The Way You Make Lit Mags Feel!
Pushback on new NEA guidelines; input on submission fees; lit mags on TikTok; history of leftist lit mag Anvil; Conjunctions Editor reflects on magazines; Witcraft closes; and more
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magtropolis,
In my last newsletter I reported on the National Endowment for the Arts’ recent changes to its Challenge America grant guidelines. Last week, the organization hosted a webinar to clarify some of these changes for potential applicants.
On Bluesky, writer Lacey Dunham shared a slide from the webinar:
Interestingly, the third item here states (emphasis mine): “Applicants must certify that they do not operate any programs…including programs outside the scope of their NEA project.” This guideline not only differs slightly from what is on the NEA site but also appears to expand upon the rules stated there. Yet once again, they do not seem to specify how or even if they intend to monitor the full scope of programs undertaken by any award recipient. Will they? How so?
As for the organization’s recent press release stating that “the NEA continues to encourage projects that…[honor] the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250),” Sidney Paterra at Broadway World reports that in the webinar, they reminded attendees that “Promoting America250 is not new for the NEA in 2025—[Grants for Arts Projects] GAP has encouraged projects celebrating the anniversary since 2021. They also elaborated that America250 is not required of GAP applicants to be eligible for funding.”
The same day of the webinar, artists and writers across disciplines sent a letter to the organization in protest of its new guidelines. Reports Michael Paulson at The New York Times,
In one of the first signs of collective pushback to the Trump administration’s arts initiatives, several hundred American artists are calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back restrictions on grants to institutions with programming that promotes diversity or “gender ideology.”
…The artists’ letter asks the N.E.A. to ‘reverse’ the changes, saying ‘abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.’”
You can read the full letter here.
Back to more specifically lit-mag-related news, ONE ART Editor Mark Danowsky has posted at
his concerns regarding submission fees. In Balancing Act: The Realities of Running a Literary Journal without Submission Fees, Mark writes,I want input from poets/writers about submission fees, ‘pay-to-play’, and the ethical quandaries as well as financial realities faced by lit mags.
…Recently, I've been thinking about encouraging (not requiring) a $1 token donation to ONE ART with each submission as a form of token compensation for daily hours of otherwise unpaid labor.
…Why $1? The basic concept is to create a small amount of friction. I’ve always wanted to make the submission process as poet-friendly as possible. The result (surprise, surprise) is that it is very easy. You can toss random poems in the body of an email (personally a preferred method for me when I’ve submitted my own work) and then send it off. The lack of friction means people send a lot of work that is not even close to a good fit for the journal.
…I’m seeking input for how to navigate these complex questions.
I don’t think there are easy answers.
If there is a literary youngster in your life, you might want to tell them about Gently Mad. I don’t typically share news about high school and college lit mags, but this one caught my eye. According to Trill Mag, Gently Mad is a “new literary magazine to watch out for!”
The Gently Mad is a magazine that exists to serve an international generation who have grown up learning, seeing, and hearing about the political instability, cultural upheaval, and chaos in our post-modern world. The authors featured are primarily high school and university students from Canada, the USA, Greece, South Korea, Egypt, and Scotland, reflecting the magazine’s desire for contrasting voices.
Interested writers can hop onto TikTok to learn more about how these editors met and then launched their journal. (I must reveal my reporter’s bias here and tell you all that I find this quite sweet and adorable and I hope these young editors keep going!)
Speaking of magazine history, Jacobin has a new piece on Anvil, “the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism.” Writes Marc Blanc,
In its three short years of existence, Anvil magazine published several writers who would go on to achieve immense fame, including Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren. The small, ragtag magazine, founded in 1933, was unique among leftist literary journals of the time in its racial diversity and its proud adoption of rural radicalism.
…Despite publishing the early works of some of the most renowned US socialist writers of the twentieth century, Anvil remains unknown to all but a few specialists in leftist literary history. That’s a shame, because it offers a blueprint for communicating a popular socialist vision to a working class outside the United States’ major urban centers — a task that could hardly be more urgent today.
At Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, former Managing Editor of Gettysburg Review and now-Editor of Conjunctions, Lauren Hohle, has written of her own history with magazines. In “Who Reads Magazines? A Personal History,” she writes,
On the day [my partner] Matt and I (with the help of our friends) packed our moving truck, an oracle reading in Gettysburg told me the worst of “whatever it is you’ve been going through is over,” but I can’t be sure. Conjunctions’s future is uncertain. On Twitter, I see wave after wave of folding publications and media layoffs. Green Mountains. Image. Sycamore Review. Pitchfork. Sports Illustrated. Are we that far gone to the algorithm? I keep wondering. Why, in the age of curated subscription boxes and bookshelf wealth, do people hate magazines?
In the realm of expansions, the newly-back-from-hiatus Literary Mama is relaunching “the community writing project ‘Mama And.’ Writes blog Editor Carrie Vittitoe,
Once a month, we will post a “Mama And” prompt on the blog, and we encourage you to write in response to it, whether it is in the form of short poetry, flash fiction, micro-stories, or other kinds of art.
For February, the topic is “Mama And… Relaunching.” What does it mean as a mother to experience relaunch? When is it needed? What can it look like? We want to read your thoughts on whatever relaunching means to you as a mama and writer.
And sadly, in the realm of closures,
Founder Doug Jacquier has announced the end of his magazine Witcraft and its sister publication Stories Out:For personal reasons, I have decided to close Witcraft from the end of March. All pieces accepted for publication will still be published and remain archived until my WordPress account runs out. All pieces published in February and March will remain eligible for the monthly prizes.
Thank you all for your support over the last couple of years, especially to those that gave what they could to keep Witcraft afloat and keep its deficits manageable.
Between us, we have proven that there is a modest market for true humour and wit and I hope someone decides to launch something similar in the future.
Nice work, Doug! Congrats on the magazines. We do all need more humor in this world. Best wishes in your next endeavors.
As for us, some good news and some LTI (Less Than Ideal) news for our Lit Mag Reading Club.
Starting with the LTI: It seems the copies of Post Road many of us ordered were just sent out last week. You might not have received yours yet. I just got my own copy today. So, we have a few choices. We could continue as planned, with our chat about Post Road this Wednesday and our editor interview on Friday. We could cancel the chat but keep the interview. We could postpone both the chat and the interview, to give everyone enough time to read the issue and so we can have a more robust conversation.
I am fine with any option, though keep in mind that postponing may mean doubling up on our monthly journal reading at some point (fine by me).
If this scenario applies to you, please vote in this poll. All votes are anonymous and the poll will expire in 24 hours. Please also feel free to leave a comment.
Now, the good news: Our March Lit Mag Reading Club pick is Ploughshares! We will be reading the Winter 2024-2025 issue. Guest Editor John Skoyles will be joining us at the end of the month to answer all our questions.
The Ploughshares Editors have kindly offered all participants a 50% discount on the issue, print or digital. You can claim your discount here.
And if you have no idea what I am talking about, you can learn all about the wonderful Lit Mag Reading Club here!
Finally, I will be posting the line-up for March interviews and info sessions sometime this week. So keep your chin up, your eyes out, your buttons tied and your antlers in peak antennae-mode.
And that you thinkers and mere thought-havers, you word tinkerers and endless sentence re-aligners, you last-minute scramblers to change your cacophony of commas and you early-worm-catchers writing to the whistling bird on all the nearby winding wires, you work hustlers, you would-prefer-not-to wanderers, you whipping your WIP until it’s at last in wing-flight mode, you drilling into your dreams with the kind of power that rattles, you out there, corkscrewing your path into the labyrinthine wonderland of all your best intentions as well as all your odd and unexpected results, you with your eye on your vision and your vision shining right back upon itself, but inward, like an inner eye, that also shines directionward? or was the direction within all along?, who knows but you and you, everywhere and always, looking, plummeting, plunging, courageously curating the clay of life to make something to hold, forever, inside those charmed and clever hands of yours, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most inspired week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
Many thanks for the mention, Becky, and for all your support for Witcraft over the past 2 years.
I'm sorry to hear Witcraft is closing-- they honored me by publishing a couple of my poems last fall.