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What Purpose do the Literary Periodicals Really Serve?
by Jacob Russell on November 29, 2007
Originally posted at: Jacob Russell's Barking dog
tags: literary magazines, literary periodicals, little lits, short stories,Leave a comment (8 so far)
A month or so ago, Lev Asher, on LitKicks hosted a discussion on hardcover versus soft, contributors included agents, publishers, writers and reader/consumers. It was good discussion. Informative. Offered some new ideas.
I’d like to see a discussion like that on literary periodicals. There seems to be more of them then ever. Most have circulations well under 5,000. Most pay contributors in complimentary copies, if that.
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?
What is driving this?
First, let’s confine this to short stories. Poetry spreads like mold, under rocks, behind the wallpaper, pops out of urban lawns like mushrooms. It finds its readers by laws of its own. But fiction is something else. 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?
But why?
If you don’t get paid, and almost no one is likely to read what you publish in one these magazines, what’s the point?
If you submit your work to these journals, what benefit do you imagine will come from it? You think, maybe, once you have some magic number of stories in print--that will turn the trick and get an agent to beg for the rights to your unpublished novel? Or are you playing the second-tier lottery game? Selection in one of those annual anthologies (yeah, that’ll sure be the thing gets the eye of the New Yorker editor, right? BASS, the sesame key to fame and fortune!)
Question is, how does any of this square with reality?
What is the reality?
I get the feeling it’s nothing more than a phantasmagoric con game, but not even the shills and carneys are aware of the con.
I’ve seen the lits attacked because they were assumed to be run by the “Academics”, FMA Mafia Cartel, or some such. Great resentment because no one but Academics would read anything published in them.
Hey, be thankful for any readers you can find, I say. And be grateful for “Academics,” They got into their line of work because, at least in the beginning, literature and reading was something they really cared about. Come on, now, these can’t be the bad guys, that’s like saying those 9th C. Irish monks were to blame for the Dark Ages, because--in their labor to preserve ancient learning--they were the only ones left interested in it!
Which brings us back to the beginning: what’s the point? And how do we come to an informed understanding of what all this means?
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The point depends on what you want. If you want literary fame, then trying to stand out in a world of Literary journals seems daunting. Riches? Forget it. You might as well stand on a street corner and sell your story for a quarter a piece because you’ll make more money that way.
Or maybe you simply want to send your story out into the world and see it somewhere other than your own computer screen. If so, then send it to a literary journal. Journals do have readers and these readers are hungry for new stories and undiscovered writers. The prestige comes from knowing your story was published. I know plenty of writers who were published by “big presses” and that’s pretty much all they got. Maybe a few more bucks, but a month after their story was published, they were back to being an obscure writer again.
So writeand submit to journals because you love writing. And read those journals because you love to read. If you want fame, then yeah, you should keep trying for Harpers.
– terena (12/13 at 13-Dec 19:05 -05:00)
My question was, what purpose do they serve: you’ve re-written that to: why should I submit to them. A question of entirely private concern, with no public interest that I can see.
Though I do find the assumption behind that misreading part of the problem I wanted to address.
– Jacob Russell (12/13 at 13-Dec 19:25 -05:00)
I thought I addressed their “purpose.” People want to share stories. The individual needs serve the societies needs and vice-versa.
Can you clarify your point so I can understand? I see I’m not following your train of thought.
thanks.
– terena (12/13 at 13-Dec 19:32 -05:00)
... on reading again what I wrote, I see how you might have thought that was what I was after.
The lits serve, as far as I can see, an imaginary public. My question about the “benefits” was not personal--but what I guess motivates writers to mail tens of thousands of stories to venues that have almost no public following. They are kept afloat, not by demand for the “product,” but by the writers who, for the most part, have no place else to go.
It’s an incestuous demand that feeds on itself, and I can’t help but wonder if this strange institution doesn’t inhibit the development of more open means of dispersal.
Writers writing for writers makes sense when the conventions are being challenged, when new forms are being explored, but the lits churn out the same old same old. Some of it quite good, but almost all of Establishment Literary Fiction, which confirms my suspicions that the motivating purpose is the hope that getting published for nothing for a handful of subscribers--few of whom read any of these cover to cover--is that it will be the springboard to “real” publication. Conventional stories leading to publication of conventional novels.
There’s something wrong here. I may not be able to put my finger on it, but I can’t see how any rational accounting of this institution makes the least bit of sense.
– Jacob Russell (12/13 at 13-Dec 19:45 -05:00)
I see. Thank you.
