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How I Research and Organize Literary Magazines

How a guy that’s been published once tries to get published again.

PART TWO

In part one I wrote about the vast and confusing literary magazine ecosphere. Poets & Writers lists over 1200 literary magazines that accept unsolicited submissions. Where to start? If you followed the first post, you’ve already read and digested the Pushcart Prize, and you’re hip to the best of the best. What about the rest? Once you’re fluent with the 50-odd magazines where every writer sends work, where to take it from there? Because unless you’re Karen Russell and your first publication is the New Yorker, you have make some kind of sense of the remaining 1150 venues, and it’s not BCCing three hundred editors with rich text pasted in the body of an email. 

Keep reading, and I’ll tell you where to find them, how to interpret them, and how to organize the venues. 

I. Where to Find Literary Magazines

There’s more than one way to skin this cat. The big list, as I’ve mentioned, is on Poets & Writers website. That’s all of them. However, they all have different submission periods, different themes, etcetera, making this tool as unwieldy as hanging a piece of drywall. 

Duotrope will allow you to narrow a search. The service is five dollars a month, and you’ll get stats on each market. How long they take to tender a rejection, how many users have been accepted and that percentage, and it will put “Temp Closed” in big, red letters, saving time. This is the best of the best of internet crowdsourcing. There’s also a helpful email list that goes out on Wednesdays with new and newly reopened markets. I use Duotrope regularly, but that’s no longer where I find venues. 

Sadly, Writer’s Market, imo, is obsolete. I remember a family member of mine, a poet, giving me a copy in high school. That was my first formal introduction to writing beyond 5-point essays and the Sylvia Plath facsimiles I wrote in honors English 10. There’s not much here that you can’t get from the internet. There’s something to be said for having all of the contests in one place from A-Z, instead of scattershot announcements via Twitter or email, but I’m not sure that’s worth 15 bucks. The articles at the beginning of the book are pre-internet, when writers had a tough time accessing career information. Pre-Writer’s Digest, honestly.

Where I find markets is Entropy’s “Where to Submit” list. This is what that looks like. The compiler of this list should never have to buy a drink at an event where writers are present. The list is bi-monthly, and divided into four sections: Presses, Chapbooks, Journals and Anthology, and Residencies, Fellowships, Conferences and Opportunities. The journals section has everything from “Zzzyzva” to “Wanton Fuckery.” (Don’t lie, you just threw that into Google). Like every other list, it’s overwhelming. But it’s monthly, and if the magazine accepts submissions in the second listed month of the title, that’s specified. Start with the A’s, then the Z’s, then the Ms, and you’ll be ahead of the game. I didn’t get them all from the August/September list, but I found five prime, previously unknown-to-me markets. 

The other source not be forgotten is “Calls for Submissions.” These are markets that explicitly need more work to read, so yeah, might want to keep up with those. Poets and Writers, The Review Review, and New Pages all list markets with open calls for submissions. Some are niche, many are not. 

II. How to Interpret a Magazine’s Work

We’ve found the market, how do we know what it likes? Simply, don’t send a sci-fi story to Ellery Queen, and all that. I don’t want to go there, that should be obvious by now. But I also don’t want to get into dense literary criticism, which I probably can’t pull off as-is. Though, I don’t think you have to.

Start with the submissions page, where you’ll get all the relevant info about formatting, submission window, SASE or not, fees. Often, there’s a mission statement. Maybe they only publish teenagers from Borneo? That’s something to know. The mission statement is something of a wish-list, but with 1000s of submissions, believe they can find it. Here’s a common one I just saw from TIMBER:

“We’re...interested in hybrid work that pushes against the limits of genre.” 

Okay. That makes sense. They’re more likely, if this were a novel, to publish Phillip Meyer or Benjamin Percy than Don Winslow or James Ellroy.

My next stop is the contributor’s notes. Magazines publish writers from one stage of their career, more often than not. I divide them like this:

a. Heavyweights - Names any writer would recognize like Stephen King, James Patterson, Joyce Carol Oates, Lauren Groff, Junot, TC Boyle, Jeffrey Eugenides. The upper-crust. The careers we would all love to have. 

b. Pros - Full Professors with a track record, or well-known names in the literary mag world like Stephen Dixon, Tea Obreht, Deb Olin-Unferth, or Steve Almond. 

c. Up and Comers - MFAs, adjunct professors, emerging writers with a few credits. I would say the literary magazine bear is stuffed with 70 percent of this class of writer.

d. New Writers - MFA students, writers with two or less publications. 

