Q: Do you need a submissions mojo playlist? Here it is.
"Mixtapes were fantastically cool."
Welcome to our weekend conversation!
Do you all remember making mixtapes?
A good many of you are probably too young to have experienced that. And apologies to you youngins if you’re exhausted of hearing of all the cool things people did before we just let the internet do things for us, before we shouted into the air things like, “Siri, play my Spotify upbeat housecleaning mix…”
But the thing was, mixtapes were fantastically cool. And man, they took effort. You had to have a stereo with two cassette players. You had to sit hunched over the cassette decks, fast-forwarding and rewinding to cue up the song to the exact moment, you had to hit record at the instant the song started, then be sure to stop the recording at the exact moment the song ended. And do that for, like, dozens of songs.
If you were really into it, you gave your mixtape a name. “Super Slammin’ Summer Jams for Tony xx” or some such. You made art too. Collages or drawings. The whole endeavor could take hours. Days. It was a project.
And then, when it was all done, you delivered that mixtape to its intended recipient. It wouldn’t be posted online. There wouldn’t be the possibility of strangers finding it. A mixtape was a love letter or a friendship bracelet. It was a time stamp to capture memories to hold onto forever. Mixtapes were a way to share all the stuff you loved with someone important to you, or they were a way to say something that can only be said with music. And so much can only be said with music.
Somewhere on my shelves, I still have mixtapes from my teenage besties. The tape is all warped, the sound quality is terrible, the ink is faded. But I will never throw them away. They are a testament to the yearning to share, to feel so overcome by an art form that we just have to record it and make sure the person we love most hears it too. They’re a testament to friendship, heartbreak, and to the need I think all writers feel, which is to make the intangible permanent, to find new and deeper ways to speak.
What the bejeesus does this have to do with literary magazines? you are surely wondering.
Well, lit mags are very much like mixtapes. Some journals make this connection overt, like Michigan Quarterly Review’s mixtape section and the (now defunct) Side B Magazine, plus many others.
But also—surprise! I’ve made a mixtape for all of you!
For better or for worse, it’s not actually a tape. Those good old days of crouching over the stereo are sadly gone for good. But it is a compilation. And it is dedicated to each of you, to all of us.
These are the songs that get my wheels spinning, make me want to move. Songs that pump me up on those days I feel woefully behind. Songs that make me laugh because, as Twisted Sister so eloquently puts it, some of those rejection letters are “so condescending” and we’re not going to stop trying, no, we’re just “not gonna take it.”
This is a mix that reminds me of how the publishing world can at times feel rigged, unfair, and, as Dolly Parton tells us — “a rich man’s game,” one that “can drive you crazy if you let it;” and yet, like Florence Welch says, we’re just going to “shake it out.” Why? “Because it’s hard to dance with the Devil on your back.”
The truth of the matter is, sometimes you might feel like you’re out there all alone. Maybe then you’ll crank up the volume on your speaker and hear Whitesnake tell it like it is, “to walk along the lonely street of dreams…” (And come on, how can you not smile when you hear this glorious nod to glam metal?)
Time and time again, your heart will be stretched. Dare I say, it will have to become elastic. So naturally, how could I make a playlist like this and not include Sia? Of course, we’ve all heard “Elastic Heart” blaring from every supermarket across the land. But have you heard the piano version? What I love about this one is the raw vulnerability of her voice, how her claim of having a “thick skin” and being “like a rubber band” belies what we hear in her voice—the tender yearning, the vulnerability of wanting, the ache of a broken heart finding its way whole again.
Not to end on such a downbeat, there’s Lucy Dacus with her own spin on a classic, reminding us of how much writing and submitting really is so often a dance in the dark, how all we need is “just one spark,” and good god it gets boring sitting around “trying to write this book.”
Finally, to close it all out, there’s the great Bonnie Raitt, who will not be broken (and so neither will we). “Because what is living, if I can’t be free? And what is freedom, if I can’t be me?”
I hope you all enjoy this list! It’s short, with just seven songs, as it’s sort of hard to anticipate the musical tastes of over 10,000 people. You might love some songs here. You might loathe others. Maybe—I hope—at least one makes you smile. Maybe another helps to roll that rejection water off your ducky back, pushing you to keep on going.
Please share the playlist with anyone who you think might need it. Please let me know if it inspires. And please share your own songs below, so I can add them to the mix!
I suppose that’s one good thing about that old-school age being old and gone. The mixtape is no longer a finite thing. We can keep adding to it, continue to build on it, and we can make it grow.
What a great idea! I journal every morning and a song always pops into my head, which I note down. I keep saying to myself I’ll make a mixtape! One of these days. Today my song is, May It Be, by Enya.
Love it, Becky! What a sweet idea. Forwarding to my submissions buddy, who I sit with on Zoom every Wednesday evening while we do our submissions (or whatever is on our writing To Do lists).