Let My Love Open the Lit Mags!

Writer assumes fake identities; editor moves from web to print; Brown partners with Callaloo; reviews of Tiny Molecules & Molecules--A Tiny Lit Mag; & more!

Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!

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Greetings Lit Magstronauts,

What do we make of writers assuming false identities in order to test lit mags for bias?

On April 4th, The B’K Magazine posted on X:

Post on X

The author in question, Jasper Ceylon, was indeed assuming different identities and racked up a fair number of publications as such. He documented his endeavor on

Jasper’s Substack

. In Call Me the 21st-Century Ern Malley (How I Fooled the Poetry World), Ceylon writes (bold emphasis his),

Throughout 2023 and 2024, I assumed a series of “attractive” pen names and as these personas sent upwards of fifty poems to English-language poetry journals the world over…These poems featured material that was farcical, inconsistent, inaccurate, prejudiced, and, in some cases, outright nonsensical, spanning every kind of style and subject matter seen in contemporary poetry…They were trash.

The worst part: Every single poem got published.

…Each poem received complimentary feedback from the accepting editors. Each poem helped build these personas up into “legitimate” industry figures and afforded them additional publishing opportunities. (Just Google “Adele Nwankwo” and see how prolific she became in a short span.) Before long, I was receiving requests from editors for additional poems. Rejections were virtually non-existent. I was being paid more for my acceptances because of my apparent BIPOC status. I was suddenly “in the loop.” Hell, I even got nominated for an international poetry award as a magazine’s top recommendation of the year.

So Ceylon, a white man, assumed the identity of a few others, most notably Adele Nwakwo, and received many journal acceptances under this pseudonym.

Nwakwo’s bio on at least one still-active journal page reads,

Adele Nwankwo (they/them), 24, is a genderfluid member of the Nigerian diaspora. They are a healthcare worker by trade, but have recently taken up writing as a means of exploring the connections between identity, trauma, and humour. Their poetry is inspired and encouraged by figures like Gwendolyn Brooks, Douglas Kearney, Ocean Vuong, and Ed Roberson. They have work upcoming in several magazines.

What do you make of this?

Worth noting is that many of the lit mags in which Ceylon/Nwankwo published openly state their preference for work from certain groups of people. The B’K Magazine (The B’K) is “an art and literature magazine prioritizing and paying traditionally marginalized creators, but open to all.” Plenitude, where he also published as Nwankwo, is “Canada’s only queer literary magazine.” They emphasize “We especially encourage BIPOC, trans, and disabled writers to submit their work.” The Afterpast Review “is a feminist literary magazine dedicated to uplifting underrepresented voices.”

Why target such magazines in order to prove bias? I posted my own view on X:

post on X

This past week Ceylon posted a follow-up, providing greater detail about his thought process. In "Echolalia Review" Behind the Scenes: “Decolonizing a stray,” he writes about an additional intention he had.

…In the present day…poets have moved on to projecting their decolonial inclinations onto physical objects and specific concepts. You can decolonize addiction. You can decolonize assault. You can decolonize pens and pencils. You can decolonize, in a meta way, poetry journals themselves, down to the printing process and distribution. If it exists, it can be decolonized, as the motto would go. The more I stumbled upon poems of this nature, the more I began to wonder where the line would be drawn on what could and couldn’t be decolonized.

…Controversy aside, my/Adele’s “Decolonizing a stray” poem was meant to take the post-colonial lit crew on and facilitate discussion about where to go from here.

Deep in this latter piece is something else I found interesting. Ceylon writes, “[The editor] offered to pay me a $10 honorarium because I was BIPOC (normally, no payment was offered if you were a non-minority).”

Lit mags paying contributors differently depending on their identity (or, in this case, their stated identity)? Now that was news to me.

Another think piece caught my eye this week, albeit one less controversial and in fact rather soothing. At The Irish Times Ian Maleney, Editor of Fallow, has written about his lovely and unusual decision to migrate his literary journal in the opposite direction as most: from web to print. Making a compelling case for such migration, Maleney writes,

The internet is always on, always inviting, always demanding. Wanting to publish regularly, I felt that I could never switch off, that there was always something to be done – something in fact overdue, which ought to be done now….

