The BlazeVOX kerfuffle (if it is indeed a kerfuffle) has made me—as it has many others—wonder about the state of and the future of literary publishing. Poets and writers around the web have attacked and defended the press’s new practice of asking nicely/insisting that poets help to cover the cost of publishing that poet’s book. As the advisory editor of a small undergraduate journal, I find myself in many ways nodding in agreement with BlazeVOX’s position. However, as a poet and writer who is currently shopping his own manuscript, I find myself gritting my teeth and mumbling under my breath.
The fine folks at Finishing Line Press published my chapbook, A Visible Sign, a couple of years ago. As a part of the publication deal, I agreed to help Finishing Line drum up a certain number of presales. The press run of my chap was based on the number of presales. Of all literary ventures, chapbooks are most certainly a labor of love. I understood Finishing Line’s position on the presales. While many of my friends and family were supportive, a few writers and editors that I knew asked me why I chose to publish with a vanity press. I didn’t think of Finishing Line as a vanity press (and I still don’t). I helped fund the printing of my book by selling copies of it before it was printed. Thus, I contributed to its publication cost. Nonetheless, I didn’t think of my part as “paying out of my own pocket.” I thought that I was helping a wonderful literary press bring my work to a reading public. I saw myself as promoting literary publishing as much as I was selling my own book. As an author, I had a stake in my own publication. The BlazeVOX decision, however, has less to do with literary publishing than it has to do with publishing at large. The truth is that the printed book is now having to compete with the electronic book. No longer mere novelties, electronic books are cheaper to produce and thus cheaper to sell. I own a Kindle, myself, and I’ve read a lot of novels on it (no poetry as of yet, though I’m not sure why). Like vinyl, printed books are quickly becoming the purview of collectors and specialists. I’m not going to prophesy the death of print (so many others already have), but I will say that in order to survive, printed books have to become more than merely a receptacle for words. Instead, the printed book itself is going to have to become a work of art. Certainly, the book has a long history as an artifact. Illuminated manuscripts are merely one example. Handmade books in small press runs have been a part of publishing since before Gutenberg, and I believe that the small pressrun/handmade book might be one way that a publisher can distinguish its books and create a market for such books. I’m impressed with Slash Pine Press, a publisher of small, limited-run handmade chapbooks. Their work makes the book itself as valuable as the text contained within. Their publications are more than a ink printed on a page. Their books are works of art. They design and create books that give value to the printed word in a way that a mass-produced book simply is incapable of doing. I don’t want to give the impression that I hate large presses or despise large press runs. I’d love for my manuscript to picked up by a major press. I’d love to have a couple of printings of my books. However, I also think that as we move further into the 21st century, literary publishers are going to continue to face funding problems. Capitalistic supply/demand economics isn’t kind to literary publishing because American popular culture doesn’t value the very things that literary publishing champions: individuality, hard-won positions, questions, and writing that challenges more often than it entertains. Ultimately, I close not knowing how exactly I feel about BlazeVOX. My sympathies are with any literary publisher. I don’t think that BlazeVOX is trying to take advantage of its authors. The press is doing what it can to stay afloat in a tough economy. I do sympathize, though, with those struggling writers trying to cobble together a life out of words. I understand the outrage when a poet finds that she must help fund the publication of her own book while so many seem to navigate the strange waters of literary publishing with ease. Perhaps instead of attacking BlazeVOX, however, writers and those invested in literary publishing might turn the lens back on themselves. If we’re not willing to support our art, who will? _____________________ 1 I think that the term “vanity press” is loaded ideologically, and I shy away from it, but I use it here to make a point.
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The first time I ever went to a poetry reading was on campus when I was an undergraduate student at the University of West Florida. I don’t remember the particulars of the night. I do, however, remember being impressed and cowed by the writers I met that night. They got behind the mic with a confidence that eluded me. They read their work with practiced authority. They became their words.