This is definately something to ponder more. What does the relationship between journal and writer really provide?
What other means of dispersal can you imagine?
– terena (12/13 at 13-Dec 20:09 -05:00)
It’s interesting you would name some of the most obscenely out-of-reach and commercialized magazines as though some kind of bar - as if under which fall a slew of hopeless drival publications. Quite franky, it’s been a long time since a story in The New Yorker wowed me the way stories in lit mags do.
Yes, yes, the “incestuous” nature of lit mags exists, as do some of the concerns you mentioned regarding academic-for-academics’-sake publications. But not all mags stumble into these categories. And if they exist as such, so what. Let ‘em be. They have their own audiences both in following and submissions. It is incumbent upon any good reader to sort through this - wade through the ocean of pages and make their own decisions about what constitutes writing worth reading in the limited time we have on this planet. Quite frankly, I’m thankful there is so much to choose from and that I have the ability to make my own choice (after the editor has made the choice, of course).
Having access to these lit mags opens up entirely new worlds for readers. Where else would you have the opportunity to read the newest lit forms being developed? The newest writers to have their works recognized for the first time? Lit mags are the archival record of change and transition for many who become “great” authors in our culture as well as for our artistic culture itself.
Are there too many lit mags out there? Can you ever say there is “too much literature”? Having watched many generations of publications, I can tell you for every new mag that comes along, another has folded. The numbers are not purely in growth. And for what exists, no one says we have to read it all, and no one is saying what we have to read. What readers do have is a wealth of access to literature, if only they take the time to explore it (as opposed to expecting it to be handed out directly on the mainstream magazine racks in the chain bookstores).
Those who start up lit mags do not do so to “make money.” Anyone in the business knows, you’ll be paying out pocket for years to come before you ever see a profit margin (even *free* online lit mags cost money to produce). Not to mention the amount of time spent on each publication. So why do it? It’s got to be for more than a labor of love…
– NewPages (12/14 at 14-Dec 13:02 -05:00)
NewPages:
“It’s interesting you would name some of the most obscenely out-of-reach and commercialized magazines as though some kind of bar - as if under which fall a slew of hopeless drival publications. Quite franky, it’s been a long time since a story in The New Yorker wowed me the way stories in lit mags do.”
Do show me where I said the commercial magazines where “some kind of bar.” A bar to what? I mentioned them because they pay. Sure, literary merit isn’t measured in dollars, but it’s a damn good measure of what is valued in a culture. Expecting to be paid for one’s labor is matter of self respect. If you value your own efforts, you will expect to be rewarded in whatever mode of social exchange happens to be in fashion--in our case: currency.
When an art form loses it’s measurable value, something is wrong: with the society, the art form, or the institutional apparatus that mediates between writer and reader--more likely, some combination of all the above.
And because they have wide circulation. Whatever you think of the New Yorker, the stories they publish will have more than a half dozen readers… which is about how all you can realistically expect in most of the lit mags.
Raising questions about them doesn’t that they’re useless. I’ve published both fiction and poetry in literary magazines. I was quite pleased to have one of my stories in the same issue as an exert from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. I currently have some 30 submissions in circulation. But I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t give some hard thought to something that takes this much time, and-=on my budget, a not insignificant expense.
One last point… your write: “Yes, yes, the “incestuous” nature of lit mags exists, as do some of the concerns you mentioned regarding academic-for-academics’-sake publications.”
I explicitly exempted myself from that sort of complaint. I have no problem with academic readers.
You say that the lit mags “open ...new worlds for readers.” Really? I sure don’t see where. If there’s one problem I think I can put my finger on, it’s how short fiction, even when it is quite good, seems to be repeating the same formulas over and over with little exploration of new possibilities for the form. The same can be said of most novel that find publishers, but I can come up with a list of novelists pushing the form. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening in the stories in the lits, and there’s a real problem. The lits, if they have a mission at all, it’s to find new voices...not just new names turning out more ELF, but voices we haven’t heard, writers who break out of the Mandarin molds and make something we haven’t seen before in short fiction.
I sure don’t see that happening. If you do, please enlighten me, cause I’d love to be reading something that did more than impress me, something to *surprise* me.
– Jacob Russell (12/14 at 14-Dec 15:20 -05:00)
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I am not sure I follow the logic of all of this, but it is a good question which I will ponder on (again). Another question is what you do about all those internet literary mags? Never has it been so easy to publish a ‘magazine’, never has it been so easy to become an editor.
– Dead Beat (12/06 at 6-Dec 22:35 -05:00)