You Got a Fast Lit Mag!

Me Too scandal follows former Paris Review Editor; Chill Subs gets big write-up; Bad Art Friend revisited; closing of Sycamore Review & Image; beautiful archive of old mags; and more

Welcome to the bi-weekly news roundup!

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Greetings Lit Magnucopia,

An NYU class scheduled to be taught by former Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein has been canceled after an investigation into the editor’s history. According to Washington Square News, which conducted the investigation, “In December 2017, Stein resigned from The Paris Review after he was featured on ‘Shitty Media Men,’ a list that allows anonymous users to publicize allegations of misconduct against men in the media industry.”

Not everyone supported the class’s cancellation. According to The Daily Beast, “Confider has learned that cultural critic Katie Roiphe was…responsible for hiring Stein, her former editor at TPR…In a now-infamous 2018 essay for Harper’s, Roiphe lamented Stein’s resignation due to his uplifting of female writers at TPR…”

From that Harper’s essay:

Whatever its boys’ club ambience under George Plimpton, The Paris Review under Lorin Stein was devoted to writers such as Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, Vivian Gornick, and Amparo Dávila…The Paris Review was a fruitful and vibrant and professionally useful place for women writers.

In researching this situation, I came upon an interesting 2017 article about former Paris Review Editor Brigid Hughes. In This Is How a Woman Is Erased From Her Job, A.N. Devers writes,

For nearly a decade, the Plimpton, Gourevitch, Stein lineage was simply taken as fact. It effectively stripped Hughes of her significant contributions to the magazine where she had spent her entire career before her termination, which included serving as managing editor for a dozen issues beginning with issue 155 in Summer 2000 and ending with issue 167 in Fall 2003, before taking over and producing issue 168 in Winter 2003.

In brighter news, congrats are in order for that indefatigable team at Chill Subs, as today they got a lovely and delicious write-up in Publishers Weekly. In Chill Subs Wants to Take the Angst Out of Submissions, Nathalie op de Beeck reports,

At the uneasy intersection of the creative process and the manuscript submission process exists a website known as Chill Subs. The site provides an extremely fast-growing grassroots alternative to Submittable, the venture capital–supported site that has dominated the submissions space for more than a decade but has occasionally frustrated writers with its fees and lack of transparency.

If you’re wondering where that link about “occasionally frustrated writers” leads, well, it’s here, to Lit Mag News! Yes, dear readers, Lit Mag News was featured in the Publishers Weekly article too, which means your voices are getting heard!

I was also pleased to see Lit Mag News get a shoutout in Plagiarism Today, regarding the John Kucera brouhaha. Jonathan Bailey offers important perspectives of his own:

Most literary magazines, in particular online ones, are not professional operations. They are edited and managed by volunteers who are doing the work in their spare time and with extremely limited budgets.  

Because of this, there is a limited focus on checking incoming works for plagiarism. Most literary magazines feel that, given how low stakes the industry is in general, that there’s no real reason to spend the time and resources checking work for ethical issues. 

However, that is something that my personal experience shows to not be the case.  

…After starting regular checks for my work, I found…700 plagiarists. These included plagiarists who had created sites, submitted my work to forums and many who had submitted them to literary magazines, both print and online.

Relatedly, do you all remember the Bad Art Friend saga? It concerned a story that was published first in audio format and then later in American Short Fiction. A few months ago, literary critic and podcast host Bethanne Patrick invited me on her program to talk about my own experience as a former member of the writing group at the center of the scandal. The podcast aired today. Listen on Spotify or Apple. (With one correction: I no longer teach at Grub Street, as Bethanne states.)

In other news, I was delighted to learn that Raleigh Review has begun to post the percentages of solicited versus unsolicited work published at lit mags. Say the magazine’s editors,

As we have continued to build our reputation and our audience, we have made a conscious effort to resist solicitation in favor of publishing those pieces from the submissions queue…The submission process should be fair and based on merit rather than relationship-based publishing, especially among fee-based magazines and presses.

(If you like the sound of this journal’s ethos, I’ll be interviewing one of the editors this Thursday, so be sure to tune in!)

Sadly, two lit mags announced their closing last week, both after 35 years of publication. Sycamore Review’s final issue has just been released.

Image announced, “We’re proud of the work Image has done from its founding: curating, cultivating, convening, and celebrating work that grapples with the mystery of being human and demonstrating the vitality of contemporary art invigorated by faith.”

So many lit mags have closed over the years. One reader recently shared with me an absolutely wonderful site. from a secret location is an archive of small presses and lit mags “from the mimeo era and beyond.” It’s just delightful to see these old-school mags, what’s changed, what hasn’t, and to be reminded that as journals come and go, we are all part of a long history of editors, writers, poets, readers and artists doing our thing.

Finally, for all of you Substack writers or writers trying to grow an audience generally, Carlos Greaves has written the laugh you need. In his hilarious “How I Grew My Substack From 439 to 451 Free Subscribers In Just 11 Months,” he writes,

Whether you like it or not, [Substack] Notes is here to stay. And, sure, like any social-media-style feed, it’s time consuming, mentally exhausting, and a great place to get harassed by the most heinous people on planet Earth. But that’s a small price to pay for occasionally meeting someone cool.

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For those of you seeking gainful employ in the land of lit mags, here’s what we’ve got:

The Offing seeks a Translation Editor.

Writers SA seeks an Editor for a new to-be-launched lit mag (in Australia).

Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters seeks “volunteer, part-time Referees” to review submissions.

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For those of you looking to bone up on your studies, two Lit Mag News contributors are teaching workshops:

Bethany Jarmul will be teaching a Micro-memoir Generative Workshop. “During this online generative workshop, participants will look at examples of evocative micro memoirs and explore what makes them effective.”

Katherine E. Standefer will be teaching Early Writing Career Incubator : Paving the Way for Your Writing through Literary Journals. “In this eight-month Zoom class, you’ll go from lit mag newbie to submitter extraordinaire while developing a community that can keep you accountable.”

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As for us, lots happening in the days ahead. I’ll be interviewing Landon Houhle of Raleigh Review this Thursday.

And we will have a lovely lovey-dovey supper fuzzy Valentine’s Day Lit Mag Chat this Wednesday, plus our Submissions Study Hall on Friday.

Here is the full schedule. Registration links are coming asap!

Those of us in the Lit Mag Reading Club are also in the midst of reading, enjoying (and no doubt getting emotionally gutted by) Bellevue Literary Review. I’ll be speaking with the Editors at the end of the month.

Finally, for March we will be reading One Story. If you haven’t yet, go order your discounted issues now!

As a reminder, anyone can join the Lit Mag Reading club, anytime. You can learn more about it here.

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And that you linebackers and line editors, you out there drowning in the first down of your third draft and yearning for an ecstatic and easy end around, you who pray every single day for a hail Mary to let you touch down on some golden green grass (or is it artificial turf? who’s really to say?), you tackling the trips to and fro and always toggling against your own defensive demons, you sliding past those scurrilous inner censors with the world’s swerviest swim move and you summoning all your characters, both on the bench and off, for a desperate scramble as you search for someone, anyone, to catch that darn thing you’ve been holding for so long, and so far, inside your own small hands, you sprinting against the oceanic roaring of the crowd, you slowing into the silence of your most surest of unsteady selves, you out there to have fun, you out there to win, you and you, everywhere, always, freeing yourself from the fear of false starts and fighting for your very own goal, out in that field, wherever you may find it, full of freedom, full of fire, is the news in literary magazines.

Have a most adventurous week, pals.

Fondly,

Becky

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