I’d heard of open-mic readings before that first one I attended, of course. I associated open-mics with hippies and goatees, berets and espresso, vaguely European snobbishness and angst. When I finally read my work at a reading, I donned an over-sized denim shirt (an unsuccessful attempt to hide my girth) and a pageboy cap, a hat I donned because of my love for Stevie Ray Vaughan, who wore one (when he wasn’t wearing his trademark fedora). Reading a chapter of a novel-in-progress, I tried not to let my nerves show, despite the reticence I felt. My insides shook, but somehow, my voice stayed steady. Afterward, several of my friends and professors congratulated me on the strength of my work. I was quietly elated by their compliments. Saying nice things about a peer’s work is one thing during workshop, a classroom method that by then I was getting used to. This was outside of the classroom. This rug had been ripped away: no classroom niceties, just me, the mic, and a crowd that could have booed me off the stage. Since that night, I’ve read at countless open mics and benefits, sometimes headlining, usually playing second fiddle to a better, more well-known writer. And since that night, I’ve heard and read all kinds of dismissive commentary about open mic nights. The work is awful, some complain. The writers suck, others say. Open mic nights are magnets for creepy old guys who want to read their racy work to a captive audience. Open mic nights are forums for wanna-bes, poetasters whose work will no other audience. No doubt, some of these things are true. It would be dishonest for me to say that all the work I’ve heard at open mic nights is good. A lot of it is awful. I’ve seen some young poets stagger up behind the mic and slur out, “I just wrote this on a napkin” before reading some god-awful piece of pseudo-poetry. Just as often, however, I’ve seen writers blossom during open mic nights. I’ve seen my own students, shy about their work in class, suddenly become another person as they read their work. I’ve seen the boost that their peers’ confidence gives them. The literary magazine I advise, Pegasus, stages monthly open-mics on the campus of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. These events have grown in popularity over the past semester. The house was packed at the August open mic, and I was thoroughly impressed with the literary community at the small state college that pays my bills. Not all the work was high quality, of course. Very little of what I heard was publishable quality. And I don’t think that’s the point. Instead, at least for me, an open mic gives writers the opportunity to engage with a community of those who value what they value. Let’s face it: writing is a lonely business. The writer sits at a keyboard (or with pencil or pen in hand) and stares at a white page, wrangles with language, seeks the perfect combination of words, and endures all of this alone. What impressed me about my first open mic reading so many years ago back at UWF is what impressed me about our modest readings here at ABAC: the community of writers and artists, all who come together in the name of art. For many beginning writers, just knowing that they’re not alone in their struggle is more of a gift than they ever realized. Even for a veteran open-mic denizen like me, I still enjoy standing behind the mic and reading to a crowd who came not to see me, but to hear another writer's words. Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College’s literary magazine, Pegasus,is now open for submissions to the 2012 issue of the magazine. If you’re a high school or college student currently enrolled in a Georgia high school, college, or university, then Pegasus wants your work. Please visit http://www.abac.edu/pegasus/submit.htm for full guidelines.
Many young writers are new to the submission process and are often unaware of the various ground rules and unspoken expectations that go along with submitting to literary magazines. Below, I’ve listed out a few of these conventions for newbie writers who might need this kind of information. Veteran writers: please correct or add to these suggestions in the comments below. Formatting your submission: For poetry submissions, put only one poem on a page. Typographically, space out your poem exactly as you would like to see it in print (don’t double-space unless you mean it). If your poem is longer than a page, use brackets to note stanza breaks (or lack thereof). Use a standard 12-point font (no Comic Sans). Be certain that your contact information appears on each page of poetry. For prose submissions, double space everything. Be certain that you include your contact information on the first page. Number your pages. For art submissions, we at Pegasus require high-quality .jpeg or .gif files (300 dpi). This means that you can't send us a picture that you took with your cell phone camera. Visual and plastic artists: send us high-quality digital photographs of your work. Cover letters: In the publishing world, some editors like cover letters and some don’t. To be safe, I always include a cover letter with all submissions. At Pegasus, we like cover letters because we want to know a bit about the writers we’re publishing—a cover letter is an easy way to see if a potential author is eligible for publication in our journal. Cover letters shouldn’t be overly-long. Something simple is much better than a long list of everything you’ve ever done. You might write something like: Dear Pegasus Editors, Per your submission guidelines, I’ve uploaded my story “Bat’s Belfry” to Submishmash as a submission to Pegasus. Currently, I’m a sophomore English major at Georgia Southern University. I hope to one day be a high school English teacher. Last year, the literary magazine Jump It published my poem “Robin’s Egg.” Thank you for reading my work. I look forward to hearing back from you. Best regards, Bob Studentwriter Short, sweet, respectful, and to-the-point: a good example what we at Pegasus expect in a cover letter. Submitters can feel free to address the cover letter to Matt McCullough, the current managing editor, or to me, Jeff Newberry, faculty advisor and advisory editor. Note: some literary magazines want you to write your bio in third person; others don’t specify. If you’re really confused about how to write one, take a look at some contributors’ notes online. Mimic what you see there. Response time: Pegasus is a yearly publication. We publish each spring to coincide with Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College’s annual celebration of the arts and humanities. Although submissions open in August of each year, we don’t make any decisions until January, usually. This means that once you’ve submitted your work, you may not hear back from us for a pretty good while. Don’t worry; we’ve not lost your submission. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Some pieces we accept very quickly; with others, the decision can take a bit of time. Writers should resist the temptation to email any editor about the status of a submission unless four-six months have passed with no contact from the magazine. Asking about the status of a submission isn’t necessarily wrong (though some journals expressly ask writers not to contact the editor until a certain amount of time has passed). Rather, emailing the editor might result in a quick rejection. The editor might think, “Well, we were on the fence about this submission, but clearly the writer has had some luck placing it elsewhere.” And please, don’t call to ask about your submission. Simultaneous submissions: As a writer, I rarely send to a place that doesn’t accept simultaneous submissions, a term that means the journal allows writers to submit the same manuscript to them that the writer has sent to others. This way, the writer has to contact all the other journals to withdraw the manuscript, should it be accepted. Because Pegasus uses Submishmash, we have no rule against simultaneous submissions. Writes just need to log in to their account and withdraw any manuscript accepted elsewhere. Read the submission guidelines: By this I mean, read the submission guidelines to any journal to which you’re submitting. Treat the guidelines like Gospel truth. I hope these tips help clear up a few things for the newbie writer hoping to place her manuscript with a journal. These suggestions aren’t meant to scare away potential authors. Understand that editors want to read your work. However, as a young writer first starting out, I had no idea how to submit. I’m merely trying to make explicity what so many editors and writers assume is common knowledge. Please, send your work to Pegasus. And please, spread the word to other writers. We’d love to read your writing. Visit http://www.abac.edu/pegasus for more information. I first read Philip Levine’s poetry in a creative writing workshop I took as a community college student in the fall of 1992. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to write a generation-defining book, something like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I had no idea how to write poetry, and I cared little for it. In the creative writing class, we had to write poems, and my first effort is laughably forgettable. I don’t have a copy of the piece (thank God), but I do remember that it was about a rainstorm caused by Odin working at his forge (I don’t think Odin even has a forge). I had a vague idea that poetry was supposed to be about big, epic things like gods and storms and mythology.
My teacher, Lynn Wallace (a Gulf Coast writer whose work I still admire) passed out copy of Philip Levine’s “What Work Is” one night in class. I didn’t know anything about Levine, and I had no real idea about how to respond to poetry. Growing up in the bayous of North Florida, I didn’t read much poetry, save what was taught in school: Beowulf, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the occasional piece by Poe. We read the poem aloud, talked about it, a bit, and moved on. I spent the next few years in college, trying to learn how to write and trying to write a novel. I encountered Levine’s poetry again in graduate school. I’d taken a few poetry workshops along the way, and I had begun to think of myself as a poet. I was drawn to the Beats, to Arthur Rimbaud, to T.S. Eliot, and a host of other writers whose work I considered “nonconformist” (a word I treated like a mantra back then). My graduate thesis was going to be a book of poems, but I didn’t read a lot of contemporary poetry. My thesis adviser, Laurie O’Brien, regularly berated me for my lack of knowledge about contemporary poetry, telling me rightly that if I didn’t read any contemporary poetry, I didn’t have a heck of a lot business writing it. How could I expect readers if I didn’t read anyone else’s work? So, one night, while my then-girlfriend and now wife, Heather, were browsing at the Pensacola Barnes and Noble, I picked up a copy of Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems, a book I took from the shelf only because I remembered Lynn Wallace’s workshop. I distinctly remember being simultaneously entranced and excited by Levine’s work. It wasn’t his diction (a plain-spoken line I’d never seen) nor his images (beautifully drawn and accurate) that drew me in. Instead, I was taken with his subject matter: working-class people in the factories of Detroit, where Levine came of age and later worked. The realization that I could write about my life, too, now seems facile. Of course poets write about their lives. But I’d never encountered a poetry so honest about defeat and regret. Only later did I read Whitman and discover where Levine drew his epigraphy for “Silent in America”: “Vivas for those who have failed.” I’d never written a poem about bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, where I worked throughout high school. I’d never written about unloading a produce truck at 6:00 a.m., the work I did in junior college. I’d never written about working the midnight shift at a coastal convenience store. I’d never written about flipping burgers at Hardee’s (my first job). In a very real way, Philip Levine’s poetry gave me permission to write about those things. Gone were my Beatnik fantasies. I didn’t need to live some life on the road to write poems. I had a life worthy of poetry. Or, in another way, maybe I began to write poetry that made me see that life as worthy. I began writing poems that imitated his plain-spoke, narrative style. I tracked down most of his books, going so far as to order