasm). The heinous (real and physical) violence of Hamas and other fundamentalist islamic groups is not problematic to these people at all; just the "violence of words" that disagree with them. Please, please wake up.
I don't want to sound gloomy, but this makes me wonder whether there's any future at all in writing, by, you know, actual human beings:
https://lithub.com/meta-considered-buying-simon-schuster-to-build-its-ai/
John, it appears that in the emergence of generative AI, we have reached the final technological embodiment of the catchy truth proclaimed in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." That saying is from his book, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man.
The ramifications are several: 1. content - nearly worthless subject matter, growing more worthless by the minute (remember, the medium is what really matters), 2. publisher - a now undefinable concept (is it a "press" or a person, like Julian Assange?), 3. book - a suddenly anachronistic medium, 4. editor - an anachronistic content intermediary and superfluous synonym for the ancient word scribe, 5. intellectual content - unprotected and unprotectable subject matter previously generated only by humans, but now "mined" by machines, 6. publishing - a once profitable and prestigious business, rendered non-viable by the proliferation of "content" and by secondary "monetization" via ubiquitous, free, unfiltered, sticky, targeted electronic media carefully designed to stimulate human dopamine receptors.
The question concerning AI has nothing to do with technology. The question concerning AI is this: "What are People For?" (here I borrow the words of Wendell Berry's eponymous essay). I've written my own 10,000 word essay on the topic of AI from a humanistic perspective. But I don't expect it ever to be published or read... because I too share your concern (observation), whether there is "any future in writing."
Here is how it works: The creation of celebrity must come first, also known as a "platform." The publisher is immaterial to the process, the publisher alone has no purchase. The command of a medium is the other raw essential. Content itself is worthless. The medium IS the message. And that is not a 1964 prophecy.
In the end people could wind up as glorified janitors taking care of the god machines.
Man's fate is that of the
Maytag repairman.
It's difficult to get this sort of dystopian message across in an infantalized culture.
Many people, especially the young, seem eager to surrender what little autonomy they retain to some external authority.
The writing that matters most to me now is 19th century Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky. His intuitive understanding of what was talking shape in Russia then seems eerily relevant now as I watch the new leviathan take shape before my eyes.
Thanks for this much needed reasoned overview that clarifies some of the basics.
When I read about the SPD closure, I immediately thought of Jenn Scheck-Kahn's Journal of the Month. Fancy, if she were to expand into small presses, offering monthly bundles of books by subscription. A year's subscription—of say four titles (chapbook, novella, story collection, novel, memoire, essay collection, etc.) from four presses per quarter—could give readers (& writers looking for places to submit a book proposal or MS) a fairly comprehensive idea of the small-press market.
#Lit-Mag-News - A pleasant surprise: my recent poetry submission to a campus lit mag sparked an interview request. Naturally, I agreed. How many formalists who are not named Richard Wilbur [1921 - 2017] get a chance to discuss the joys and challenges of formal verse in a full-length interview?
It especially pleased me to have a lit mag soapbox to explain that my WIP "Past Tense: Poems & Portraits of Suicides" evolved from real-life suicide notes - - and how it found expression via derivative poetry forms such Golden Shovels, Centos, Erasures, etc.
In contrast, my WIP on real-life crimes has relied on the Mesostitch Acrostic poem format, Echo Verse, and nonce forms meant to look "jagged" on the page.
And now, dear colleagues, I look forward to reading your Lit Mag News today! :-)
This is so useful. Thanks for curating and sharing. I need to get back to submitting and now I have ideas on places to send work.
Goddard? that is bad, sad news on top of all the rest.
Guernica - another cancellation, another forced resignation, just another day in the arts & literary world. I hope people like her will wake up and see the progressives for what they are. They want compliance and they want it now with a 100% alignment and fealty. Or you will be denounced.
The Guernica misunderstanding is sad.
Is there anything we can do to help these publishers?
I say this as someone appalled by both the Israeli government and the leaders of Hamas, who seem to be made for each other right now, in terms of how they're propping each other up (now that my disclaimer is over with...): If Guernica can't stand by a human-angle story about a child-welfare advocate who clearly felt pained by the loss of life on both sides, then what can it stand by? And let's remind ourselves that this debate isn't about the conflict, writ large. It's about a magazine's response to an article, just so we don't act like a bunch of dumb MFAs (as usual) with no sense of history, spouting off about global politics before we've done nothing more than read a few headlines or tweets from the professor of our Advanced Topics in Poetry class. Let's stick to what we know. Guernica. A lit mag desperately scrambling to placate everyone and placating no one. And now we have silence around the experience of someone involved in both Palestinian and Israeli children's welfare--someone who might have shed some light on how conflicts get perpetuated. Shame on Guernica for retracting that article. If they had any guts, they would have stood by it and let it be a means to a real conversation. BTW, I just read the article. Has anyone else so enraged by it? And if so, what about it "normalizes" violence? Seriously. Give me some specifics. Because the author talks about violence? Don't so many groups try to shed light on violence to call attention to injustice? Isn't that what Guernica purports to do? If some had quibbles, why not give the author a forum to explain any comments people felt normalized violence instead of throwing her under the bus for crimes that seem, honestly, to have been committed by others.
Love the Booth segment! How cool to feature a lit mag on local TV. I was just back in my home ground of Indiana (was born there and later went to grad school at IU MFA) for the eclipse, and it just warms the heart.
Jina Moore, you are a hero. I wish I had your courage and self-respect.
Thank you for sharing my little pub :)
I am so appreciative of your Substack column. The updates and insights into the earthquakes in the publishing world are so helpful - I rethink who to support, why I read this but not that.
I love that there are so many presses, so many journals. But it’s a treacherous landscape for them, and for any editor or publication that does not satisfy the “correct” political stance of the moment.
It does make me appreciate so much more that ancient world of cranking out a poetry journal on a mimeograph machine, beholden to nobody, and the number of “published” poets so small that everybody read everybody, and even if you called a poet a pig or an idiot you still would read their work. I’m just sayin’…
I'm looking forward to the Florida Review dates. I read the editor's note yesterday and it made want to subscribe to another 28 lit mags while I still can.