Paean to Literary Magazines

 I read somewhere James Lee Burke got his start through university presses, I thought to do the same with the smaller literary presses. If you click on the link below for "Literary Magazines", you will see my success and find links to this kind of magazine.

And if you do not want to do that, then check out LitHub's Big Names in Little Magazines: On Thomas Pynchon’s Very First Literary Journal Appearance. Some highlights for those who will not follow links:

One of my favorite teachers, the novelist Tayari Jones, told me that the first page of a story is prime real estate. The page ultimately has a form dictated by someone other than the writer—editor, copyeditor, designer—yet the intended spirit of an opening page must carry its own energy and space.

That is what I have been shooting for without success in some of my stories. I might be putting too much information rather energy into my openings. Anyway, as a reader, this makes good sense to me. Think about it. 

Longtime Antioch Review editor Robert S. Fogarty has written that short stories “continue to be powerful engines for social description, for social imagination, for self-reflection, for aesthetic possibilities, despite the limitations they impose on both writer and reader.” The Summer 2014 fiction issue of the journal teems with great work from these “literary exiles,” and begins with a quote from Flannery O’Connor: “The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”

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One of my favorite collectively narrated works is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, his breakout book. A few years later, Eugenides was still publishing in literary magazines, because that is where new writing lives.

Conjunctions, founded and edited by Bradford Morrow, published Eugenides’s “Timeshares” in Issue 28 (1997). The narrator’s father is in the process of refurbishing a rundown motel in Florida. The narrator walks the property, and notices “painting tarps and broken air conditioners lying on the floors. Water-stained carpeting curls back from the edges of the rooms. Some walls have holes in them the size of a fist, evidence of the college kids who used to stay here during spring break.”

More examples exist of good, even great writing, in the smaller magazines. Check out the article. Check out the magazines.

If you want to submit, let me recommend reading How to Submit to Literary Journals. I have seen the advice elsewhere online, but not put so amusingly. Now, I am worried about misspelling prostrate for prostate.

sch 12/23/22