These Lit Mags are Made for Walkin'!
Losses in literary community; culture in decline; CIA in lit mags; merger of Chill Subs & Write or Die; nuns in poetry; the end of Briar Cliff Review; rejection de-coder; jobs at lit mags;150+ markets
Welcome to our bi-weekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magsquatches,
This week’s newsletter is a packed one, friends, so brew a cup of tea, make sure your reading device is fully charged, and away we go.
First, some sad news as the literary world had two recent losses. John Tranter, who was a poet, essayist, publisher, editor, and founder of the poetry magazine Jacket, has passed away at age 79. He is described here as “Perhaps more than any other Australian poet of the 20th Century,…guided by a relentless desire to experiment.” At Jacket 2, the editors say,
In 1997, John Tranter began publishing Jacket, one of the earliest all-online journals of poetry and poetics. Launched in what was still a field saturated with print, the original quarterly Jacket offered something different. Free, open-access, and impervious to the constraints of page count or paper bindings or subscription income, Jacket taught its readers how to engage with what was then a relatively new medium…We will miss you, John.
Michael Denneny, “an affable dean of gay New York publishing,” has also passed away at age 80. Denneny
nurtured up-and-coming talent while working as an editor of Christopher Street magazine, which he co-founded in 1976 and promoted as a gay version of the New Yorker, and at St. Martin’s ran Stonewall Inn Editions, which he launched in 1987 as the first gay imprint at a major publishing house.
In other news, Christian Lorentzen recently wrote about the shuttering of Bookforum and what this “says about our cultural decay.” Lorentzen cites magazines that are currently growing and thriving, such as n+1, The Drift, and Forever, but he also points to The Believer and Astra to underscore the precarity of the current lit mag scene. As for how lit mags have been funded historically, Lorentzen writes,
America has no state model for the propagation of little magazines, unless you count the CIA’s clandestine funding of various journals during the Cold War. That episode is remembered as one of shame, but on the scorecard of the agency’s sins, surely the least of them is that it helped the Paris Review get off the ground, to say nothing of the powerful avant-garde magazines it bankrolled in Asia and Africa, including Black Orpheus, Hiwar and Transition.
On this I would actually disagree with Lorentzen. The CIA’s funding of literary magazines, in my view, is not remembered as one of shame, if it is even remembered at all. Paris Review co-founder and former CIA operative Peter Matthiesen had himself observed that he looked back on that time with “more chagrin than shame.” At any rate, he argued, “60 years ago, at the start of the Cold War, the C.I.A. had not yet earned the evil repute it has today…”
Hundreds of others left comments on Lorentzen’s piece. The Washington Post has published several. In this second article, one commenter observed:
The world of literary magazines and literary criticism has become so insular — mostly wrapped around prestigious master of fine arts programs and their graduates — for so long that it does not speak to anything approaching real life. It used to be that you could pick up one of many literary reviews and see a diversity of creative writing and criticism that reflected a wide array of perspectives and talents, which included many, many voices outside of the world of MFAs.
Moving right along, okay, here is where things get exciting…and a bit complicated…but mostly exciting.
As I reported in the last newsletter, Chill Subs (the lit mag resource we all know and love) is merging with Write or Die (the writing and educational resource we all know and love). This is not a prank. Some of you may recall that Chill Subs and Lit Mag News announced a merger on April Fool’s Day. The joke was my idea, and it happened to be a totally random wacky coincidence that at that very moment, in non-fools reality, these two amazing resources are actually coming together.
What does that mean for you?
It means: They now have a magazine. It is beautiful. It’s called Write or Die. The magazine publishes essays, interviews, columns and features, all related to writing and publishing (mostly in lit mags and small presses). In an email they told me,
We are especially interested in being transparent about the writing process—the day-to-day routines of writers, the messy drafts, the rejections, and the hours spent staring into space. We love to talk about all of that. And we love that writing is something we all share and are all capable of without needing fancy accolades to prove you have something to say.
The magazine is open for submissions, and they pay.
That is not all. They are also offering workshops. “Our workshops will come from two places: writer-requested & instructor inspired.”
If you’re bummed about the closing of Catapult, then you’re in luck because many of the teachers are now teaching here. I, too, will be teaching with them in the fall.
They are always open for people to propose a workshop to teach. They are also open for writers to request a workshop.
Additionally—I know, you’re now wondering if these people ever sleep. I can tell you that I have been in touch with them over the past few weeks, and the answer is No, it appears that they do not sleep. But all the better for us!—They have launched SubClub.
