Livin' La Lit Mag Loca!
Writers doing no-no's; new editor at Poetry; review of The Drift; new workshop from SmokeLong Quarterly; jobs at Poetry, BOMB, Vallum; 200+ markets for your work...
Greetings Lit Magionnaires,
This post from an editor recently caught my attention:
Color me naive, but is re-submitting work that has already been published a common practice? Apparently, judging by the comments from other editors who have all dealt with similar situations, it is indeed. Who knew? Not I!
Are you an editor who has had to rearrange your magazine after learning of a writer’s prior publication of the work? Do you search for every piece before officially publishing it? Are you a writer who has wondered whether or not you should be resubmitting previously published work, even when editors expressly ask you not to?
In other news, Poetry Magazine, which has lately “been addressing criticisms over diversity and social awareness,” will have a new editor this month. Adrian Matejka, the journal’s first-ever Black editor, is “an educator, former state laureate of Indiana and prize-winning poet.” The magazine “has not had a permanent editor since the summer of 2020, when Don Share resigned after the magazine was criticized for publishing a poem which Share himself described as ‘insidious’ and ‘particularly oppressive to Black, Pacific Islander, and Asian people.’ The foundation called his departure part of [its] ‘ongoing changes and conversations’…”
New lit mag The Drift also got some buzz recently. In assessing the mag’s most recent issue, Barbara Lane writes, “I’ve long felt that the New Yorker, that literary paragon edited by David Remnick, is getting a bit stale. So move over, David. There’s a new crowd in town, and they’re gunning for you.”
And yours truly got to wax thoughtful in a recent interview about the state of lit mags today. Sayeth I, “There is kind of a mood out there. It’s hard, maybe harder than it used to be, to sustain a literary journal.”
Meanwhile, if you’re looking to up your flash fiction game, SmokeLong Quarterly has put together something cool. “From May 30 to August 28 2022, SmokeLong is going to host a superworkshop. We want to spend the summer with you, the flash community. Our workshops take place on a devoted website where you can create a profile, interact with the flash community, and take part in group discussions on craft…”
For those of you on the job or volunteer hunt, here are some new opportunities:
Poetry Magazine is seeking a Senior Managing Editor.
BOMB Magazine is seeking a full-time Associate Editor.
Vallum is hiring an Editorial Assistant.
Longleaf Review has openings for two volunteer positions.
If you’re looking for new places to submit, this Poets and Writers interview with Hope Wabuke might be of interest. “While working on The Body Family for the past ten years, Wabuke says literary journal editors have often allowed her to ‘see more clearly the center of a poem or themes running through the poems.’” She cites North American Review, Rupture, Ruminate, The Sun and Fjords Review as instrumental in her work.
Still in want of new places to send your latest and greatest? Here’s what’s out there:
From The Masters Review: May Deadlines: 11 Literary Contests Ending This Month
From Erica Verrillo: 110 Calls for Submissions in May 2022 - Paying markets; 43 Writing Contests in May 2022 - No entry fees; and 12 Journals With No Fixed Deadlines Open NOW - Paying Markets
From Authors Publish: 46 Themed Submission Calls for May 2022; 50 Literary Journals and Magazines Open to Genre Work; 5 Paying Literary Magazines to Submit to in May 2022
At Authors Publish you’ll also find some encouragement, where Emily Harstone writes in Typos as Moral Failure: Persistent Gatekeeping in Writing, “It’s important to know the rules of grammar, proofread your work, and edit to the best of your abilities, but it’s ultimately more important to get those words out into the world. As long as people can understand your basic meaning, you are on the right track.”
And if you still crave encouraging words, there’s this:
Finally, in case you missed it, we kicked off this month’s interview series with two motherhood-oriented lit mags. Last week I spoke to Marjorie Tesser, Editor of Mom Egg Review and Meg Lemke, Editor of Mutha Magazine. Later this month I’ll be speaking with the Editors of Motherwell and Literary Mama, with the interviews all open to the public to attend and ask questions. Come on out!
And that you upward dogs and wayward souls, you stumblers through the subterranean swamp you found through some seriously deep breathing, you who like to sweat it all out, you who can’t help but sweat the small stuff, you with your hands in prayer while your mind burbles about in the tulgey wood, you in crow, you in flying pigeon, you so focused, deeply deeply focused, on the brillig weather and tomorrow’s slithy toves, you and you, out there and everywhere, maneuvering in space, conjuring the impossible, aspiring higher and reaching harder, stretching and twisting and bending while laying down in layers of your past-present-future selves, you in a tangle, here, now, in the forever body of your one true and beautiful idea, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most magnificent week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
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Great topic, Becky. I'd like to suggest one for the future; the potential for a publisher rating site for authors. I get a little tired of submission pages having a string of conditions as long as the menu in a Chinese restaurant. I think we need something like a TripAdvisor where writers can rate their experiences with publishers as an encouragement/warning to others.
The multiple submission issue for anything other than an actual book is a huge pet peeve of mine. In today's world of millions of online magazines most with a readership of a couple of hundred subscribers if lucky it is totally unfair of these publications to want work that has not been submitted or published in another online magazine or personal blog site. They are not offering us pay at all, they cannot give us any huge exposure, so asking us to submit a piece one and at time to each magazine and then wait for a reply is ludicrous. This isn't the days of huge overhead for a print magazine. Every wanna be writer has pretty much set up an online magazine of sorts. So unless an online magazine has a readership of in the tens of thousands it is totally unfair to ask us to write for them for free, and most even charge us a fee for submission, and then think we should not be allowed to have our essay or poem printed in as many of these small magazines as we can at once. We need lots of these to expose our work and so should not be constrained. I'm reasonably sure that these sites of a few hundred readers are not going to overlap in terms of audience so why not allow us to simply submit to as many as we like and get published in as many as possible to get our work out there. I mean it's a huge difference between the New Yorker requiring exclusive rights to print and a small online mag of a few people. Sorry but this is a huge pet peeve of mine and I'm sure to many writers as well. The same goes for a personal blog site. Mine has all of 170 followers, so really this is will impact the readership of my piece on a totally different small online magazine? I don't think so.