That’s not too hard, eh? If you read the submission guidelines, the mission statements, and get a feel for the writers, you’ve eliminated 3/5 venues. Keep in mind, this is after you’ve narrowed a macro-list. So we’re down to 2 of 10 venues. 

The last bit I’ll keep short and sweet: the aesthetic. There’s a long answer that I won’t get to here, and a short answer. If you have a PhD in English Literature, you can read the last three years of issues and find the needle in a haystack. 

Or...you can submit to the journals whose work you like. That’s it! Read two stories. Do you like what you read? Submit. Do you have a first person story about punk teenagers (like half of mine) and you’re looking at a journal like The Gettysburg Review that takes a very educated look to its subject matter, like Melville’s treatment of manual labor? Don’t. At the end of the slush pile, editors have about 50 stories that are worth publishing. From there, a theme emerges, and they pick their favorites. Don’t overthink it, but don’t send your work just anywhere. Often times, editors will just list their aesthetic preferences, like the Master’s Review love of “interiority.”

III. How to Organize Literary Magazines

Should all this info just go into a computer document with the title “mysubzyo,” or a desk drawer on pieces of scrap paper? Nope, but you can figure this one out. I keep an alphabetized box of index cards with the following categories written down on each:

Editors: Need to list the right editor for your cover letter. 

Length: Will be explicitly listed, but some favor long, some short. Online-only venues favor stories that are less than 2500 words, because that’s what our minds tolerate from the computer. 

Submissions: When, how, and how often.

Contributors: See above.

Story: Which story I liked the most, and why.

Thoughts: Three or four lines of editorial.

Front of the card: I list the name, the SASE address, and the mission statement comments. 

Top line of the back: Tier ranking, where they’re from, and how much, if any, cost to submit.

How does this all come together for me? My wife went out breakfast with her mother yesterday, and I decided to do some research, and submit.. I spend at least 2-3 Saturday mornings a month pounding the pavement, and more before the academic calendars open for submissions. 

I narrowed the Entropy list to three venues: The Hour After Happy Hour Review, Craft, and The Atticus Review. I looked at their websites, and they were high-quality. I dove deeper and found:

-The Hour After Happy Hour Review was a great fit. Their mission statement included “a subject few have thought of” and “quirky.” I have a story I’m trying to place about rehab kids working in a South Florida call center which matches up nicely. I read two of their stories that matched this aesthetic, and I didn’t feel embarrassed to put my work next to.

-The Atticus Review was a good aesthetic fit for the same story, but has the edict that all stories need to be single-spaced. That’s ok. But I already have documents with and without contact info, and documents in PDF, .doc, and .docx. That’s not even digressing into what I have to do to compile these formats in Scrivener. I’m not willing to spend 10 minutes reformatting after spending hours before my story was ready. This isn’t a knock against their policy, but just as editors can be arbitrary and dislike certain flubs or themes, I can do the same. So there.

-Craft is a new concept from the Master’s Review. Like the title suggests, they focus on the craft of writing. The stories were good, but after looking at their contributors notes, I saw a lot of reprints and only writers out of my weight class. Which makes sense. Each story is concluded with an author’s writerly note on a craft element, and this isn’t 101. There were no emerging writers, of which the Master’s Review specializes. This market was not a fit, and while I’ll read their stuff (instead of the red-meat, high calorie political journalism that’s taken deep ro(o)t on social media), I won’t waste my time or their with a submission.

Hope this was a help. If anybody wants to compare notes, they can email me at lovett.nicholas@outlook.com or @lovettfiction

[nicholaslovett-blog]

“The Way that Water Enters Stone” by John Dufresne

Short-story reviews always have spoilers.

“The Way that Water Enters Stone” is the eponymous short story of John Dufrense’s first collection, centering around a terminally confused, middle-aged man separated from his wife. The story begins in the bed of the narrator Robert, located on the fourth floor of a sleazy flophouse “upstairs from Thelma’s Cut and Curl.”

