Poetry

Reducing the churn in literary magazine submissions: Aligning writers’ work to editors’ missions

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Vintage postcard: Aquarium, Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan.

The literary magazine universe doesn’t need to be this way:

  • Editors frustrated by an avalanche of manuscripts that are wildly inappropriate for their publication’s audience, mission, or market. Mismatched texts clog their submission portals, consume their time, and leave them so cranky that when they actually find a promising text, they may be too tired or frustrated to acknowledge it.

  • Writers clueless as to why they’re being rejected again, and again, and again. The whole submission process begins to feel like throwing darts at balloons in some literary carnival game. Merely a word or three of feedback from an exhausted editor feels like a win.

  • Readers struggling to understand what makes one literary magazine different from another. For example: Which literary magazine is sure to offer eco-fiction and eco-poetry? Which magazine tends to provide eye-opening perspectives from X community?

These types of misalignments aren’t unique to the publishing world. In teaching, an instructor may fail to communicate how course learning outcomes align with class activities. Think back to times when you were unpleasantly surprised about what was on a test. In business, an inept manager may harp on minutia (such as using envelopes that cost 8 cents vs. 9 cents apiece) while rewarding only mission-related work with year-end raises.

Both teachers and managers, should look at themselves first when they don’t receive what they want in terms of performance. The same can be said for lit mags and their editors.

What is a lit mag (short for literary magazine)?

Wikipedia offers the following, “A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, terms intended to contrast them with larger, commercial magazines.”

Wikipedia includes a brief history of literary magazines, as well as a link to a “List of literary magazines.” Also see writer Clifford Garstang’s helpful 2022 Literary Magazine Ranking, a yearly compilation he bases on Pushcart Prize results.

Communication can be the key to reducing the churn in literary magazine submissions. Unfortunately, mission statements and “About Us” webpages are often vague, such as “We want to publish the best fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction available.” What does “best” mean? Each staff member may approach or define “best” differently.

Subgenre overload

Market listings for literary magazines — whether in Submittable, Duotrope, annual Writer’s Market books, or elsewhere — often push editors to offer more specifics about what they want to publish. This can be useful. However, such listings may also exacerbate miscommunication, especially in regard to subgenres. How much do you know about a lit mag that says it publishes a laundry list of subgenres?

For example, the Poets & Writers literary magazine database lists 38 potential subgenres, and recently a reputable Midwestern literary magazine designated 32 of them and excluded only six:

  • Autobiography/memoir
  • BIPOC voices
  • Commercial fiction
  • Creative nonfiction
  • Cross-genre
  • Erotica
  • Experimental
  • Feminist
  • Fiction
  • Flash fiction
  • Formal poetry
  • Graphic/illustrated
  • Graphic/health
  • Historical
  • Humor
  • Journalism/investigative reporting
  • LGBTQ voices
  • Literary fiction
  • Love
  • Lyric essay
  • Micro-poetry
  • Narrative nonfiction
  • Nature/environmental
  • Nonfiction
  • Poetry
  • Political
  • Pop culture
  • Prose poetry
  • Regional
  • Religious/spiritual
  • Serialized fiction
  • Short fiction
  • Speculative fiction
  • Speculative poetry
  • Translation
  • Visual poetry
  • War
  • Young adult

How much does a list of 32 subgenres tell writers, readers, or even staff members about a lit mag? From the editorial side, the rationale may be to keep options (or subgenres) open. But writers have likely responded with a raft of everything-goes submissions. 

On the plus side, broad mission statements or subgenre lists offer flexibility for a magazine’s management, especially for college and university publications that change editors yearly. However, the outside view of vague descriptions or jargony missions is that the publication’s editorial targets are constantly shifting.

An unfortunate result is that the common advice to read a magazine to familiarize yourself with what it publishes often doesn’t work with the broad missions and shifting staffs of some publications. For example, one year a lit mag editor may include mermaid and ghost stories, but editors in previous and following years may reject such stories at the first hint of merpeople or specters.   

Theme issues

Theme issues or special sections may be useful for editors, writers, and readers facing unclear or outdated mission statements.

Some publications, such as Fairy Tale Review, set a theme for each issue. Other magazines, such as Creative Nonfiction, intersperse theme and “regular” issues. When editors communicate their themes they often offer more information and details that help writers align and target their submissions.

A couple examples of upcoming theme issues (and their deadlines) include:

  • Creative Nonfiction. Theme: “Caring for the Heart.” Deadline 1/23/2023. “For an upcoming issue, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new narratives about caring for the heart — medically, technologically, or metaphorically. We’re looking for stories from healthcare workers and researchers; counselors and cardiologists and coaches; nurses and nutritionists … or any red-blooded writer with a heart.” See Creative Nonfiction’s website to continue reading the submission call.

  • Fiction International. Theme: “Refugee.” Deadline: 2/16/2023. “Fiction, non-fiction, and indeterminate prose texts of up to 5,500 words that address the theme of ‘Refugee’ are welcome. We will consider submissions of narrative, anti-narrative and indeterminate texts but only accept submissions reflecting the theme.…” See Fiction International’s Submittable listing for more information, as well as a link to the magazine’s catalog, which might offer insights into “indeterminate texts.”

