Stuck in the Middle With Lit Mags!
RIP Russell Banks; changes at Creative Nonfiction; "a Bleak Year for Lit Mags"; "Fuck the Poetry Police;" profiles of Editors; Hobart interview fallout; jobs at lit mags; 200 + markets; & more
Welcome to the bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magnifiers,
Today’s newsletter begins on a sad note, as I’ve learned of the passing of Russell Banks. As I’ve mentioned before, Banks was one of my favorite authors. He also has a novella in the latest issue of Conjunctions, which we are reading for our January Lit Mag Reading Club. I spent this past weekend immersed in his novella, marveling that the 82-year-old writer sounded just like the writer I first encountered and came to love as a teenager.
I’ll of course be discussing this work in greater depth when we discuss this issue. (I also shared a bit about my fondness for Banks here.) Suffice it to say, the story is really, really good. This is likely his last published work. I look forward to having a discussion about it with those of you in the Reading Club in a few weeks. RIP, Russell Banks.
On a more uplifting note, I spotted a delightful tweet from this editor at Fourteen Hills, just before the new year.
The tweet is in response to a writer lamenting the exclusion of older writers in many literary magazines. Fairchild says that she and the other editors at Fourteen Hills had a look at their editorial practices, guided in part by the discussion and comments from so many of you over in this conversation about ageism in literary magazines.
Nice to know people are listening, eh?
Speaking of changes, something is going on at Creative Nonfiction Magazine, but I don’t yet know what. In December, nearly all the staff resigned. Founding Editor Lee Gutkind also announced that there would be no courses this spring. I was slated to teach one of these courses. Gutkind was not specific about the magazine’s situation. I will say, this journal has been around a long time, and has produced excellent work. Whatever the deal is, I do hope they pull through.
Meanwhile, discussion of the culture of literary magazines has arisen in many prominent venues. At The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes about “Bookforum and a Bleak Year for Literary Magazines.” Chayka discusses magazines like The Believer and Astra, which suffered major setbacks after being acquired by large corporations. (The Believer had to change ownership; Astra closed.) He notes that successful magazines such as n+1 and The Drift try not to rely exclusively on any one source of funding.
Chayka also highlights the new possibilities with Substack, writing: “The past few years have seen a profusion of Substack newsletters in which writers are free to rant at length about whatever irks or obsesses them at a given moment.”
I feel so seen.
At the New York Times, Jewish Currents Editor Arielle Angel got a lovely write-up. In “She’s Building a Little Jewish Magazine on Big Ideas,” Emma Goldberg writes about the journal, which publishes mostly left-leaning critical essays but also features poetry and fiction. (I can’t quote from this article, as it’s behind a paywall. But I can tell you that I myself have sent work to this magazine, and Angel was lovely in her interactions! So, kudos to her for this nice coverage.)
In Interview, the magazine’s Digital Editor Jake Nevins converses with Madeline Cash and Anika Levy, Founding Editors of Forever Magazine. Says Cash:
“If you have no editorial standards, you can only pleasantly surprise people. But it’s not even a morality thing. We’re not taking money from Peter Thiel because we haven’t been offered any money. We are constantly being asked if our dads are paying for the magazine, if we’re heiresses, where the money’s coming from. And we’re like, ‘There is no money.’ That’s the thing.”
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dan Sinykin covers a project for data collection that assesses inequality and nepotism in the poetry world. In “Fuck the Poetry Police: On the Index of Major Literary Prizes in the United States,” Sinykin writes,
“The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat; a team of scholars has been working for almost 10 years to detail exactly how the rigging works.”
And at Compact Magazine, Alex Perez of the famous Hobart interview, analyzes that interview’s fallout. In “All the Sad White Literary Ladies,” Perez writes,
“There is no greater proof…of the [human resources] feminization of the literary world than the hate directed at [Hobart Editor] Elizabeth Ellen from other literary women and the male feminists who do their bidding. Countless members of this community viciously attacked Ellen, bringing up her divorce and other parts of her personal history. These self-proclaimed feminists were, of course, the first to incite a hate mob against a fellow woman when she had the wrong views.”
If all this doesn’t make you want to find work in the wild world of literary magazines, what will? Here are some opportunities:
Pithead Chapel is seeking Editors.
Geist is seeking an Editor.
The Yale Review seeks a Deputy Editor.
The Margins seeks a Managing Editor.
For those of you following up on those 2023 resolutions to get submitting, here are some places to begin:
The Write Life has 40 Free Writing Contests.
Erika Dreifus’s newsletter lists 80+ no-fee calls for submissions.
Authors Publish has 5 Paying Literary Magazines to Submit to in January 2023.
And Erica Verillo has 91 Calls for Submissions in January 2023 - Paying markets and 54 no-fee writing contests.
As for us, those of you who are participating in this month’s Lit Mag Reading Club—I hope you’re enjoying your issues of Southern Review and Conjunctions! There is still time to order these magazines with the LMRC discounts. I’ll be interviewing editors from both these journals at the end of the month.
Also, the first Submissions Q & A session of 2023 kicks off this Friday. I’ll be sending the registration link later this week, so keep your eyes peeled.
And that you daredevils daily staring down the deep abyss of always deafening absence, you brave marchers onwards into the sea of words whose waves are wondrous and salty indeed, you valiant verse crafters, you punch-drunk prose-penners, you who muster all your resources in the face of ever-mounting obstacles and you who sometimes sit and stare at that blinking cursor and muster nothing, but nothing at all, you who summon strength on cold winter mornings and you who sweat through long nights of language-spiked insomnia, you with endless hustle in your giddy-up, you with endless sluggishness in your shoulder-slouching slowness, you with effort, you with grace, you in just whatever old messy wild tortured lazy longing tentative doubtful exuberant joyful unkempt strange deranged and out-of-range state you find yourself at any moment in time, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a beautiful week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
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Thanks, especially, for the Creative Nonfiction info, and look forward to hearing more, if poss. I hope they sought things out.
I hope circumstances calm down at Creative Nonfiction.