Lit Mags Didn't Start the Fire!
Poet's book canceled; Ann Carson poem goes viral; profiles of Zyzzyva, Conjunctions, Spittoon; inside submission fee data; jobs & opportunities; hundreds of markets for your work and more
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
A poet’s publishing contract was recently canceled. The reason? Emmalea Russo writes,
Shortly after the book was listed for sale on the publisher’s website, I received an email from an editor informing me that my associations with people and entities, including [Compact] magazine, he deemed “alt-right” or “fascist-adjacent” had put the press “in a really bad spot.” He asked me to explain myself. I respectfully declined to do so. The next morning, I awoke to an email from another editor, someone I considered a friend, stating that the publisher could no longer publish Magenta.
What does it mean to collaborate with someone? To write for a particular press or publication? To edit and publish someone else’s work? To refuse to handle someone’s work? It wasn’t my words specifically that bothered the editors, but the words of others I had associated with, spoken to, published alongside. The implication was that I had been contaminated, so my book would contaminate their press, harming their authors and readers.
…It isn’t hard to imagine a future where everyone working in the arts willingly tattoos QR codes on our foreheads, which can be scanned to reveal those with whom we have associated.
On her own Substack, Russo writes,
To me, the danger had to do with his morally superior, prosecutorial tone being fed through inflammatory, supercharged jargon. He was one of the good ones and I had already been labeled bad—as I’d chosen to publish alongside people whose views he took to be “anti-liberatory.” Guilt by association. There is, of course, a long history of men punishing women for stepping out of line or being hard to read, but ordinary misogyny aside, Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han were right: we surveil and punish each other under the guise of liberation and safety, thus doing the state’s work for it. It’s freaky, tricky. And it does make me scared for many things, including poetry.
In other poetry news, some kind of “discourse” exploded last week over a Tweet from New Yorker writer Hannah Williams. It began with this seemingly innocuous tweet about an Anne Carson poem that was published in the magazine in 2017.
I didn’t follow this particular discourse and I wasn’t much aware of it until today. But you can see that Williams’s tweet has garnered nearly two and a half million views! On LitHub Janet Manley writes,
Critiques of the short poem about getting dinner at a noisy restaurant and finding bones in your fish fillet ranged from “kill Anne Carson?” to “wow that’s crazy has the author ever thought about letting joy into their life.” Generally speaking, a common theme was “can’t we just have a nice dinner here on Twitter, Anne Carson?”
Was there something revelatory about this particular discourse? Did you follow along? Do you have your own assessment of the situation? Is it actually a good thing to see hundreds of thousands of people getting worked up about a single poem?
A handful of lit mags were profiled recently. Here is an interview with Xiao Yue Shan and Zuo Fei, co-editors of Beijing-based Spittoon. Says Shan,
Inside the pages of Volume 8, you will find poems from 张枣 Zhang Zao, a renowned, revolutionary, and formally inventive poet who believed that “poetry must transform one’s self and life.” We’ve also included excerpts from a true visionary, 苇岸 Wei An—known as the Chinese Thoreau for his intimate writings of solitude and witness to nature. Though these writers have left us, we feel that their work continually resounds in the calls we feel so urgently today: to give our attention to the natural world, and to constantly interrogate the limits of language and what it allows us to say.
This profile looks at San-Francisco-based Zyzzyva and explores its enduring power. Writes Lou Fancher,
A person seeking for the golden thread that has held ZYZZYVA together for more than three decades might assume the “aha” is in the steady staffing, or due to the stunning literary stars shining in the index of writers, or perhaps its commitment to excellent writing…
But many equally excellent literary journals are lightly staffed by top tier management and loaded with artistic talent—and have collapsed…
In an interview, [newly appointed editor, Oscar] Villalon says a literary journal wants stability, but the only way to get it, ironically, is by seeking out and risking new things, by deliberately avoiding becoming a “we’ve always done it this way” echo chamber.
And here is an overview of Conjunctions’ latest issue, which is dedicated to the theme of water. The staff writes,
Conjunctions:80, Ways of Water, the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College which has been in print for more than 40 continuous years, has just been released…Through fiction and poetry, ecological and climate writing, in a multitude of genres, Ways of Water brings together a wide community of writers to plumb this most essential matter so basic to the survival of all flora, all fauna on this fragile water-blue planet.