Revision: Use the Read Aloud tool in Word to hear (and fix) glitches in your writing

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Vintage postcard: Highway from Torrey Pines, on the Coast Route between Los Angeles and San Diego.

One of the following sentences includes a misused word:

A. “I defiantly think that word should be changed.” 
B. “I definitely think that word should be changed.”

Although B is preferred here, my students often type “defiantly” when they mean definitely. Neither spellcheck nor the grammar checker flags “defiantly” in this context. Nonetheless, imprecise and awkward word choices can be an issue in college essays, and in business and professional writing the stakes are higher.

Checking dictionary definitions can help pinpoint misused words, but another tactic is hearing your text read aloud.

Microsoft Word has tools for that

The “Read Aloud” tool in Microsoft Word helps you listen to your drafts. Hearing your words can help you identify (and fix) word-choice glitches, subject-verb agreement errors, misspellings, and more. Hearing the word “defiantly” when you meant “definitely” can spotlight a needed revision.

You’ll find “Read Aloud” on the Review screen’s toolbar in Word 2019, Word 2021, and Microsoft 365. You can customize this tool to read faster or slower, pause, skip forward or back a paragraph, and more. For more information, see the Microsoft support page, “Listen to your Word documents.”

If you’re using an older version of Word, you can still get the program to read your text to you. Add the Speak feature to your Word screen by following the five steps detailed by Microsoft at “Use the Speak text-to-speech feature to read text aloud.”

Pro tip: Find a fresh approach

Reading aloud, whether you read to yourself or use tech tools to read to you, is a strategy that professional writers use. I’ve seen reporters in newsrooms whispering their stories to themselves just before deadline. I’ve experienced the deep revision that comes from preparing to record a story for a website.

With text on screens, it can be easy to insert words and adjust sentences as you read. You keep adding the missing words or fixing the awkward sentences in your mind. However, the actual words in your file may say something different. Approaching your text fresh, so that you don’t rely on what should be there versus what is actually there, can help you avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Time can be a great resource for approaching a text fresh. In other words, put away your project for a week or more and then come back to it minus your assumptions. However, time can be a luxury that isn’t available when a due date or deadline is looming.

Whether you’re on deadline or not, hearing your words aloud can give you a fresh perspective that reading on screen over and over can’t.

Multilingual writers

Hearing a text can also be helpful for writers who are working in a second language. In my college writing classes, I’ve had students who are working in English when it’s their second or third language. I can point to a paragraph containing, for example, subject-verb agreement problems. When I ask them to read the paragraph aloud, they often fix the verb tense issues as they speak. They are often surprised when I point out the error in the text—the error they fixed when they read aloud.

For English speakers who are working in other languages, the Read Aloud tool can also be useful. The tool can be set to read in an array of languages.

Why literary magazines? They could be an important part of your book’s journey

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Vintage postcard: General Motors Building, Chicago World’s Fair, 1933.

Start with the acknowledgment pages

If you read the acknowledgment pages of many novels, nonfiction books, short story collections, and poetry books, you’ll often see where earlier excerpts were published. This can tell you several things, including that the publications listed:

  • May be something you would like to read
  • May be markets for your own work

Often, first publications or excerpts appear in literary magazines. If you’re working on your own book or collection, literary magazines may be an important step in your reading, researching, and publishing journey.

For example, in World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s 2020 book, the acknowledgments include literary magazines such as Brevity, Diagram, Ecotone, and Georgia Review.

Bully Love, Patricia Colleen Murphy’s 2019 poetry collection, lists acknowledgments for Hawaii Review, Heliotrope, Indiana Review, and many other publications. 

Finding literary magazines

Finding information about the literary magazines listed on an acknowledgments page is an online search away. However, reading the stories, poems, and essays they publish can get tricky. The spectrum of literary magazines ranges from fully online to print-only magazines that publish zero content online.

Reading content

Reading online literary magazines can be as easy as signing up on their websites, but reading print-based magazines may involve ordering print or electronic copies of individual issues. Some magazines offer pdf versions of recent back issues that may be available for reduced prices and quick access.

Don’t skimp on reading. An important part of the submission process is familiarizing yourself with individual literary magazines. Research what they’ve published. A friend of mine from grad school didn’t do this, and he ended up with a publication that he finds embarrassing to this day.

Submitting work

Submission windows for literary magazines may vary from one week to year-round. A few don’t accept any unsolicited work. Tactics to find these submission windows and writers’ guidelines start with a magazine’s website. If the magazine offers a newsletter, sign up to receive alerts about content, contests, submissions, blog posts, and (yes) fundraising.

Another tactic to find submission windows and guidelines is to “follow” publications in Submittable, an online submission management platform. Once you follow a publication, you’ll build a dashboard-like “Following” screen within Submittable that you can skim for “opportunities.” Some of these opportunities are solicitations to buy copies of magazines, but the majority are submission portals for fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comics, plays, contests, and more.

Setting your intentions

Many writers set quotas for themselves when drafting or sending out work. However, fewer writers seem to set reading quotas, such as to explore one new literary magazine each week. Or push your weekly reading to include at least one short story, essay, or set of poems from a literary magazine.

This intentional exploring and reading of literary magazines can yield inspiration, which contributes to your writing, revising, and submissions process. You’ll also gather valuable information about the literary marketplace, including where to find copacetic writers and editors.