copies from Subterranean Books, a local Pensacola used book store. I even wrote Levine a letter and enclosed some of my own work. Graciously, he responded and gave me some advice about my writing. He invited me to write back, and I regret that I never did. I was too much in awe of my poetic idol; I didn’t know what I’d say. But, now, I continue to write poems filled with the images of my coming-of-age on Florida’s Gulf Coast: the dead-end mill towns, the shrimp trawlers, the limestone church parking lots, the boys with mosquito bites scarring their legs, the gray-faced men and women who pull 12-hours shifts working demeaning jobs. All of these images are now politically-charged, but when I first began writing these poems, I wasn’t trying to make any statements about the working class. I merely wanted to explore what I knew. I discovered that what I thought I knew opened the door to the unknown, a lyrical terrain that still sustains me. All of which is to say I couldn’t be more happy that Philip Levine has been named our nation’s poet laureate. His is a gritty, honest poetry, accessible and true-to-life, all traits that has caused some to dismiss him. Others like me, however, find a home in Levine’s work. His voice is the voice of my father, telling me that it’s time to get up and go throw papers at 1:00 a.m.; his voice is the paper mill whistle sounding at 11:00 p.m.; his voices is the south breeze off the Gulf of Mexico, a salted wind that cuts and soothes. The first time I set foot into a Borders store was in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1997. My roommates and I had made the crazy decision to drive to New York City for Spring Break. Since we were all undergraduates at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, that meant we’d be in the car for a little over 20 hours. These were the days before Google Maps or Mapquest, so we were armed only with the overconfidence of youth and a road atlas. We crashed on couches up and down the east coast on our sojourn. We’d stopped in D.C. to visit a friend who was attending Georgetown.
To me, then, Borders was a Mecca containing everything I valued in life: good books, good music, and good coffee. I distinctly remember wandering the aisles, dumbstruck at the sheer number of books. I’d been in only one big-box bookstore, a ratty Booksamillion on Davis Highway in Pensacola. Borders trumped Booksamillion by far. When I found the poetry section in Borders, I nearly fell to my knees. I’d never seen so many volumes of poetry for sale in one place. I think I purchased a copy of Jim Morrison’s The Lords and the New Creatures, a choice that reveals a lot about me back then—and a choice that, frankly, I’d like to forget. Morrison is a terrible poet, but I’m not writing about him. Rather, I’m interested how Borders filled a niche for me—and maybe it filled a niche for the readers in our country back then. It’s hard for me to imagine a time before Amazon and Powell’s and AbeBooks, but in college, I didn’t have access to these websites. No one else did, either. Visiting a Borders was visiting a place that shared your obsessions. You could meet fellow readers, talk about books in the coffee café, or pick up the latest album. What Borders offered me then seems quaint and old-fashioned now. I can sit down in front of my computer, and with a few keystrokes, I can have coffee beans delivered, order a used copy of a book, and download an entire album’s worth of MP3s. With this kind of at-your-fingertips convenience, Borders seems like a hindrance rather than a convenience. Small wonder, then, that despite a valiant attempt to stay relevant, Borders closed its doors permanently in July of 2011. The question is why. Why did Borders close? Poor business practice? A failure to fully engage the e-book market? Perhaps it’s all of these reasons—or some combination thereof. However, I think there’s a bigger issue at play. We live in the customizable culture. Everything we want is not only right at our fingertips, but also completely customizable to our tastes. Online, you can create playlists, order custom coffee beans, print your own book, and order custom skins for your laptop or cell phone. You can even order customized jeans and Converse shoes. The customizable culture elevates individual expression to capitalistic commodity. You are what you buy. And maybe that’s always been the case, even when bookstores like Borders didn’t seem like relics, the shopping malls we once roamed. But roaming through a bookstore, glancing down at the rows and rows of titles, and soaking up the atmosphere of coffee and bookbinding glue reminds me that while I love the convenience of shopping online, I miss the adventure of browsing in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. For me, shopping at Amazon or Powell’s or any other online book merchant inverts the book shopping paradigm: when I go online, I discover books; when I shop in a bookstore, books discover me. Online, I type in a title or an author and I get a list of what’s available. I’ll also get a list of recommendations, based on my choice. However, shopping in a bookstore, I wander row to row, each aisle opening up endless possibility with each outward-facing spine. Am I being a little Romantic about this? Most certainly. I have some serious reservations about the way that big-box bookstores ran small, independent bookstores out of business. I’m also bothered by the way that big-box bookstores summarily ignored small, independent publishers. Big-box bookstores in many ways turned art (writing) into commodity. Maybe big-box bookstores are a part of the customizable culture, too. However, at the same time, I mourn the loss of any bookstore, small or large. And I miss the wonder I had that first time I visited a Borders in Washington, D.C., when I walked the aisles, mystified by all the possibilities. It's that time of year in south Georgia: hot, sticky, and uncomfortable. Whether you're headed to the beach or turning the air conditioning down and staying indoors, summer is a great time to catch up on some reading. Many websites are offering lists of summer reading, too, so recommendations are everywhere. Of course, I have my own ideas (as do you--drop me a comment with your own suggestions).