Finally, we’ve talked a lot about submission fees around here lately. This piece by Benjamin Davis of Chill Subs offers fascinating insights about the lit mag market and the software we all use to navigate it. He writes,
On Chill Subs, one of the main filters we offer is a "no fee" filter. When you tick it, you'll find that 2611 of 3020 of our magazines have no submission fee. That's a lot of magazines. That's 86% of magazines….Now, you might be asking...why are people getting worked up over 14% of magazines?
…Last I checked Submittable's "discover" section, 88 of the 113 submission opportunities on the first-page charge a fee. That tracks. Just checked again: 86 of 105. That’s because only organizations using a paid service can promote calls on that paid service’s discover page.
…Any new writer coming into the scene is going to assume that submission fees are a huge problem because the vast majority of the ways to discover new magazines focus on magazines that have grown popular enough to have to pay for ever-tier-upping products to handle the workload of managing all of the submissions and promoting their publication.
For those of you looking for jobs and opportunities in the luscious landscape of literary magazines, here is what’s out there:
FRAME Literary Journal seeks “editorial talent.”
Vita Poetica seeks readers and editors.
MAYDAY seeks production editors.
If you’re looking for some advice on funding your work, Craft Talks is hosting a free webinar on The Art of Applying: Finding Funding & Demystifying Guidelines. In this session, Chelsea Biondolillo “will share a number of tips and tricks for finding fellowships, grants, and residencies to support a wide range of projects and writers at every level.”
For those of you looking for publishing opportunities, here is what’s on offer:
Erica Verillo has 87 Calls for Submissions in June 2023 - Paying markets and 71 Writing Contests in June 2023 — No entry fees
Erika Dreifus has 70+ curated, fee-free opportunities that pay writers
Authors Publish has 32 Themed Submissions Calls for June 2023 and 5 Paying Literary Magazines to Submit to in June 2023
As for us, my friends, I made a mistake! I just took a peek at our upcoming events this month and I realized I had the same date listed twice for two separate events. And none of you told me!!
Anyway, it has been corrected now. This Friday, June 16th at 2:30 we will have our super fun lit mag chat session. Next Friday, June 23rd at 2:30 pm est we will meet to discuss The Sun for our Lit Mag Reading Club. And on Tuesday, June 27th at 12:30 pm est, Editor Derek Askey will join us so we can ask him all our questions about the magazine.
Sorry for any confusion. Please take a look at the schedule and mark your calendars now. I will be sending registration links to these events later this week.
And that you dear darling discombobulateds, you with your head spinning in sixty directions simultaneously, you out there juggling an infinite jungle of jumbled jigaroos, you who are chief coordinator for the many parts of choo-choos that continuously chug along, you with fifty fingers figuring out solutions to fifty-six problems in which a lack of problems is certainly not one, you and you, task-masters and demand-meeters who still are no matter dreaming in the midst of packing and being packed in, wondering and wandering in the midst of other people’s boring and tedious certainties, you carving your creations, you taking secret skips along the hallway floor, you with a twinkle in your eye and a little giddy private joke running all the while, you and you, everywhere, relentlessly and ruthlessly soul-searching with a magnifying glass as big as the world and a hunger as insatiable as time, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most magical week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
As for the Anne Carson "poem", I see it as a flash fiction, but who cares about genre (except absolutely everybody, including a high-prestige magazine that said to me we love your essay, is it nonfiction? and then rejected it when I refused to say one way or the other, because I hate genre requirements. To what, besides science papers, does that label truly apply, after all? Not even history.)? What's important about the bitching over Ann Carson online, I think, is that Twitter is not where literary criticism lives, can we be honest about that please? Second, the type font shows that this was in The New Yorker, which increasing numbers of people in general and real writers in specific are beginning (finally) to hate because of its pretension, its clubbiness, its propensity to publish reviews and fiction that fiddle with the intellectual while avoiding completely anything that feels. So. I don't mind the paragraph, this flash-fiction, this poem, whatever it is. It addresses the discomfort of a date that starts badly and ends worse. I felt it. It is, perhaps, the perfect New Yorker piece for its cosmopolitan feel, its well-fed people complaining about bones and noise. And that's why it probably would have been received better by the public in a different magazine.
There is an increasingly reactionary attitude to any kind of supposedly 'controversial' attitudes in literature across the English-speaking world. Mainly it seems to originate from individuals who shout louder. Free speech depends on adult conscience, the expectation of society that an individual at a certain age can make up their own mind about political, sexual, aesthetic and religious and moral views. The term 'protecting from' is a applicable for children and the otherwise vulnerable, such as the mentally differently-able who may not be able to distinguish generally accepted views on those things. So have we mass-infantilised since the invention of social media? It seems to me so.