For help, check out “Resolve to read a literary magazine,” a recent effort by the Community of Literary Magazines and Publishers. Click through the CLMP membership directory for reading and submission options as well as discount subscription bundles. 

Literary magazines offer free access via websites and Project Muse during pandemic

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Vintage postcard: United States-Mexico boundary line near Tijuana, Mexico.

At least two print-based literary magazines have opened up their recent issues for online reading during the pandemic:

  • Ecotone issues 25, 26, 27, and 28 (their most recent issue) are free to read online “throughout the pandemic.” To start reading, go to: https://ecotonemagazine.org/magazine/ 
  • The Missouri Review’s content is available online through the Project Muse database until the end of March. (See the tech note below, to help you navigate Project Muse.)

Print-based literary magazines don’t seem to share much of their content online, so these opportunities are worth checking out. 

Magazines offering full-text content through Project Muse

Here are seven lit-mags, including The Missouri Review for now, that continue to offer full-text content from their recent issues through Project Muse:


Publication
Available content
Most recent issue
The Missouri Review
(University of Missouri)
1978 to presentWinter 2020 (Vol. 21, No. 4)
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
(Michigan State University)
1999 to presentFall 2020 (Vol. 22, No. 2)
Prairie Schooner
(University of Nebraska Press)
2003 to presentSummer 2020 (Vol. 94, No. 2)
Minnesota Review
(Duke University Press)
2010 to present
(plus many older issues)		2020 (Issue 95)
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative
(Ball State University)
2003 to presentFall 2020 (Vol. 22, No. 1)
Sewanee Review
(Johns Hopkins University Press)
2007 to presentWinter 2021 (Vol. 129, No. 1)
Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing
(University of Hawai’i Press)		1999 to present2020 (Vol. 32, No. 2)

Note that database content can change quickly. In other words, due to budgets, contract negotiations, and legal and financial wrangling, publications can pop into and out of Project Muse and other databases. What you were looking at yesterday, might not be there today.

For my students, I recommend they download any database document (including bibliographic information) if they even think it might be useful in their work. Note that these downloads are for personal use only.   

About Project Muse

Project Muse is an online database available through many college and university libraries. The database offers access to articles, poems, fiction, nonfiction, and other content published by a variety of journals, including select literary magazines.

In terms of market research, database access to full-text content is valuable because once you’ve read what a magazine is publishing, you can sense whether your writing might find a home there. Also, it never hurts to mention a memorable piece you read from the editor’s magazine when writing a cover letter.

TECH NOTE: How to search the Project Muse database

Databases offer multiple points of access, but the following is the quickest way I’ve found to search for and read content from the magazines listed above using Project Muse.

1.

Select “Project Muse” from the list of databases available on your college or university library’s website.

2.

Instead of using the search box at the top of the screen, scroll down to find the “Journal” filter on the left side of your screen. Enter “Missouri Review” in the Journal filter.

NOTE: Skip the “Content Type” filter, which starts a much broader search related to journals.

3.

After typing “Missouri Review” in the Journal filter in Step 2, an overwhelming 4,373 results were returned.

To narrow your results, click on the name of the publication (the link) within your Results list.

4.

After clicking on “The Missouri Review” in Step 3, you should get an “About this Journal” screen that provides some background about The Missouri Review.

Scroll down on the “About this Journal” page and you’ll see a list of the available volumes and issues of the magazine. If you’re doing market research, you’ll want to look at the most recent issue, which is currently “Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2020.” Click on the link to the issue you would like to search.

5.

After clicking on the link for the most current issue “Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2020” in Step 4, you should get an “In this Issue” and “Table of Contents” screen that offers links to the articles within the Winter 2020 issue.

From this Table of Contents screen, you can click on View (to read content online), Download, (to get the pdf file), or Save.

NOTE: Content isn’t often labeled as fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, but the page numbers offer useful clues. A one- or two-page article is more likely to be poetry, and a 10- or 20-page article is likely to be fiction or nonfiction.

Submittable: Follow the money in literary magazine publishing

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Vintage postcard: Night view of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago from the sky ride’s observation platform.

Pondering “Giving Tuesday” donation requests and everyday submission fees at lit mags

Writers don’t earn much for publishing their work in literary magazines. In fact, after you add up the online submission fees and the costs of old-school printing and postage, many writers actually pay to have their work published.

However, publishing can build a writer’s social capital. It’s a different type of earning. Publishing is a status symbol, of sorts, that can verify your topic or your writing is good or interesting or digressive or [insert another adjective]. For writing teachers, especially those on the tenure track, publications listed on a vita show a teacher’s relevance and contributions to their field, which helps them get hired or promoted or keeps them employed. 

More literary magazines are offering an honorarium beyond “paying” in contributor’s copies and bragging rights. Often honoraria run $25. A few magazines, such as those with commercial or foundation backing, pay professional rates. These mythical outlets may pay $250 to $1,000 or more, but their fiction is liberally sprinkled with agented submissions.

Science fiction, fantasy and other genres

Genre publications, including science fiction and fantasy, seem to take writer’s payments more seriously. Publications can’t be considered professional or “qualifying markets” by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America unless they pay at least 8 cents per word, among other criteria.  

