What is a Magazine?

Looking through an airline's in-flight magazine I found to my surprise it's not a magazine anymore, but a catalog full of purchasable items, titled Sky Mall. I kid you not. In vain I searched it for articles, advice, horoscopes. The items were fascinating and I probably read the catalog more thoroughly than I ever read those in-flight magazines with ecstatic descriptions of trips I would never take.

I think about magazines, talk about magazines. I receive magazines. So what the heck IS a magazine? A wanna-be book with a shorter lifespan? A paper-bound, two-dimensional variety show? A newspaper on steroids?

Etymology: "storehouse, granary." Sense a) "a storehouse of information on any subject." The term used to be applied to books. But more recently, b) "a periodical with miscellaneous papers, esp. critical and descriptive articles, stories, poems, etc., designed for the entertainment of the general reader." (Then a qualification: "Magazines are now often specialized...") (because there is now no general reader. General readers read, like, catalogs. Magazines are slanted toward certain demographics.)

The dictionary points me toward the word "review." What, I ask, is a "review," as in Paris Review? Threepenny Review? I have never looked it up. Anyone can see that "to review" means "to look again," but the noun is defined thus: "a periodical containing critical articles primarily."

What is a magazine? I love magazines, so I have to give this more thought.

My Journal

Doggedly I've kept a journal since 1997, when I took The Artist's Way "morning pages" directive. At first I hated the discipline of a daily journal. Then I loved it. Currently it's an off-and-on thing, because I'm much more likely to start writing when I start my morning by READING some(body else's) great poetry or prose. (B.H. Fairchild, Kathleen Finneran, Suzanne Rhodenbaugh, for starters. . . If I've bought your chapbook be sure that I do read it -- it turns out that the better I know the author the more I'm inspired.) A kick-start of inspiration, plain and simple.

My journal by contrast is 60 volumes of the dullest document ever produced by humanity, a chronicle of the dullest possible existence, chosen because that is the placid kind that permits the most writing time.

What Literary Magazines Are For

I figured out what litmags are for. Like medical and scientific journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Glia, or Wounds (great name for a journal!), they publish discoveries – in our case, discoveries in literature. The best litmags bring to light new, surprising, well-wrought and fascinating things. They change our perceptions, even our lives. That's why we still talk about The Dial, transition, Perspective, and Ironweed, litmags long gone.

A “peer-reviewed” journal published mainly for specialists will never have a big subscription base. But like a medical journal, if a litmag's contents truly advance the cause of life, it gets into the news and attracts readers. And it is worth printing hard copies so people can read it anywhere and everywhere.

Ultimately a litmag is about service.

It's not about service when litmag editors publish mainly their friends’ work; try to canonize their own taste by publishing same-old-same-old, and derivatives of same-old; attempt to use editorship to enhance their status or careers; rule their litmags as their little personal empires; or if the editors don't like editing but can't or won't get another job.

Litmags Don't Live Here Anymore

The library here used to carry a score of literary journals. Today on my lunch hour I found only five. Where did they go? I hadn’t time to ask a librarian because I had to go buy an envelope. But thereby I found out where the journals went. They’re sold single-copy in the bookstore: Boulevard, New Letters, Tin House, Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review – about 10 titles in all.

The library chucked its subscriptions because it knows no one reads these things, except maybe for Poetry and Creative Nonfiction, and those just as bellwethers. Last time I read through the latest issues of literary journals at the library – noting on index cards their names and contents, and what percentage was fiction, what percentage nonfiction, etc. (so I can discuss them in classes) -- in THREE litmags I found poems about Persephone. Whoa. To be fair, about 10 to 20 percent of the published material took my breath. But on the same round I noted two essays, in separate journals, beginning with the words “My father,” and acres of bad fiction – full of neon signs, breasts, tragic foreigners, and petty quarrels.

Some journals make impressive publishing credits if you want to rub shoulders with laureates and academics – who won’t actually read what you published. So beyond impressing each other with our publication credits, what are these journals for? I had never seriously questioned their value. Do they serve as some sort of – standard? For us? Me? Time for self-examination. And figuring out that if they're not important anymore, what is?

Surprise, Surprise

Ten months passed and I forgot about the poem. Then two months ago I heard the mag had been published. Was too busy writing new stuff to inquire as to why I didn't get a contributor's copy. And I'm kind of far along in life and in art to grouse about contributor's copies. But through my own efforts I got a copy. Today, read it. So much good stuff that I went into that altered state that readers of poetry get into. And when I met my own poem I began reading it as a stranger might. It's better than I remembered. It belongs. It's worthy. I'm pleased with it.

How refreshing! And quite a boost to morale. Basked in it for about 15 minutes.

Now, place fingers on keyboard, both you and I, and let's hunt up the next good poems we're going to write.

Chapbook or Magazine Publication? Which is Best?

Real life-question: Poet has a sheaf of excellent poems, all unpublished. Should she skip ahead & enter them as a manuscript in a chapbook competition -- or first try to print individual poems in journals, and THEN do the chapbook thing?

Answer: No journal wants to publish poems that appeared first in a chapbook. I'd try first to publish individual poems in as many local print journals as possible, setting a deadline of one year; then -- no matter what the result -- I would make a chapbook ms. Local journals will further your work much faster than will national publications. How so? See next blog entry. Send to 'em all. Don't enter contests, just send the poems. And send simultaneously!

Think you have some good poems? Get a bunch of them out to your local journals by Dec. 15!

Dead Ends for Your Creative Writing

If you want quality readers such as literary agents, Pushcart Prize judges, famous writers, and Best American Poetry anthologists among your readers:

1. Don't submit to a brand-new literary journal. They don't have subscribers, and their newbie editors don't know enough to nominate their contents for Pushcart or other prizes.
2. Don't submit exclusively to journals edited by students in MFA programs. Because the editors change yearly, their contents are unpredictable and can be uneven, and because of this they are not taken very seriously. In fact these journals are referred to in the aggregate as "MFA rags."
3. If you win prizes from your local literary organization's contests and get that good work printed in the awards-ceremony program, or on the organization's website, that may be the last daylight your prizewinning work will ever see. Some litmag editors consider that work to have been "already published."

I think some MFA rags are wonderful, but if you're career-minded, learn to think differently. The above information from a seminar I attended last Saturday on poetry publishing.

Nine Ways to Judge a Literary Journal

Pretend the literary journal you're looking at is a person, and ask yourself if this is the sort of person you would like to befriend.

1. How does it look? Healthy, artsy, sloppy, folksy, ritzy? . . . . and do you like its looks?
2. Does it seem able to appreciate people (writers) like you?
3. Does it seem to refer constantly, not to say obsessively, to things you have had enough of, such as Greek myths, old barns, eating disorders, famous dead writers, or graphic depictions of meaningless sex?
4. Is it trying hard to be something it's not?
5. Does this journal let you know, through its form or content or list of contributors, that it doesn't care to associate with your kind?
6. Is there something in this journal that intrigues or stimulates or impresses you?
7. Do you like this journal enough to see it again? To sit down and have lunch with it?
8. Do you two have anything in common?
9. Would you like to be associated with this journal?

Full disclosure: At this time I am a longtime subscriber to just one literary journal, and that's the quarterly Creative Nonfiction. I keep up with Natural Bridge. Not long ago I gave up The Sun and The New Yorker, because they arrived so often that reading each issue felt like a job.