In no particular order (they're all excellent), here are my Top Ten Summer Reads: S.J. Watson, Before I Go To Sleep (Harper, 368 pages) Novelist Dennis Lehane (Mystic River and Shutter Island) describes Watson’s debut novel as “Memento on crystal meth.” Featuring a first-person narrator who can’t make new memories, Before I Go To Sleep is a genuine page turner, the kind of novel that will have you saying, “I’ll go to sleep after one more chapter” over and over again. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harvest Books, 191 pages) Hamid’s 2008 novel could be described as a number of things: an allegory, a cautionary tale, or a love story to a bygone era. Whatever you call it, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is both accessible and challenging. Ostensibly the story of a young immigrant’s education in America, the novel explores the devastating global and personal after-effects of 9/11. The book is worth reading, given that we are approaching the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 this September. D.B. Grady, Red Planet Noir (Brown Street Press, 216 pages) Grady’s debut novel is simultaneously a homage to hard boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as well as science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. The story of a private eye investigating the death of a prominent military official on Mars, Red Planet Noir is a page-turner that asks some very tough questions about the government, the military, the police, unions, and the sometimes uncomfortable alliances among these strange bedfellows. Lisa Turner, A Little Death in Dixie (Bell Bridge Books, 298 pages) In Turner’s debut novel, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, is as much a character as Billy Able, a detective with the city’s police department. Able’s investigation into the disappearance of a young debutante uncovers all sorts of nastiness that the upper crust of southern society would like brushed back under the rug. Turner’s prose is crisp and kinetic. A character-driven story that also has a plot, A Little Death in Dixie is a book for fans of thrillers as well as southern literature. James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues (Avon Books, 384 pages) The third in Burke’s hugely-successful sequence of novels featuring Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, Black Cherry Blues shows what Burke does best. As a writer, he rests one foot firmly in genre fiction, the other firmly in character-driven literary fiction. The first-person narrative allows Burke to explore Robicheaux’s flawed psyche, yet it doesn’t distract from the novel’s tightly-woven plot. Readers who’ve not read the first two books in the series shouldn’t worry. Burke’s prose allows you to jump right in—no previous reading experience required. Victor Gischler, The Deputy (Tyrus Books, 256 pages) Gischler’s fifth novel, The Deputy explores some familiar terrain for the Edgar Award nominee, whose previous works include Gun Monkeys, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and The Pistol Poets. What starts as a simple assignment for small-town Oklahoma deputy Toby Keith (keep an eye on a dead body until the county medical examiner arrives) turns into an action-packed thrill-fest that delivers, page after page. As always, Gischler’s prose is tight and economical, a trait that keeps the book moving a mile a minute. Anthony Neil Smith, Yellow Medicine (Bleak House Books, 256 pages) Founding editor of the online noir literary magazine Plots with Guns (http://www.plotswithguns.com), Smith knows the terrain of crime fiction very well and Yellow Medicine demonstrates his mastery of the form. The story of anti-hero Billy Lafitte, an exiled deputy from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who’s now a deputy in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota, Yellow Medicine begins innocently enough. The bassist of a local pscho-billy band called Elvis Antichrist asks Billy to look into the disappearance of her boyfriend. The novel quickly becomes an action-packed romp featuring corrupt cops, backwoods meth dealers, and Malaysian terrorists. A page-turner that has all the action of a big-budget Hollywood production, Yellow Medicine kicks the tires and lights the fires on the very first page and hurtles toward its conclusion with gasoline-soaked abandon. Michael Lister, Double Exposure (Tyrus Books, 240 pages) Florida panhandle native Lister explores his home terrain in Double Exposure, the story of photographer Remington James, who returns to the small north Florida town of Apalachicola following the death of his father. James is not only mourning the death of his father, but he’s also stinging from a recent break-up with his girlfriend. On an afternoon trip into the thick woods surrounding Franklin County, James stumbles into a murder plot. This set up coupled with the novel’s use of present tense allows Lister to build tension and urgency as the night deepens around James. Lister’s a fine writer with a Faulkner-esque interest in landscape and characters. Double Exposure delivers, page after tense page. Mary Jane Ryals, Cookie and Me (Kitsune Books, 330 pages) Poet Laureate of the Florida Big Bend and first-time novelist Ryals explores an interracial friendship in the turbulent late 1960s in Cookie and Me. A coming of age story about the friendship between the white and somewhat privileged Rayanne and the African-American and decidedly underprivileged Cookie, the novel demonstrates Ryals’ ear for regional speech. Her first-person voice is believable and endearing. Recalling such southern classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Cookie and Me explores the Civil Rights movement as it reaches Tallahassee, Florida. A beautifully-written novel, the book has the quiet power of classic. It’s not to be missed. Dear Contributor,