This professionalism goes both ways. Many science fiction, horror, and other genre publications pay their writers, but they may require exclusivity. Their writer’s guidelines may prohibit simultaneous submissions, but in return, they often make their decisions (to publish or not to publish) in days or weeks, rather than months.

SFWA members frown on reading or submission fees. “The Egregious Practice of Charging Reading Fees” is the title of a 2018 SFWA blog by John Walters, a hybrid author who has published more than 20 books. Walters critiques the literary marketplace’s submission fees and their impact on disenfranchisement and diversity.

Poetry has value

As for poetry earnings, think back to the blog “Poetry Has Value” where poets shared monthly tallies of their submission fees and income. For example, Erika Dreifus, author of Birthright: Poems, earned $517.65 from her poetry publications in 2016. However, she did this by pursuing free markets for her poems.

“Thanks to my Poetry Has Value posts, I can tell you that I sent out 134 [packets of] poetry submissions in 2016… Had I spent $3 each time, I’d have shelled out $402 on submission fees. Which would have left me with $117.65,” Dreifus wrote in “Making Poetry Pay: Five Ways to Increase Your Poetry Income,” which was published in The Writer’s Notebook in July 2017.

NOTE: The free monthly Practicing Writer e-newsletter from Erika Dreifus includes “fee-free (and paying) calls and competitions—plus other resources—for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.” More information is at: ErikaDreifus.com

Where is the money in literary publishing?

So, what happens when you follow the money in literary magazine publishing? Like a big shining billboard, there is Submittable.

Submittable, a “submission management software” company based in Missoula, Montana, gives writers an online platform to submit their creative work to publications. Costs for printing, postage, and SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes) have morphed into online submission fees. Magazine staff members use the Submittable platform to accept or reject work online. Stacks of mail and full recycling bins have turned into burgeoning electronic queues.

“Since starting, Submittable has partnered with over 11,000 organizations to promote calls, accept, review and take action on over 50 million submissions and applications from over 4.5 million users,” wrote CEO Michael A. FitzGerald in November.

Fifty million submissions…

Some of those submissions were free. Other submissions cost $25-plus. Most of them were about $3. Some of that money went to the publications and some to Submittable. If you read Tahoma Literary Review’s “What We Pay (and how we do it),” you’ll see that in spring 2020 Submittable’s cut of each submission was 5 percent plus 99 cents. This is on top of a yearly fee, which can be $999 for Submittable’s “basic” level.

For Submittable, what does this look like in rough numbers?
• 50 million submissions @ $3 apiece = $150 million * 5 percent = $7.5 million
• 50 million submissions * 99 cents = $49.5 million
• Total: $57 million (This estimate doesn’t include Submittable’s base fees.)

Not bad for a company, originally called Submishmash, that FitzGerald started in his basement with Bruce Tribbensee and John Brownell in 2010. 

FitzGerald stepped down as Submittable’s CEO in November 2020 to continue his treatment for colorectal cancer. Thor Culverhouse has since taken over as CEO, but the transition and the recent global recession brought to light hints about the financial side of Submittable. As reported in the Missoulian newspaper:

  • In July 2019, the company raised $10 million in venture capital.
  • In April 2020, Submittable laid off 30 of its 130 Missoula-based workers.
  • I’ll add that, during the pandemic, literary magazine submissions may be up, if the quick closing of metered or free submission windows is any sign.

Why “Giving Tuesday” made me think about this

Even before “Giving Tuesday” I started receiving donation requests from literary magazines that I submitted work to over the years. I don’t mean to put a negative spin on this, but some of these magazines last communicated with me via a boilerplate message like, “Thanks for your submission [and submission fee], but we’re not going to publish your work. We’re so busy that we have nothing more to say right now. Good luck.”

About those $3 submission fees, my math shows:
• $1.86 stays with the magazine
• $1.14 goes to Submittable
Note that it’s not unusual for a higher-tier magazine to receive 10,000 submissions a year.

Nonetheless, I saw a stark contrast. The donation solicitations were annoying, especially those from magazines that hadn’t communicated regularly through newsletters or other avenues. But these literary magazines needed donations, grants, subscriptions, and submission fees to keep publishing. We’re talking about budgets of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, a company that “partnered” with these sometimes-struggling publications talks about fees and venture capital on the order of millions of dollars.  

And writers? Maybe they made $500 through their writing last year, if they worked hard and avoided submission fees.   

An update from Submittable

Keriann Strickland, director of product & content marketing for Submittable, contacted me to provide additional information about their business and fees. Here’s what she wrote:

  • First, you caught an error for us; thank you. Michael’s [former CEO Michael FitzGerald’s] blog post should have said nearly 20 million submissions [instead of 50 million].
  • As the blog you quote mentions, we’ve expanded from our literary roots into many other industries and use cases. That total submission number represents all of those industries/use cases (not just literary journals)—most of them without submission fees.
  • In the minority case where an organization charges fees, you’re correct that we charge $0.99 + 5% of the total sum collected—4% of that goes to our payment processor (we use a 3rd party for security and compliance standards). More on that break down here: https://www.submittable.com/features/fees-and-payments/
  • In partnership with CLMP [Community of Literary Magazines and Presses], we also offer special discounted plans for literary journals at $39/month or $290/year (well below our basic pricing https://www.submittable.com/clmp/).

