Becoming Respectable

Jacob Russell wonders why so many writers are so eager to get their work published in "little magazines":

Each one of these periodicals receives hundreds, and many, thousands of submissions a month. Is it the hope of becoming "respectable," of making an honest buck, that drives writers to spend their time and money printing and copying and addressing and mailing and keeping records so you don't send the same story to the same place?

And answers his own question:

Aside from Harpers (which publishes no more than 12 stories a year) and The New Yorker (which may publish 100), what's left? Esquire. Playboy. Maybe a dozen open slots left in the Real World. What's left, the last remaining outlet for print publication: the Little Lits. So what drives this is the writers. When the readers disappear, what else is left?

The problem with this answer is that the readers didn't "disappear." They never existed. Little magazines have always subsisted on subscriptions from libraries and subsidies from universities or some other outside funding agency. Very few (perhaps none) have been able to keep themselves in print off of individual subscriptions and sales, and even those that do find themselves onto library shelves mostly go unread except by a few creative writing students who want to know what sort of thing a given journal is accepting these days.

The literary magazine as we know it was the product of two aspirations, one noble, one less so. Most of the early "little magazines" were created, at least in part, in a sincere effort to provide "serious writing" a place of initial publication in a world where the "book business" has little or no interest in literary short fiction or poetry. To some extent, such magazines continue to be founded on this idealistic ambition, although over the years it has become increasingly difficult to see how yet another literary magazine published from yet another small college or regional university is going to spark a revival of interest in poetry or the short story. The circulation numbers for most of these publications remain microscopically low.

The other function the little magazine came to fulfill was offering the opportunity for publishing credits to the scores of writers who began to emerge from the creative writing programs appearing in increasing numbers in the 1950s-1970s and that now exist in some form in almost all American colleges and universities. Since not all of these programs could insist that incoming faculty already have books to their credit, placement in one of these magazines could help insure job candidates appropriate credentials and could serve as measures of "production" for faculty members in mid-career. Take a look at the contributors page of most literary magazines, and you'll most likely discover that most of the contributors are either members of the faculty of a creative writing program or students at one of these programs, presumably in both cases seeking publication credit that will specifically advance their academic careers.

(I am a graduate of one of these programs, and I can certainly testify from my own experience that gathering such credits was something I was taught, both directly and indirectly, to vigorously pursue.)

I'm afraid that this more utilitarian goal has come to dominate most writer's thinking and largely accounts for what "drives" them to engage in the submissions game Jacob describes. Jacob further cautions against blaming "academics" for the dismal rules of this game. But it isn't the "MFA Mafia Cartel" that controls current little magazine publishing operations, even though graduates of the more prestigious MFA programs do seem to have pride of place in the more presigious literary magazines. (Just as scholars from more prestigious universities get pride of place in most scholarly publications of any kind.) It's the very attachment of little magazines to universities, from which most of today's little magazines still originate, and inevitably to the protocols of academic publication that most directly influences the dynamics of publishing in even the smallest, least recognizable of the literary magazines.

On the one hand, the existence of this system does help to keep poetry and short fiction alive as literary forms. This is not a negligible accomplishment, and for it the editors of little magazines, who endure a maximum amount of trouble and enjoy a minimum amount of compensation for their efforts, should be thanked. On the other hand, the bland uniformity of what is published in the little magazines as a whole begins to suggest that the publishing format created decades ago to serve the needs of "literature" as embodied in the institutional necessities of academe isn't aging well.

For a more extensive discussion of the role of literary magazines, see my essay here.

Comments

[Robert Nagle]

First, bravo for you for linking to all those lit mags on the left. It's a good way to remind people they exist. (Btw, I'm a big fan of Dinty Moore's creative nonfiction Brevity Magazine if you haven't seen it. http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm Online fiction is doing well, and so is blog-based creative writing.

Yes, edited/moderated litmags are great, but keep in mind that just putting it out on the web attracts a lot of random readers. My short story site receives 100,000 unique visitors per year to my site, and out of that total, I would say that 30 to 50 thousand are giving the site more than simply a cursory look. But there's a certain randomness to the traffic. Of course traffic doesn't equal money (or even fame). And ultimately what is 100,000 visitors if nobody likes what they're reading?

