Submissions and other things

I spent most of yesterday working on my novella and blowing deadlines.

Today was just about recuperating.

Odds and sods

2/15 

Thank you for sending us "Ahab in the Moonlight." We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, this piece isn't the right fit for us. If you wish to submit again, please wait until one month has passed.

Thanks again for submitting, Samuel, and we wish you the best in finding a home for this elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Pithead Chapel

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We are honored you have decided to share your piece "Coming Home" with us. Unfortunately, your piece was not selected for our upcoming volume.

While this piece may not be a fit, your future work might! Please consider submitting to us again.

Thanks,
The Editorial Board
Tir Literary Magazine  

Hamlet unravelled is a discussion that I listened to last night while working on my novella.

2/16

Southern Humanities Review - "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984"

Adroit Journal: -  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984", "Ahab in the Night", and "Agnes".

 Uncharted Magazine Cinematic Short Story Contest: "Going for the Kid"

Straylight Literary Magazine: "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

Talk Vomit: "Ahab in the Night"

 Southern Indiana Review:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

peatsmoke:  "Ahab in the Night"

SAND HILLS LITERARY MAGAZINE:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

The MacGuffin:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984"

Moonday Mag:  "Ahab in the Night"

Whistling Shade: "Ahab in the Night"

For Page & Screen Magazine: "Ahab in the Night" 

 Wow, six days for this rejection to arrive:

Thank you for submitting Ahab in the Moonlight to Unleash Lit.

We receive many worthy submissions, and our editorial decisions are never easy. Unfortunately, your submission was not selected, but we encourage you to consider us for future submissions.

Thank you again for your submission. We understand how much work goes into writing, and we hope you find the perfect partner for your work.

Best wishes,

Unleash Press team

 LARB Podcast: Richard Hell's 'Godlike' 

7 Short Lessons from Gabriel García Márquez  

 The Trouble with Aristophanes 

 ‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think  - I did not think Morrison difficult to read, but maybe I did not read her as anything but a great writer. But the essay gave me much to thik about.

To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared with them. It is not an easy one to untangle. As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”. 

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Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses: “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.

Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics. It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing.

Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated. Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.”

Even without reading The Song of Solomon,  I found her amazing. I wonder if those who think she was some sort of charity case have read her on her terms.

 sch 2/16