Bookshelf: 4 reference books to sharpen the details in your writing

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Postcard bridge on Pennsylvania Turnpike 20_0810 - Copy

Vintage postcard: Beautiful bridge on Pennsylvania’s Turnpike in the Bedford Narrows.

One of the authors I worked with described his home as “El Rancho Indebto.” That description — from author Daniel Gray’s books, such as Adobe ImageStyler In Depth — has stuck with me even though it has been years since I’ve worked in educational publishing.

Dan had a way of twisting words to make them more interesting amid chapters on how to apply the techniques of web design and develop software expertise. I have to apologize in arrears for probably thwarting some of his descriptions. For example, I remember him writing the lesser-known “stop on a nickel,” and I might have changed it to the tired, old “stopped on a dime.”

In any case, finding the right words, the less tired words, the memorable words, can bring your writing to life. It’s a constant battle I’ve fought by seeking the telling details that deepen scenes.

In my search for the right words, I’ve accumulated a few trusted books that go beyond the thesaurus and Google searches. Books I continue to turn to include:

Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier – Struggling to describe the lights and mirrors in a setting? This reference gives you a list, along with short definitions, to help you decide if your setting has a gaslight or a torchiere. A pier glass or a looking glass. See the “Lamps and Mirrors” section.

The Describer’s Dictionary by David Grambs – The subtitle is “A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations for Readers and Writers.” Want to give a character a trademark ring or pendant? Scan the “Common Emblems and Symbols” chapter. Consider the implications of whether your character would wear a peaceful ankh (a “loop-topped cross”) or a human skull, “as a symbol of mortality, death’s head, memento mori.” This book is half word lists and half literary excerpts so you can see how authors have employed these details.

DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary – This book is all about images and labels. Want to know the name for that little chute between your character’s nose and lips? A philtrum. (As an aside, some believe the width of this chute is an indicator of a person’s fertility.) Need your character to encounter a horse and touch its leg or head? You might want to know the difference between a fetlock and a forelock. A fetlock is a joint somewhat similar to a human’s ankle, and a forelock is the hair between a horse’s ears that often falls forward like bangs.

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi – This book is part of a series of emotion and setting thesauruses. Want to go beyond saying your character is upset? Look at the “Agitation” chapter and browse through the physical signs, internal sensations, mental responses, and other cues to deepen your character’s responses and lead to telling details. If your character was abandoned or neglected as a child, check another book in the series, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma for examples, false beliefs, fears, potential personality traits, triggers, and more.

Why turn to books when there’s Wikipedia, Google, and other online resources? The more curated content found within these reference books (whether paper or ebook) can save you from falling into a rabbit hole (or as Dan Gray might say, a woodchuck hole) of clicks.

And speaking of clicks and tired descriptors, check your writing against the visual essay “The Physical Traits that Define Men & Women in Literature” written by Erin Davis and illustrated by Liana Sposto at The Pudding.

Davis scanned 2,000 books, including bestsellers, prize winners, and books commonly assigned in U.S. high schools and colleges. She used a language processor to see what body parts and adjectives were most commonly used to describe male and female characters. The interactive visual aspects of the Pudding essay allow you to test some of your assumptions about gender and descriptors. (Thank you to Jane Friedman’s “Electric Speed” newsletter for recommending this article.)

Good news and a poetry writing prompt: Pantoum

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My poem “The Choice” has been published in the spring 2020 issue of Phi Kappa Phi Forum, an honor society magazine. Here are the poem’s first two stanzas:

                 “The Choice”
I would not wish you to pass.
I would press my hand into your palm
and hope my distress stirs you to choose.
Override the machines. Grab on or let go.

 

I would press my hand into your palm
and pray for a reflex, anything.
Override the ventilator. Grab on or let go.
Breathe or stop on your own.

 

The year after my father collapsed with respiratory failure I spent a lot of time, usually alone, in waiting rooms—surgery, ICU, radiology, and more. So many waiting rooms in three hospitals and five care facilities in two states.

PKP Forum 2020 springb

The high stakes, the uncertainties, the complications made fiction reading (my usual pastime) difficult. I turned to reading and writing poetry. One of the books I read was Edward Hirsch’s Poet’s Choice, which introduced me to Indian poet Reetika Vazirani and her work.

Vazirani’s three-line poem “Lullaby” stuck with me. And I found myself using Vazirani’s poem as a model. I wrote of my father’s situation over and over, never finding the right words until I learned a poetry form called the pantoum.

The repetition and circling back of the pantoum’s form helped me synthesize the prayer poems I had drafted during my father’s eleven ventilator-dependent months. These months included three times when doctors recommended extubation—twice while my father was unconscious and once while he was awake and clearly not ready to die.

“The Choice,” in the form of a pantoum, helped me to work through this ultimate decision.

Writing exercise

I’ve been curious as to whether the writing process I used might work again with different subject matter (for example, the social isolation of sheltering in place).