This Substack offers a wealth of info, including ideas on submissions strategies, a submitter’s dictionary, special events for subscribers, and even sandwich recipes. (Get it, sub club?)
They are also open for submissions here related to lit terms, submission strategies or recipes. They pay here too.
If you are interested in joining the Sub Club as a paying subscriber to get some great benefits, they are offering a free month at “the PB & J tier” for Lit Mag News readers. You can fill out the form here to claim the free month.
They are also currently offering a 10% discount off all writing workshops and Chill Subs merch for the next week. If this interests you, the code is CHILLORDIE.
If you’re wondering where the money from subscriptions goes, they explain it all here at the bottom of the page. Not that anyone asked my opinion, but I think this is extremely commendable. If more publishing venues practiced such transparency regarding where the money goes, we could all save ourselves a lot of time and heartache!
In other news, if you’re also interested in literary history, this interesting article caught my eye this week. It explores the history of nuns writing poetry and touches on the aims of religious writing in general. Nick Ripatrazone writes, “For the past few years, I have been writing about something of a minor literary renaissance. In mid-century America, nuns and sisters were writing poems, and publishing them in the nation’s finest publications.”
On a sadder note, Briar Cliff Review is officially ending its run. In this very brief video, Editor Tricia Currans-Sheehan discusses why the 35-year-old magazine is closing and why it is closing now in particular. I hadn’t known the reasons for this beautiful magazine’s ceasing publication and had assumed it was under more positive circumstances. Alas, that does not appear to be the case.
For those of you looking for work in the luscious land of lit mags, here is what is out there:
The Drift is seeking an “administrator to manage fiction submissions.”
The Adroit Journal seeks a Digital Communications Manager.
For those of you who have been looking for love in all the wrong places, perhaps try here:
Authors Publish has 45 Themed Submission Calls and Contests for May 2023
Erica Verrillo has 97 Calls for Submissions in May 2023 - Paying markets and 44 Writing Contests in May 2023 - No entry fees
Erika Dreifus has a super long list of no-fee paying opportunities.
Oh, and if you are ever wondering what to make of a rejection, this funny site caught my eye this week. At The Rejection Whisperer, you can paste in the text of your latest perplexing rejection, and the site will tell you what it means. Once you get your answer, you can then select “help me cope,” which offers some pretty amusing advice.
As for us, it’s an all new month, which means we are well into our May Lit Mag Reading Club. Of course, it’s not too late to participate, and it’s never too late to join The Club.
For this month, we will be reading Pleiades. You can find out more about the club, as well as an awesome discount to the latest issue on this page here:
In case you missed it, I spoke with Lynne Nugent and contributors to Iowa Review last week. The interview was loads of fun.
Stay tuned for the next Save the Dates page, which will let you know about editor interviews and information sessions this month.
And that you communication experts forever craving the call and response cacophony of your own clattering ideas, you dreamers of exceptional and grandly envisioned escapades which are albeit occasionally extremely effortful if not downright excruciating to execute, you seekers of knowledge and seekers of wisdom and seekers of every small scrap of whatever possible soul might slither through the cracks of all those endless streams of notifications and noise, you whose voice is a bridge so sturdy it could be traversed by ten Mack trucks and you whose voice is, on other days, so quaky and shaky it can barely stand even the slightest of whispered winds, you who are unpredictable, you who are unmanageable, you whose latest enterprise is exceptionally unputdownable, you who rise to the occasion and you who, well, don’t, so much, not really, because, ugh, the occasion is just, so, well, haven’t we all had enough of the occasion, you and you, everywhere, at the page and off, working, trying, making magic from your mighty and beating and magnificent forever connection-craving heart, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a most spectacular week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
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For those who are interested in the CIA influence in lit mags, there's a good interview by Mary von Aue in VICE from five years ago with Joel Whitney, the author of Finks. In short, the direct CIA funding of some very famous writers and lit mags (and who else now? Do we even know?) to conduct "soft" propaganda and do actual spying on the ground connects in my mind with my article about work in translation in this space last week. The world is now awash with American narratives in translation to other languages while the flow in the other direction is still stuck at 3%. That reality speaks for itself and the agenda of the military-industrial complex. Who's getting that money now, I wonder? By the way, I don't know where this "MFA pipelines" is supposed to be located: it certainly wasn't anywhere near the program I graduated from. Perhaps you have to go to the Iowa program to get a ticket to ride, I don't know.
Happy/ honored to have a poem in the last Briar Cliff. I'd actually never held one in my hands until today. Gorgeous journal. Sad it's gone.