Saturday Morning's Dawn Patrol of Literary magazines

The hip woke me up before the alarm. I have read my email, I have looked at the news, and now I am here.

Listening to a podcast, The Subtext: Kimber Lee Isn’t Cagey About Her Process, an interview with a playwright.

A different approach this morning: I am going to believe the blurbs on the sites and submit my stories. Rudie can't fail, right?

1.  Modern Literature: passed on because I cannot find the way to submit in any clear way; what I can see it is interested in world lit and this makes it interesting - expand your horizons, expand your imagination, expand your writing.
2. Great Ape: absurdist humor, love the blurbs, signed up for its newsletter, submissions closed, but not a likely one for me - nothing I have right now could be called humorous (although I do have this one that has been circulating in my head....)
3. Ornery Quarterly: just the name should have been enough, and then I read the submissions page (follow the link); sounds like my kind of place. I sent "Problem Solving".
4. Fictive Dream - limits to less than 2500 words - I sent "Colonel Tom" to another rejection,
   
5. A Velvet Giant - closed for submissions; the link goes to its archives.
6. Untoward Magazine - got "Problem Solving".
7. Unlikely Stories Mark V - I have had this one for a while, it got "Problem Solving."

Reading Literary Canons and the Reckoning of National Heritages, gave me a bit to think about:

Reducing authors to identity labels is problematic as well, but disregarding the fact that any writing is shaped by the complex ways in which our multi-layered identities play out into systems of domination means ignoring that our own identities are tied to how we engage with national narratives. When you’re teaching or studying the canon, identifying who is not white (or male, or straight, etc.) helps you see right away how much of it has been and is still based on exclusion. The very idea of a national literary canon is fraught with the modern, Western conception of nationhood that has still not come to terms with its colonial underpinnings.

If you search this blog, you will find my notes on re-reading Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County. It was written in 1948. In relation to the quoted material, Lockridge engages with the national narrative - in ways I still find peculiar to 1948, as well as 2022. Not quite sure who else has. E.L. Doctrow with Ragtime? Another candidate: John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy. I wonder if the demise of the Great American Novel can be traced back to how well it addressed American nationhood. I could say William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! has colonialism and racism, but is it not relegated to being Southern rather than national?

It is 11:10 am

Dawn is over. The patrol is done.

 

I will be going out today. Work on my own fiction when I get back.

sch