  1. Write about your own subject/topic using Reetika Vazirani’s poem as a model for phrasing, line breaks, and so on. Keep writing and writing until you have multiple versions and approaches and angles and voices. Here’s Vazirani’s poem:
                      “Lullaby”
     I would not sing you to sleep.
     I would press my lips to your ear
     and hope the terror in my heart stirs you. 
                     —by Reetika Vazirani (1962–2003)
  1. From among your drafts, highlight the line or lines that “say it best.” Consider which one might work as the first line of your pantoum. Note: This will also become the last line of your pantoum.
  1. Continue working with material from your drafts within the pantoum structure. One interesting aspect of using this structure is that as you write a stanza, you are also writing two of the lines for your next stanza.
        Here’s the pantoum structure of four-line stanzas, notice the repeats:
A
B
C
D
B (a repeat)
E
D (a repeat)
F
E (a repeat)
G
F (a repeat)
H
G (a repeat)
I
H (a repeat)
A (line 1 repeats)

Pantoums aren’t limited to four stanzas, as my outline shows. They can be any length.

Note: When I worked through this process, I titled my “Lullaby”-based drafts. Some of the drafts were “Prayer,” “Meditation,” “Hope,” “Will,” and “No Words.” Ultimately, these titles helped me organize the different approaches and points of view. I encourage you to title your “Lullaby”-based drafts.

  1. Then, edit, review/peer review, revise, and repeat.

When you need more information or inspiration, it helps to search for and read pantoums on the Academy of American Poets website poets.org or on the Poetry Foundation website poetryfoundation.org. You’ll notice how some poets make slight adjustments in the repeats, while others are to-the-letter faithful in their repetitions.

If you try this writing exercise, I’d be interested to hear about what does or doesn’t work, including your resulting work. If you feel comfortable, please post a comment.

Play with your words: Poetry craft, reading & revision

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Postcard Florida lily pond 19_0924b - Copy

Vintage postcard: A charming lily pool in the heart of Florida

When I was in grad school a few of the poetry students seemed to be more, er, playful. I remember a potluck dinner at a professor’s house where one of the poetry contributions was an 8½-by-11-inch pan of Jell-O with mini bottles of booze gelled into it. The liquor was plucked out and consumed. The blue gelatin, not so much.

Outside of parties, there seemed to be little overlap between students and faculty in the poetry track and those in the fiction track. In hindsight, I wish my program had required us to take workshops and literature classes in other genres. For me, the magical realism class taught by Alberto Ríos offered the most in terms of genre blending with topics ranging from Dadaist poetry and images to novels by Isabel Allende and others.

Post-MFA I felt ill-prepared when my first teaching gig included a creative writing class meant to cover both fiction and poetry. I had much more to offer students in the fiction unit. For the poetry segments of the course, I relied heavily on the textbook.

Reading about poetry

Through the years I worked to make up for this gap in both my reading and my work in poetry. A few books I return to time and again are:

  • Poet’s Choice by Edward Hirsch. The book collects his columns from Washington Post Book World and covers an array of poets and poetry styles. The individual columns offer platforms for further reading, “from ancient times to the present,” and for drafting.
  • The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. With sections on “Subjects for Writing,” “The Poet’s Craft,” and “Twenty-minute Writing Exercises,” this book is geared for classes or self-study. Wondering how to structure a sestina or how to address death and grief in poetry? This book can help.
  • The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser. This book is subtitled “Practical Advice for Beginning Poets,” and that’s what it was for me. This book helped me play with words and possibilities, even when I was writing about heavy topics.

Reading poetry itself

One of the usual prescriptions for writers is to read. Kooser’s book led me to subscribe to his column and others like it. Daily and weekly poems pop into my inbox from sources including:

  • American Life in Poetry—Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate, sends out a weekly poetry column. Each column includes his introduction to the poem and some basics about the author of the week’s poem. Access the columns online at americanlifeinpoetry.org or subscribe (free) to receive the week’s poem in your inbox. The column’s supporters include The Poetry Foundation.
  • Poem-a-Day—The Academy of American Poets offers, both on their website or via free email subscription, a variety of poetry that includes pieces by contemporary writers, works in progress, and samples of centuries-old verse. Each Poem-a-Day email has a statement from the poet about the genesis of their work or a historical note, as well as a brief author bio.

Any of these inbox poems can lead to deeper dives into the poetry of individual writers. Reading a whole book from a particular poet can help you connect to their work in a way that a single poem often cannot.

NOTE: Content on the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets websites also cover the craft of poetry and are a useful accompaniment to the books mentioned earlier.

Seeing revision in progress

Another helpful area of reading has focused on revision. One book in particular made me feel like I’d observed a college poetry workshop in that it took student-level poems and offered critiques from an array of teacher/poets:

  • Poets Teaching: The Creative Process edited by Alberta T. Turner. This is an older book, published in 1980, that I rescued from a bin headed to the college Dumpsters. (Who knew that indexing books in online databases costs more than keeping the books on the library shelves? But that’s a matter for another day.) This book advanced my understanding of line, exposition, sound, and so much more.

Each student poem in the book received extensive comments (sometimes contradictory) from two or more of the thirty-plus teachers, among them David St. John, William Stafford, and Thomas Lux. Occasionally, the teachers offered line-level suggestions for the more advanced poems to show how handling lines in different ways led to different effects.

Some feedback in this book made me shudder. Individual teachers didn’t hold back from labeling writing as “boring.” One even said, “it may turn out her abilities do not lie in writing, but in some other direction entirely.” Yikes! Is this any indication of what goes on in college-level poetry workshops? Or is it just a few of these teacher/poets?

