Is There A Literary Blacklist?

 Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings think there is. See their Scenes From The Literary Blacklist on the Substack Persuasion.

My rejections can be found under the label of literary magazines. Frankly, they have one theme - my stories do not fit the magazine. This I expected - too old, my subjects do not seem to come from a fashionable place. There is also a feeling on my part that I have not ever written particularly good short stories. I have not been too shocked by the rejections.

KH thinks there is an MFA lock on the literary magazines. I think it is more like I wrote above that there is a market that I do not appeal to.

However, Cook and Jennings do make me worry and wonder:

Public censorship creates a culture of self-censorship. Today most editors simply choose—quietly—to avoid publishing controversial but high-quality work. If pressed, they might say, All writing is political. By now most writers in this sphere know where the boundaries are.

Fear of reputational damage and public censure are ample motivations for writers to embrace the lit community’s talking points and denounce those who don’t. This is a culture in which the Director of Creative Writing Curricula and Managing Editor for Georgia Tech’s lit mag, the Atlanta Review, breezily solicits a “solidarity doc” on Twitter. This “solidarity doc” is one of six blacklists we discovered; it is certainly the most ironically named. Some comrades are particularly eager to dole out punishment, chasing their marks around the Internet to ensure they cannot publish ever again. During a Zoom interview Rattle’s editor Tim Green said, “These literary firebugs have become addicted to the dopamine of outrage. They tell themselves they’re working for social justice, but really they’re just searching for that dopamine hit that makes them feel good.”

This sounds too much like the internet/social media addiction fueling our soured politics. It reminds me too much of the rabbit hole I went down with my depression, which led me to very ugly places. Perhaps less time spent on Twitter/X, etc. I do not miss Yahoo Chat, which is where I tangled up with too much Internet weirdness.

Business is the likely excuse for the social media exposure of these editors. I can understand that impulse quite well. However, controversy attracts readers. I belong very much to the Oscar Wilde school of marketing: "There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Since I would not be the one whose email and/or social media mailboxes would be filling up, I am a little bit reticent about making these comments. But just a little bit. When was being an editor not a controversial position? Was there no controversy in publishing Theodore Dreiser, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, John Steinbeck, or James Joyce?

I think KH would agree with the conclusion of Cook and Jennings:

Writers privately tell us that they are concerned about the inevitable literary pablum of the coming decade. It’s already here. 

Therein lies the criterion for judging these editors and their journals - are they encouraging and publishing pablum?

The alternative is to self-publish. That feeds the Amazon monster, which I assume would be anathema to the likes of these editors. To my mind, publishing with Amazon is akin to dropping one's child into a deep dark well. That does nothing for the wider culture.

sch 9/22