Robert is “looking for more wisdom that [I] went to bed with to get [me] up.” We learn that he’s separated from his wife for the third and, what he feels could be, final time. He’s a middle-school teacher, and his wife at the time of their marriage is a college student that “launches into enthusiams” and is “hoping she’ll find the life she’s good at.” The early backstory concludes with Robert thinking of the first time she left him in 1976, where she took up with her college professor and he “stayed in bed for three days.”

The present action of the story begins with a knock on his door, and it’s Robert’s “moderately retarded” neighbor Martin looking for his pregnant wife, who’s run off for the third time in five weeks. That begins what I know to be of John Dufresne’s writing, which is to say, weird, wonderful worlds. He’s influenced by the Southern Gothic school of writing, and has a lot of “Catholic” themes, along with its attendant visual symbols, and to me, he’s in the same literary neighborhood as Flannery O’Connor, Andres Dubus, and Richard Russo.

There are ten line breaks in the story, and this isn’t a traditional, linear narrative, but a modular narrative that bobs and weaves present action through backstory, daydreams, and memories. The narrative of Robert and his Wife is organized around the three times she left him. Twice for other men, and a third time after a fight about his not “knowing what love is.” The other follows Robert’s attempts to help the “moderately retarded” couple in their trials and tribulations.

His wife isn’t a sympathetic character; she’s without purpose or motive, flitting through “soul searching” type vocations like protesting a nuclear reactor, natural remedies and new age medicine, and even playing the dulcimer in a folk band. I couldn’t help but feel her lack of respect, calcified in the story by Robert’s silent admission to her statement “you don’t love me, you love being married.” 

The troubled couple, after their second separation, talk about buying a house in the country, and that fantasy sustains them until she decides she wants to be a midwife, and will need to go to school, postponing the home sale-which Robert readily agrees to! She retreats to the kitchen after a burst of anger and leaves him for the final time in the story. He responds by flunking all of his students, regardless of performance, until he fails a psychiatric evaluation and gets fired. He buys a cab and moves into the Royal Hotel, reflecting:

You know, the thing that drives me crazy is that I had it all one time--wife, oak furniture, a white Persian cat, a job turning into a career, families over to dinner, color television, a list of errands taped to the fridge, a bartender at the neighborhood pub who knew my first name and usual drink. I was normal. And now what? I like in this musty hotel along, with an uncertain future and a past that seeps into everything I do like water into stone.

John Dufresne pulls off a very complicated narrative. There’s enough of the two threads to write two stories, but the story never feels bloated. I’ll leave the second to the reader. The outcome of a “moderately retarded” couple having a baby is predictable, but the subplot speaks more to the state of the narrator and what kind of man he is than a connect the dots, ABC, three-act production. 

In the final pages, the narrator--who is only twice mentioned by name in the story--drives aimlessly in his cab, and we learn his wife has finally filed for divorce. He speculates what will happen if he calls her, but it’s clear his heart isn’t in it, and he’s finally ready to move on with his life. 

[nicholaslovett-blog]

How I Learned to Research Literary Magazines

Where a guy that’s been published once dispenses advice.

Part One: 

Like most younger writers looking to be published, it came to me as a semi-shock that I would actually have to read the magazines. Of course, before I started submitting, I read literary magazines. I read The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. The problem? So does everybody else. (If you don’t read at least one literary magazine from time to time but submit, what’s wrong with you?) But I’m telling you, even though in theory a strong piece will be published either way, you’re wasting your time if you don’t read an issue before sending your work. Do you really think someone like Joyce Carol Oates, the most published writer in literary magazines this side of John Updike, sends out her work scatter-shot, or do you think she reads and keeps up with dozens of venues regularly?

So how do I try to find a home for my mediocre work? When you get rejected as much as I do, you’re always on the hunt for new venues. There are five billionty fiction markets, and if you’re behooved, you can create one yourself. There are sites that aggregate lists that I use now like Entropy, but I think the best place to start is the Pushcart Prize anthology. (Forget that wonderful list on the internet, read the damn thing). I find that “The Best American Stories” anthology gravitates towards commercial markets like The New Yorker or Harper’s. The Pushcart Prize is “the best of the small presses.” Truthfully, I haven’t read much of The O Henry Prize Stories because I already read two short fiction anthologies yearly. 