…Publishing a magazine [in print] allows you to make a big deal out of whatever you’re bringing into the world, which is actually kind of hard to do if you’re publishing all the time, or if you’re publishing one small thing at a time. It gives you a sense of achievement and release which is lacking in the always-on, what’s-next world of the internet.

…Being in print also gives you reason to work within the ecosystem of an actual, physical community – of writers, readers, booksellers, festivals – who share your interests and goals, rather than being dependent on the whims of platforms. You reach people in a different way with something tangible, there is a stickiness to it. After 10 years in the frictionless space of the browser, it’s honestly kind of fun to be worrying about ink and paper and postage. There’s a freedom in hard deadlines, and knowing that when it’s done, it’s done.

A handful of journals got some press recently.

James Folta at LitHub reports on a positive change at Callaloo.

Callaloo, the journal of writing and art from the African diaspora, announced that it will be partnering with Brown University and its Department of Literary Arts. It’s an exciting next step for the nearly 50-year-old publication, and this new home will let the journal and its programming continue to grow. Callaloo’s editorial board will expand, allowing for more collaboration between scholars, writers, and artists at Brown and at other institutions.

The Berkshire Eagle reports that Orion, a journal focused on nature, culture and place, will have a new publisher. “As an author, journalist, editor, and literary arts funder, [Neal Thompson] has worked across nearly every facet of the publishing arena.” At Orion, Thompson wrote in a welcome letter: “The work we do and the stories we tell at Orion feel as important as ever. We will continue to be an urgent and eloquent voice for the planet and all its creatures.”

And at her Substack,

Amy Holman

has done a deep dive into “two similarly named online literary journals: Molecule — A Tiny Lit Mag and Tiny Molecules.”

In the Fall issue, I read mood shifts, surreal and real subjects, expressions of curiosity and certainty, sensory diction, close observations and slight removes, in a few haiku and mostly lyrics. However, the editors do accept poems that I put under a kind of mapping/cataloguing distinction, forming tiny lists in their unfolding, and that has a kind of narrative movement.

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And now it’s…Bueller time!

We don’t always have Buellers but when we do, we do. This is the part of the newsletter where we bring attention to those lit mags that seem to have quietly slipped away. No recent issues have gone up, no social media posts are up, yet no formal closing announcement has been made, leaving us all to wonder…

This week we’re wondering about Spry Lit. A reader wrote to me:

I submitted to them in January 2024, got an acceptance in April 2024 and then that was the last I heard from them (or that they published anything on their website). Did the usual kindly worded messages to [the editors] on submittable and via the editors email listed on their website but again nothing. It would be sad if they have left the scene and even sadder if they did so leaving writers, like me, in the lurch.

Sad indeed! If you or anyone you know has insight into this journal’s activities, please let us know!

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As for us, there is a lot happening in the days ahead!

Tomorrow, I am delighted to be hosting Bethany Jarmul, who will share all her publishing secrets with us and give us loads of practical submissions advice.

Then next week we’ve got a chat with Vauhini Vara & Camille Bromley, who I’m eager to ask about AI and writing, the pros, cons, benefits and dangers. I’ll also be interviewing Susanna Baird, Editor of Five Minutes, which is this month’s Lit Mag Reading Club selection.

You can learn all about these events and register right here:

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And that you slow and steady mountain climbers, daily plodding your way to the top, you careful wanderers, poking your head into the access trails, you backcountry bravados, boldly barreling into the green and sunlight-dappled depths, you for whom there is no trail, only walkways to blaze, and blaze you shall, you unstoppable driven demons of determination, you racers and laughers wilding your way down the rocky descent, you pitching your tent under the sky’s taut and nearly-touchable canopy of twinkles, you who know a false summit when you see it—alas!—you with trail mix smushed in your pack—oh no!—you and you, out there climbing, you who can feel it, the salty seawater growing more distant, the great friendly clouds coming to shake your hand, you on your way up—oh yes!—and in no rush at all, but eventually, in time, and heck, maybe you’re already there, have been, you, yes, you’ve in fact been at the greatest of heights all along, right where you are, is the news in literary magazines.

Have a most restorative week, pals.

Fondly,

Becky

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