Play with your words

Beyond reading poetry, craft, and revision texts, I’ve learned you should play with your words. Let yourself do the writing equivalent of chilling mini-bar liquor bottles in a tray of blue Jell-O. You can always pluck them out, throw them out, consume them, or turn them (or the Jell-O) into something else entirely in the next draft.

Bully Love: An interview with poet Patricia Colleen Murphy

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Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy book coverPatricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her book Bully Love (Press 53) won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry and was published in 2019. Her book Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press) won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. A chapter from her memoir in progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, American Poetry Review, and has received awards from Gulf Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, among others. She lives in Phoenix.

How would you describe your poetry collection in 2-3 sentences (as a novelist or screenwriter might offer in an elevator speech)?

This book examines how location informs identity, loss, and love. With images drawn from a difficult childhood in Ohio, and a subsequent rebirth in the wildest areas of Arizona, Bully Love delivers a portrait of one woman’s struggle to make sense of disappointments caused by both people and places.

Which poem did you most enjoy writing? Why? Also, which poem gave you the most trouble, and why?

My favorite poem in the collection is “Plucked.” I enjoy the whimsy of the opening, which contrasts with the content later in the poem: the tragedy of my mother’s mental illness. I wrote this poem after a hike in the desert during which I was feeling very emotional. That is usually how a poem starts for me, with a strong emotion. The images in the poem presented themselves in order and on time. And that is a true blessing! Because so often that does not happen. The poem also served an important purpose in the collection as a whole, by showing a strong reason why I wanted to escape Ohio, and what the desert offered instead.

By far the hardest to write was the poem with the title in its last line: “Day Trip, Cave Creek Guided Tours.” The poem describes a ride my girlfriends and I took with a typical Cowboy Wrangler Outfitter. The activity is designed to delight tourists and let them dip into a culture few of them care about. The line in the poem that includes the title describes the horses as, “quietly suffering our pats of bully love.”

My editor, Tom Lombardo, nudged me to make that theme more clear and more relevant to the collection as a whole. I think I sent him something like six versions of the poem. I had such a hard time getting it right. But then one day I realized, my god I’m one of those horses. My mother used me as a means to an idealized end. She wanted me to be perfect, part of a package that suited her and others. I got next to no pats from her, and those I received were insincere.

You’re the founding editor of Superstition Review, an online literary magazine, and you’ve been a poetry editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. Could you share your insights on how the arena of literary magazines and publishing is evolving, especially for poetry?

It is my observation that many literary magazines are currently reaching for out-of-the-box content and forms. One way I measure this is by looking at Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets. That’s pretty much the first thing I do each day is read the poem in the newsletter. This year new poets are curating each month, so it has been an interesting year getting to see what poets prefer—it is so instructive.

As an editor, I like to evaluate poems in terms of their craft, content, and composition. I’m finding that content has really changed—fewer pastoral poems and more political poems. Composition has changed dramatically. The shape of poems is no longer dictated by the limitations of the printed page.

Work is getting shorter and more punchy. If we’re looking for realism, we require the language to be tightly packed. We are used to word counts being so much more strict, which in some ways I find to be a good thing, although sometimes I miss more meditative wanderings.

What role did literary magazines (traditional, hybrid, or online) play in your book’s development and publication?

It is difficult (impossible?) to read every literary magazine in existence, but I have read a lot and published a lot. Before Internet publishing became acceptable, I used to sit in the ASU library and the Hayden’s Ferry archives and study back issues of magazines to glean editorial preferences. In those days Internet publications were not as esteemed. That has changed dramatically.

Part of this shift occurred as web design improved and online outlets gathered resources. I believe a big part of the acceptance and proliferation of online literary magazines came when academic poets were able to use them in promotion and tenure decisions. In the early days of online publishing, online mags were likely to disappear, and thus the publication credit with it. A CV with broken URL links to defunct magazines does little to help create a case for promotion.

This has led to a proliferation of online magazines, both independent and university affiliated. These days wandering the Bookfair at AWP [Association of Writers & Writing Programs] has become an all-day affair. But, today’s writers can quickly drill down to what they find most important in a publication: format, frequency, design, previous contributors, previous publications. It’s easier than ever to research markets.

I published much of my work in literary magazines before collecting it in books. That is partly because the theme and structure of each book occurred separately from the composition of the poems themselves.

What is one of your favorite pieces of publishing advice?

This fall I’m teaching a graduate level class in literary publishing for our Masters of Narrative Studies program here at ASU. I will dole out all manner of advice in that class, much of which I hope will be useful. The most important note I would give to anyone poised to send work out is to make sure that the market fits. Read the most recent issue, the most recent book, the most recent bios. You can get a super good feel for editorial preferences by studying a publication or publisher.

Are you involved in a writers’ group? If so, could you describe your group and/or its format? How has your group influenced your writing, productivity, and so on?

Oh, I’m a huge fan of writers’ groups! I had a long-standing poetry group we called “Ten Poems.” We live all over—California, Omaha, Colorado, Arizona, etc.—and for a long while we shared work in Google Drive. What a wonderfully sustaining community that was. It helped not only with composing, but also with revising and editing. We have all moved into busy positions—mostly teaching at universities—so we haven’t had a “Ten Poem” session in a while. But we all keep in touch.