Thank you for your submission to Totally Awesome Journal. However, this work isn’t for us. Good luck with place it elsewhere. With regards, The Editors .... Rejection stings, but it’s a fact of life for writers. If you’re going to submit your work to journals, you’re going to have to get used to this fact: you’ll be rejected more than you’ll be published. There’s no easy way to deal with rejection, but seasoned writers know how to deal with rejections constructively. Rather than beating yourself up and wallowing in self pity or dismissing the journal editors as shortsighted idiots who’ll regret the day they let your manuscript slip away, consider the following suggestions. Send the work out again. I use this method often. If you’ve sent the work out already, then I assume that you feel confident about it. If after rejection you still feel confidence, send to another journal. Sometimes poems, essays, and short stories make many trips through cyberspace before they find a home. Sending out again also keeps your work in circulation, an added plus. Reread and revise. I can easily kill two or three hours preparing one submission. Once I begin to imagine an editor reading my work, I become hyper aware of every sentence or line break and every image and word. Naturally, I find myself rewriting certain lines or sentences or perhaps playing with paragraphing or line breaks. Reworking a rejected poem or piece of prose can be generative, too, and inspire you to write a new piece. Now, you’ve got a new and improved submission packet as well as a new writing project. Consider asking someone to read your work. Unless you’re enrolled in a writing program or active in a writer’s group, finding good feedback for your writing can be difficult. When one of my poems has been rejected four or five times (even after rounds of revision), I ask a trusted reader for some line-by-line feedback. Another set of eyes can help you see issues, weaknesses, and potential strengths in your work that you otherwise might not see. Resist the urge to beat yourself up. Rejection can be a number of things: the magazine’s publication roster was already filled; the editors had already accepted work very similar to yours; a careless reader may have scanned your piece too quickly; your poetry or prose might not fit into the theme of this particular issue. And sometimes, rejection means that your work isn’t ready for publication. However, rejection rarely if ever means that the editors think that you’re a talentless hack who should give up writing for food (though, admittedly, there are some submissions that make editors wonder . . .). Ultimately, you can treat rejection as a badge of honor. When I was the graduate student editor of the Panhandler, the University of West Florida’s literary magazine, I used to tape rejection slips to the wall in the Panhandler office. This way, I at least knew that I was sending out my work. Some writers even keep rejection slips, saving them in large boxes as the years go by. Of course, that practice was much easier when journals only accepted hard copy/snail mail submissions. Whatever the case may be, the worse thing that you can do is contact the editor, demanding to know why he or she didn’t print your work. Doing so is a great way to get blackballed from a journal and develop a bad reputation among journal editors1. Instead, understand that rejection is a part of a writer’s life and no reason to stop writing. Rather, rejection is reason to keep writing and sending your work out. __________________ 1 At the 2009 Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers annual conference a the University of South Alabama in Fairhope, I was in the audience of an editors' panel in which the panelists all discussed (without outright naming) one particular contributor who'd hounded each of the editor's journals. While it is summer, a number of literary magazines are actively seeking submissions: Sweet: A Literary Confection, Diode, Hobble Creek Review, and scores of others. The dedicated editors of those journals must read and respond to hundreds (sometimes thousands) of submissions of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. As the advisory editor of a regional literary magazine (and faculty advisor), I often forget that the etiquette of magazine submission isn’t something one knows intuitively. Of course, all editors have their quirks and pet peeves. With that fact in mind, I offer my own list of submission advice:
