Literary magazines

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.”

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.

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:

Worst Writing Group Ever

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mine postcard2

Vintage postcard: Dumping ore into a pocket at a shaft station, Cliff Copper Mine near Phoenix

For the past decade or so my writing group has, on average, taken months to get back to me. In a couple cases it has taken them more than a year. Good turnaround is about six to eight weeks.

When they do respond it has usually been brief and vague. These may sound familiar:

  • “After careful consideration, we’re sorry to report…”
  • “We enjoyed reading it, and though it doesn’t quite…”
  • “We read your submission carefully and regret…”

Time

A benefit of continuing with this group has been time:

  • Time for my own work to become distant enough that I can read it like a laser-eyed stranger
  • Time for me to read other writers (both successful and less so)
  • Time to further develop the craft of revision, storytelling, structure, line, and so much more

Encouragement

Another benefit has been encouragement, especially when editors include personalized notes, more detailed rejections, or invitations to submit to them again.

Nonetheless, I still had a strong reaction when I read the following quote in Jane Friedman’s book, The Business of Being a Writer:

“[G]etting rejected by a magazine repeatedly and then, finally, getting work accepted is, actually, fairly normal. It’s a little frustrating for an editor, [said an assistant editor at The Missouri Review], when a writer submits to us five times and then just stops and we never get the chance to read the writer’s work again. She noted that TMR has published several writers who sent manuscripts to us for over a decade before we published their work.”

Friedman went on to describe the social media response to the original blog post, “Stubbornly Submitting to a Literary Magazine is Good” by Michael Nye. “His post provoked a significant backlash from writers who felt tired of banging their heads against the wall—pursuing success within a system that never seemed to work that well in the first place,” Friedman wrote.

While rejections no longer sting as much as they used to, I connected to this conversation and not just because I have rejections from TMR dating back to 2002.

Paying for feedback

I’ve found a couple bright spots. One is the “in progress” designator in Submittable, which may indicate when my work has made it past the first readers.

A larger one is the feedback option offered by some publications, such as Tahoma Literary Review. Sometimes it’s a small fee for a few paragraphs of commentary. Other times it’s a lot more money for an in-depth critique. I’ve paid for an in-depth review on a project that was especially important to me through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Continuing Studies. Faculty member Christine DeSmet offered concrete feedback beyond what I’ve received from family readers and writer friends, who might have been concerned about hurting my feelings.

Persistence

One thing my continued participation in this “writing group” shows is persistence. In the face of years of rejection, I continue.

10 ways to access literary magazines before submitting: How to research markets for your writing

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Race horses postcard2

Vintage postcard: On the turn at Gulfstream Park Race Course, Hallandale, Florida

The warp speed way to exit the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts isn’t what you want, but writing that is poorly targeted may get just that treatment at literary magazines.

As a former fiction editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review, I remember the easiest (and most frustrating) rejections were the texts that weren’t in the universe of our submission guidelines: Literature written for very young children. No. Graphic sex and bestiality scenes with little story. No. Academic essays. No.

NOTE: See the Hayden’s Ferry Review website or Submittable portal for their guidelines. They’re currently seeking submissions for their “Magic” issue.  

While university literary magazines run by graduate or undergraduate students may demonstrate changing literary tastes or themes from year to year, they seldom make wide swings away from a core mission. Therefore, it’s easy for the editors at almost any publication to see who submitted works for consideration without researching guidelines or reading published issues first.

Ignore the oft-heard advice “read an issue before submitting” at your peril. Here are 10 ways to access current literary magazines. Many ways to do this market research are free.

Printed sources

Strategies for getting your hands on recent publications include:

  • Sample issues: Many literary magazines offer online pay portals.
  • Book fairs: Associated Writing Programs and other writing conferences and festivals.
  • Newsstands: College and commercial bookstores.
  • Libraries: Current periodicals sections, especially at college and university libraries. (free)
  • Literary magazine offices: Many magazines exchange copies with their peers, but you may need to know someone on staff to gain access. (free)

Electronic sources

Exploring a magazine’s content continues to get easier through online options:

  • Web excerpts: Content may include pieces from current or past print magazines. (free)
  • Web-only content: In addition to excerpts from print issues, some magazines offer web-only content. Note the submission process and guidelines may be separate from that of the print issues. (often free)
  • Publication newsletters: Magazines such as Kenyon Review offer weekly newsletters that link to content currently available online. (free)
  • E-magazines: Print magazines may offer pdf versions that can be downloaded immediately. Prices for these e-issues tend to be lower, possibly noting the absence of printing and shipping costs.
  • Databases: Some literary magazines are indexed by databases available through college and university libraries. While some entries list only bibliographic information, others offer full-text files of individual sources (short stories, poems, essays, and so on). (free)

While reading an issue before submitting may help you target your writing efforts to more receptive publishers, the process also makes for good literary citizens. As much as you work hard and want your work to be read, other writers and publishers want the same thing.