Let’s take a quick look at the 2016 volume, and see whom they’re publishing:

Zadie Smith - “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets”

Edward McPherson - “Telref”

Wendell Berry - “The Branch Way of Doing”

Colum McCann - “Sh’khol”

I won’t go through the entire list of short stories, but that’s just the first 100 pages of a 600 page anthology. The Pushcart Prize is a “who’s who.” It’s what’s happening in fiction. The stories are penned by two rising stars, and two crusty veterans that in music we used to say “played everywhere with everybody.”

Here’s where those stories were published:

The Paris Review

The Gettysburg Review

The Three Penny Review

Zoetrope: All Story

There are four venues, and we’re only 1/6th through the anthology. Are these the best place to start? I would say so, though according to Duotrope’s crowd sourced data, they accept between 1-3% of all submissions. A lot of these magazines solicit work from famous writers, and only publish 4-6 pieces an issue. So why read them? First of all...it’s great fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. I always have a literary magazine on my person or my side table, and at the rate they publish, a story a day will make a serious dent in the short fiction ecosystem. You’ll be entertained, and you’ll notice trends in the way modern fiction is being written, if you usually read Edgar Allen Poe or Sherwood Anderson.

But, you want to read these great publications to learn hecate from hecuba, shit from shinola. What passes for great writing in 2017, and what passes for a great writing publication. Read the Editor’s Note, and come away with an impression. 

Have they done anything interesting with their publishing medium? Design? Like ten other magazines, is their cover an oil painting of flowers? Cool photography? Do they have a unique feature like Carve Magazine’s Decline/Accept? If they’re online, is the format cheesy? Did it just start yesterday? Or are they creative, like Cleaver and include radio plays? Do the contributors read their stories or the work of others like The Tahoma Review or The New Yorker? Do they offer a writer’s regimen like The Southeast Review or assorted schoolin’? There’s no reason an online publication has to be worse than print, and heavyweights like Conjuctions, and The Collagist have been mostly, or all digital for years. 

So once you’ve learned the lay of the land, how do you find worthwhile venues where your work has a chance? The impulse, after The Paris Review sends a rejection on a mimeographed paper the size of a postage stamp, is to race to the bottom and forget the venues that you need, and need you the most.

In Part Two, I’ll detail how to use aggregate lists to find markets, and how to make sense of and organize your research from those publications.

[nicholaslovett-blog]

“The Intruders” by Andre Dubus

Reviews of short-stories always have spoilers.

Andre Dubus was a hero of the short-story, and in 1996, he published his first collection in ten years. “Dancing After Hours” received rave reviews, and was hardly an envoi to an iconic career, publishing some of his finest stories in the same stratosphere of “Killings,” “The Fat Girl” and “Voices from the Moon.” The collection begins with “The Intruder,” a story about a collision of fantasy and violence.

The story is set in the Summer camp of a nuclear family from Louisiana. The narrator is an adolescent boy named Kenneth with a sister named Connie in high school. Their parents, bit players in the story, fry up fish and head to a friend’s house, leaving Connie to watch Kenneth and “go to sleep at a reasonable hour...to get you up for Mass.” Connie invites over her boyfriend, a static character that plays football. 

Andres Dubus paints the appearance of characters with brushstrokes light and quick, and ones that don’t disturb the narration of the story. You can picture each semi-colon as a scrape on the painter’s palate.

“She was nearly 17; her skin was fair, her cheeks colored, and she had long black hair that came down to her shoulders; on the right side of her face, a wave of it reached the corner of her eye.”

“His skin was fair, as Connie’s was, and he had color in his cheeks; but his hair, carefully parted and combed, was more brown than black.”

Kenneth is characterized as a daydreamer caught in the fantasies and insecurities of adolescence. He doesn’t play sports, but is a crack shot with a rifle and at his schoolwork which he “considered [that] a curse.” He steals away from the camp house in the opening scene, telling his parents he’s going on a walk, and it’s said he does this every day, taking off to the words to dream he is an outfielder with the bases loaded and two outs, or a soldier in the throes and glories of battle. 

When the boyfriend comes over, he retreats with his just-cleaned rifle to the sun porch where his family has a TV. He watches a Western, and then a Detective Program, until his sister tries to put him to bed. The dialogue is terse and laconic (though perhaps simplified due to the ages of the characters) and he refuses.