Read to the journal to which you are submitting. I know that this seems like no-nonsense advice, but I’m often surprised by how many submitters to Pegasus are unfamiliar with the journal. If the journal focuses on regional writers, and you’re outside the region, then don’t submit. If the journal publishes literary fiction, then don’t send them your detective story (try the fantastic Plots with Guns instead). If the journal publishes narrative poetry, and your work tends to be narrative; then don’t send. And don’t assume that you’ll be the exception. At Pegasus, we’ve gotten cover letters that begin, “Dear Editor, I know that you publish . . .” followed by a *but*. Bad idea. Read the submission guidelines. If the guidelines say that the journal doesn’t take hard copy, then don’t email to ask if you can send hard copy (it’s happened). If the guidelines say to use Submishmash, don’t email your submission. A writer once emailed me with an .RTF attachment and a note that said, “Sorry, I can’t figure out how to use the submission manager.” We didn’t print that writer’s work. Magazines have specific reasons for publishing guidelines. Follow them. Formatting matters. When you are preparing a submission, place no more than one poem on a printed page. Use a serif font like Times New Roman, and triple space between your title and your poem. If the poem is longer than a page, indicate in brackets whether or not the page break is also a stanza break. For prose submission, use a standard serif font, and double space your document unless the submission guidelines indicate otherwise. For prose, be sure to number your pages. For all submissions, be certain that your contact information is on the page, usually in a header or a footer. Cover letters. Unless the submission guidelines indicate otherwise, most editors expect a short cover letter with your submission. Some disagree, but I think that best cover letters are business-like and to the point. Simple is usually better. Don’t waste an editor’s time with a long summary of your story or a treatise on your poetics. Usually, cover letters include a short biographical statement. Some writers write these in third person, some in first. I’ve heard the argument that third person seems presumptuous, but as an editor, I like third person bios. That way, should we accept the piece, I can cut and paste it. Biographical statements should be short and list only your most recent publications. If you have no publications, then don’t list any. Try something like “Jane Doe is an undergraduate at Harvard University” or something along those lines. Don't be cute and don't waste an editor's time. Best bet: read a copy of the journal to which you’re submitting and mimic the biographical statements it publishes. Whatever the case may be, remember that the cover letter is not the submission. It should be professional, but not the thing an editor remembers—leave that to your writing. I could say much more about submitting, but I’ll end by saying that I think submitting your work is important, and doing it correctly matters. We at Pegasus would love to read it, but be sure to read our submission guidelines. In a future blog entry, I’m going to talk about constructive ways to handle rejection, a fact of a writer’s life. Until then, keep writing and keep sending out your work. Cathy Day, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice have a wonderfully thoughtful discussion about teaching creative writing over at Fiction Writers Review. From the article's introduction:
It’s time to get on with creative writing pedagogy. Can creative writing be taught? Yes, we’re not charlatans, though teaching looks different here than in other disciplines. Should college-level teachers of creative writing be practicing writers? Yes. Though being a great writer doesn’t make you a great teacher, creative writing teachers are strengthened by engaging in the practice themselves. What’s the relationship between creative writing and composition studies? While creative writing is not in opposition to composition studies, neither is it a variation of or sub-discipline within composition studies. Should we grade creative writing? If we are working in institutions that require grading, of course. There exist ways to approach the evaluation of students’ skills and written work that can be minimally intrusive on the writing process and even useful. Is the workshop monolithic? No, the workshop is an adaptable model. Why do thousands of creative writing instructors who teach courses professionally — who speak and write about teaching creative writing — proceed as if this growing body of pedagogy doesn’t exist? We need this conversation — we need it now — to examine the current state of creative writing pedagogy and propose several areas for further investigation. I've mention before now that I find the sport of MFA-bashing a serious bore, especially when writers themselves do the bashing. Can an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing create a homogenized writer who never takes any risks and never challenges the status quo? Of course. Can the same program help to develop risk-taking, challenging writers whose work is both entertaining and intellectually stimulating? Of course. The idea that a creative writing program "hurts" writers or writing seems to me akin to saying that studying vocal performance hurts music. I realize, of course, that one of the arguments against creative writing programs has less to do with individual writers and more to do with a kind of aesthetic hegemony that such programs can supposedly create. I'm not sure that charge is fair, but I don't have any hard numbers to back up my position. To be fair, I don't teach creative writing exclusively. I teach a lot of composition--a lot. I've adapted some creative