I don't have any problem with litmags; they are on the whole excellent. But the submission process is time-consuming and more irritating than it needs to be.

[Bookjive.com]

All big things on earth start small. Submitting to small publications is the only way for new writers to start publishing their works; it's the easiest way to reach their audience as these small publications are easier to approach when it comes to article or story submission compared to big ones who more are likely to look at the name of the author first before reading the piece. Some don't even bother to read the submitted piece if they don't know the author.

In my own opinion, readers never "disappear" and they do exist -- they just evolve. They may be reading small print mags in the year before the 90's; but now, people are reading article or short stories online with the emergence of the internet and other electronic media. -- Well, these are just my own thoughts.

[dignam]

I'd like to direct your readers to http://www.boybedlamreview.com , a literary magazine that IS trying to advance beyond the "bland uniformity" of what constitutes prose and poetry.

[Richard]

I can't speak of little magazines today, but when I started publishing stories in them in the mid-1970s, they were incredibly vibrant and varied. Many of the 200 or so places I published in were one-person operations, and these one-person litmags were not created by anyone in academia. (Of course MFA's were pretty rare in the 1970s.)

I recall my friend Peter Cherches (one year we were both in Transatlantic Review, probably one of our most "establishment" credits) saying that the only people he figured read most of the litmags we published in were other writers also in the same issue. And surprisingly, that was not a bad thing.

My first book by a New York trade publishing house came about, as did the first books of several of my friends, because someone -- in my case, the president of the company -- found one of my stories in a litmag (here it was Cornell's Epoch, which I believe is still publishing).

I look through the litmags I was published in during the 1975-1985 period and see the first published works by unknown writers like Madison Smartt Bell who later achieved real success.

But no, they never really had an audience outside of other writers and editors.

[genevieve]

I'm going to post shortly on our country's latest collection of "Best" short stories (it's an annual event.)
I think little mags fulfil a different function in countries with smaller populations. The editor of this collection has cast his net very wide, and the collection sells well, now being in its seventh or eighth year (I think.)
Similarly, I think writers' festivals perform a different function in Australia - more face-to-face networking is necessary because of the distances between urban centres. What will happen as our creative writing programs mature is still open to conjecture. But it appears that in Australia, as more quality writing is discovered, readership of same actually increases (though usually in book form rather than in terms of mag subs). And the mags form a vital part of that process.
To summarise this ramble, a lot of it seems related to population size as well as cross-media issues.

[Jim L]

I love short stories and sometimes seek out the little magazines to read them. I also subscribe to the New Yorker and while it does publish fiction, a sizeable proportion of that fiction consists of novel excerpts from the latest publicity push. One can posit that these excerpts aren't being printed for their quality but as a scratch-your-back deal with agents/publishers/pr agents or whatever. By this arrangement, the New Yorker gets its share of the hip zeitgeist pie for the hot authors and hot books, and of course the authors receive the high profile of the New Yorker.

However, this arrangement is not ideal for us readers who would rather have well-crafted short stories than, let's face it, a cut from a book that by definition does not contain all it needs (i.e. the rest of the book) to be the work of art a short story can be. I wish the New Yorker could help solve the issues you and Mr. Russell are talking about, but it isn't going to.

As far as the MFA/publishing game, hey, as long as excellent short fiction is being written and their is a possibility that quality and not politics can lead to being published - then I applaud the little magazines for still being out there.

[Jacob Russell]

The "disappeared" readers I was thinking of were the ones that looked forward to stories in Look, Saturday Evening Post--many of the women's magazines--weeklys as well as monthlys: venues that actually paid the writers for their efforts.

Evidently they (or their children and grandchildren, are all watching TV now. My point there was that while the readers vanished, the writers multiplied, making room for this rather strange market to emerge.

I'll copy and save your essay, and look forward to reading it... as soon as I recover from my move.