“When that’s over, you better go to bed.”

‘I’m not sleepy.”

“You know what Mother said.”

“You’re staying up.”

Soon after, Kenneth sees Connie and her boyfriend whispering on the porch, and noticing him, the boyfriend waves good-bye. Connie announces she’s going to bed, and Kenneth stays up to watch the late show, “Red River,” a Western cattle-drive starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. 

Finally in bed, Kenneth hears a crackling of leaves, and sees a prowler. Dubus owes a debt to Hemingway, not just for the dialogue but for the cinematic quality of the action when the inevitable happens:

“A scream filled the house, the yard, his mind, and he thought at first it was the prowler, who was lying on the ground now, but it was a high, shrieking scream; it was Connie...”

Was it the boyfriend? After the climactic shooting and body bag, the father enters to the room:

“His father came into the room, carrying a glass of water, and sat on the bed.

‘Take this,’ he said. ‘It’ll make you sleep.’

...’I thought it was a prowler,’ he said.

‘It was, son. A prowler. We’ve told you that.’ ”

The final daydream passes before the drugged boy, who resolves to throw his rifle in the creek, “throwing all the gun and cruelty and sex and tears into the sea.” 

If not for this final passage, I wouldn’t view the story as an anti-gun lesson in the way I wouldn’t view “Blessings” three stories ahead as an anti-boating lesson. The boy has two daydreams about being a soldier, and one mirrors the climactic scene, set in an identical house across from his street, in which he barges through a door and knifes a guard and shoots an enemy General.

But more so than the lesson, this is a masterful short story, with just enough setting and character development, and a plot that pushes forward with meaningful and useful asides. I can imagine reading this in 1996 and thinking “the short-story is back.” Then to have “Independence Day” by Richard Ford come along in the same year, and it’s tough to imagine I would be able to keep employment. 

[nicholaslovett-blog]

Greg Wyshynski Leaves Puck Daddy

Earlier this afternoon, Greg Wyshynski, the long-time Editor for the Yahoo hockey blog Puck Daddy, stepped down after 9 years. He wrote an opaque post on the blog explaining his exit as the pursuit of “new challenges” and characterized the letter as “really, really weird to write.”

I started reading Puck Daddy in 2010, when there were not many hockey blogs, which started during the 2004-2005 lockout. Bloggers such as Lyle Richardson and the maligned Eklund stepped up to fill a void in coverage they felt was favorable to the owners and offered no valuable source reporting. 

Greg Wyshynski worked for a newspaper and AOL.com covering sports before he took over Puck Daddy, which grew to add more writers such as Sean Leahy and Harrison Mooney. Weekly features such as “Jersey Fouls” documenting fan-made jerseys (and FrankenJerseys) and “What We Learned” differed from newspapers offering traditional beat coverage of post and pre-game write-ups. Justin Bourne had a revolving blog/narrative cataloging his experiences as a minor league player, which had mixed reviews. Wysh made a regular appearance in the comment sections, breaking down a “fourth wall” that kept the morons in check, and made him an accessible figure in a sport populated with pseudo-stars like PJ Stock.

The line in the letter that raised my eyebrows was:

“I’ve always said that it didn’t matter if you loved reading us or hate-read us, as long as you found it interesting to read us. “

Puck Daddy under Wyshynski was the best and the worst of the hockey blogosphere, driving a trail both legitimate and troll-y. The editorializing of Ryan Lambert was out of control and seemingly without overview. One of the writers was canned for harassing women over Twitter. They dipped their toes in analytics and trendy social issues without fully jumping on the bandwagon. 

Before Twitter grew to add every hockey journalist, Puck Daddy was a place for breaking news. After that, I think the coverage went from comprehensive to scatter-brained. Over the years, it lost steam. Writers came and went. 

I can’t help but think Greg Wyshynski is headed for a subscription site like The Athletic. He would do well in a beat role for his favorite team, the New Jersey Devils. The subscription sites are taking off and drawing writers from traditional newspapers and other outlets. Fans are paying a few dollars a month to read them, and my newsfeed on Twitter has evolved to half free sites and half subscriptions sites. The model seems to have failed for ESPN insider, but if it’s all the writers? Maybe. 

We wysh Greg the best.