writing techniques to my classes, though I am ambivalent about a purely workshop approach because the workshop model assumes that all the writers invovled are invested in their work. Unfortunately, that's just not always the case in the undergraduate composition classroom. Still, I've taught many talented writers; and I've yet to see any of them hurt by instruction in writing. I think that creative writing programs can be very good for a developing writer. Should a writer mortgage her house to attend one? I don't know. That decision is personal; I can say that I was one of the lucky ones who already had a job when I returned to school for my Ph.D. Many of my peers stil adjunct at various small and large campuses. One of the best writers I know is a triple threat with a novel, a book of poems, and a slough of published essays under his belt. He works part time because he can't find a full-time tenure track position. However, I think that the issue I'm highlighting here have less to do with the field of creative writing and more to do with academia in general (a different blog post, most certainly). As an undergrad, I once wrote a newspaper story for our campus paper about the poet in residence. In an interview, I asked her, "How can you grade a person's soul?" referring to academic grades placed on what I then saw as the intimate/above-reproach genre of poetry (I've since changed my views). She looked at me for a long moment. Then, she laughed and said, "If I thought that I were grading someone's soul, I'd be in another line of work." I feel the same way now. When a student of mine fails an essay about her dead grandmother, the F that the student has earned says nothing about that student's personal life. That F has everything to do with the quality of the prose. The creative writing classroom is the same, I believe. Creative writing programs don't hurt writers. Writers can do that all by themselves. For the past six months or so, I’ve been reading a lot of what many term “crime fiction.” In many of the snootier literary circles, crime/detective fiction gets a bad rap. Formulaic. Two-dimensional characters. Stock devices. Sensational. Many other dismissals come to mind, but they all come down one thing: the idea that genre fiction cannot be serious (or even taken seriously). Although writers like Michael Chabon have exploited genre fiction with a lot of success, rarely do contemporary writers use an identifiable genre without commenting on it in the narrative. The genre becomes self-aware. For example, in Victor Gischler’s early novel Three On A Light, Detective Dean Murphy is a two-dimensional character in search of a third dimension. That dimension comes to him in the form a cursed Zippo lighter.
I don’t advocate for a celebration of genre without introspection. Good art always comments on itself in some way or another. Still, when the Modernist writers and critics elevated character-driven fiction to the status of “high art,” they missed an important point: character-driven, literary fiction is a genre, as well. And like crime fiction (or science fiction or any other kind of genre writing), literary fiction has its own set of stock characters and situations. Perhaps this stock set provides the backdrop for what has become known as a “workshop story,” meaning a competently-developed, character-driven short story that features (usually) some kind of epiphany for the main character. Note that I’m not against fiction workshops at all. All the current MFA-bashing makes little sense to me (but that's probably a different blog post). I merely want to highlight the fact that literary fiction is a genre, too. All of which is to say that the work I’ve been reading lately has been both fascinating and in many cases artistically liberating. I started reading James Lee Burke’s fiction about a year ago, and I was immediately fascinated with his use of landscape and setting. In Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels, New Orleans and southern Louisiana are more than a backdrop. The locale becomes a character. It’s impossible for me to imagine Robicheaux outside of his New Iberia, and even when Burke has him travel far away from home (as in Black Cherry Blues), the character constantly compares his surroundings with Louisiana. Indeed, Robicheaux himself is an outgrowth of Louisiana: a Cajun with liberal sensibilities and a moral code as certain as the Gulf of Mexico but often just as mercurial. He’s a fully-drawn, three-dimensional character whose psychology drives Burke’s fiction. It would be hard to dismiss Burke as a mere “genre writer.” Writers like James Lee Burke, Victor Gischler, Anthony Neil Smith, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett fascinate me possibly because my academic instincts tell me that I shouldn’t take them seriously. Why? I’m not sure. No professor I ever had said anything resembling, “Do not read genre fiction. It’s bad for you.” I did have creative writing teachers say that students couldn’t submit genre fiction for workshop. Still, I wonder why for so many years I have crinkled my nose when I encountered detective fiction. There’s a lot yet to say about crime writing, and I don’t pretend to have scratched the surface in this scant blog entry. As I often tell my students, “There’s probably a dissertation in all this.” |
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