My current writers’ group consists of fiction and memoir writers. We all attended a Writing X Writers manuscript bootcamp in Tahoe this year, and we really connected. We have been meeting about once a month through video calls and exchanging small sections of writing.

What’s among the best/worst advice you’ve heard or followed about writing poetry or the writing process?

Absolutely the worst was that I needed more Instagram followers.

The best was this revision exercise: take the first and last stanza off the poem. See. Isn’t it better now?

Read more about Patricia Colleen Murphy and her work at the following sites:

Contests vs. general submissions for fiction, poetry, nonfiction: Economics & odds in publishing

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Chicago World's Fair federal building (2) - clean copy

Vintage postcard: Federal building at night, Chicago World’s Fair 1933

I’ve rarely entered writing contests. At $20 to $30, most entry fees seem too high. Granted, some publications do ease the sting by sending you a copy of the issue containing the winning entries or a year’s subscription, but still…

When you could pay a $3 reading fee for 10 general submissions versus one $30 entry fee for a contest, the economics win. The return on investment for contest entries often seems too low.

Million-dollar contests

My view of contests was reinforced when I read about the Writer’s Digest contests in Jane Friedman’s book, The Business of Being a Writer. “When I worked for Writer’s Digest, the revenue from competition entry fees approached a million dollars a year,” writes Friedman. “The number of contests was a budgeted line item in the revenue forecast, and if the projected number was not achieved on time, the contest deadline was often extended to collect more entries.”

This gave me a new perspective on contests that announce they’ve extended their deadlines. Are they just trying to bring in a certain amount of money?

It also led me to do some math in my head—seldom a good thing—when an announcement for the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition popped into my inbox.

For this contest the regular entry fee is $30. I figured that to generate $1 million, the contest would need more than 33,000 entries distributed over the nine categories. Yes, the contest offers a $5,000 grand prize and several other higher-dollar prizes, but when I recently saw this year’s short story winner my first thought was, So that’s what a hundred-thousand-dollar story looks like (at least in terms of entry fees).

Here’s what I was thinking (mistakenly):

$1,000,000             (approximate entry fees)
             ÷  9             (the number of categories)
$111,111             (entry fees per category)

NOTE: This assumed that all categories received a ninth of the entries, or about 3,703 entries, at $30 apiece.

Okay, upon further examination, my math was really wrong because the Writer’s Digest competitions website also lists separate competitions for self-published books, popular fiction, short short stories, self-published ebooks, and poetry. These other contests must be part of the organization’s revenue projections, and I’ve only been looking at the Annual Writing Competition.

The one number I may be close to right on is that $1 million in contest revenue would require more than 33,000 submissions at $30 apiece, not counting expenses for prizes, administration, honorariums for judges, and so on. Nonetheless, the odds of winning or placing among 33,000-plus submissions doesn’t give me any sense that the odds may ever be in my favor, no matter how good or bad my writing is.

I apologize for picking on Writer’s Digest, but their contest just happens to be the one I read about recently. I don’t think their contests are alone in being a “profit center,” to quote Friedman again. I also doubt their odds are unusual among big contests.

Better odds in local and regional contests

When considering contests, I look for better odds. I’ve found this in local and regional contests, especially those held by nonprofits. These contests may attract a few hundred entries instead of thousands.

For example, the annual Wisconsin People & Ideas contests for fiction and poetry received 69 fiction entries and 585 poems in 2014 (the most recent year that I could find reported entry numbers for). The odds were much better for fiction (1 winner in 23), whereas the poetry odds were much tougher (1 winner in 195).

The regular entry fee is $20, and cash prizes range from $500 to $100 for the first- through third-place, respectively. While both the odds and the potential ROI for this contest seem more attractive, entries are limited to Wisconsin writers.

NOTE: In addition to cash awards, the Writer’s Digest contest offers introductions to agents and other benefits that are difficult to place a cash value on. Similarly, Wisconsin People & Ideas, a publication of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts & Letters, offers winners benefits such as a residency, publication in the journal, and a reading during the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Acceptance rates for general submissions

Acceptance rates of 1 to 2 percent seem common among many literary magazines, based on what I’ve read through the years.

In a 2016 Review Review article, “Is Duotrope Accurate? Ten Lit Mags Provide an Answer,” writer Jason Peck compared journal acceptance rates to what Duotrope users were reporting.

Here are a few of the acceptance rates literary magazines provided to Peck:

  • Colorado Review 1.06% acceptance rate
  • Flash Fiction Online 0.7% acceptance rate
  • Rattle 0.717% acceptance rate

Tahoma Literary Review regularly provides acceptance rates on a page titled “What We Pay (and how we do it).” For example, the fall/winter 2018 issue received 1,225 submissions, of which 25 were published, which is a 2% acceptance rate (if my math is correct). If you’re interested, the TLR website breaks the submissions down by category.

Final thoughts (for now)

In the end, contests may offer a bit more recognition, money, and perks, but their entry fees could quickly drain your budget for marketing your creative writing. On the plus side, contests offer a deadline, which may help push a project through to completion. Remember, however, that deadlines may be extended to attract more fee-paying competitors.