Literary magazines blur the line between magazine and book to the point that such a line pretty much ceases to exist. You think of most magazines as relatively thin, relatively tall, and stapled; they come out every one to eight weeks. Literary journals are perfect-bound, often very thick, and usually contain almost no pictures. Like magazines, they come out regularly (though not as often); and like books, they contain a great deal of writing and often cost quite a bit. I recently came across something called H.O.W. Journal on a trip to Barnes & Noble after work one evening.
It was twelve bucks, so I put it right back down. So was something called upstreet, which I also put back down. In fairness, standing there in the store, upstreet looked more interesting than H.O.W. Journal. Barnes & Noble has recently made changes to their literary magazine selection. They rearranged the magazine racks (at the Clearwater Crossing store) and dramatically reduced the number of lit magazines they carry (at both Clearwater Crossing and Greenwood Park Mall)—though they do seem to have added Poetry, at both stores. They used to carry Zone 3, published by Austin Peay State University, but they don’t seem to anymore. Zone 3 is only five bucks a copy. They also used to carry The Normal School, a relatively new journal that also only costs five bucks. A number of other journals, with price tags in the less-than-$10 neighborhood, have also disappeared.
But anyway, back to H.O.W. Journal and its twelve dollar price tag. There is sometimes a way around those hefty prices if you just want to get a taste for what a journal publishes but don’t want to commit to a whole issue. Oftentimes, they will have part of their current issue available for download from the website. Other times, they have other information—such as details of their current fiction contest—that will change completely the way you’ve been thinking about their product. I’ve entered the occasional fiction contest over the years; and since I’m not made of money, I tend to prefer the ones that have relatively low reading fees and which offer a sample issue or one-year subscription to the journal as part of the entry fee. H.O.W. Journal wants $20 for the reading fee, and does not offer a sample issue or subscription.
For me, though, they offer something way better. Mary Gaitskill sits on the board of the journal, and she is the one judging the fiction contest. I came across her name in a profile article in Poets & Writers awhile back, and she’s been on the ol’ radar ever since. Her fiction tends toward the transgressive, which I like; and the language of her interviews tends toward the salty, which I also like. Breaking taboos is one of the best ways to drive things out into the open and advance humankind a little closer to the ideal of the extermination of conservative thought.
I bought a copy of the journal, of course. They say you’re supposed to get an idea of what a journal publishes before you submit to it or enter a contest. With no samples to look at online, I had to buy the journal—because I knew I was going to enter the contest. Even if I don’t win, Mary Gaitskill will have read my work. That’s worth the twenty bucks all by itself. (Also, I will have accomplished part of what I wanted to accomplish this year, which was to submit to short story contests during the second half of this year—after completing the current draft of the phantom novel I have been working on.) I’m about halfway through the copy of the journal that I bought, and I have really enjoyed the stories I have read so far. To a degree, they are all somewhat transgressive—not a one has been afraid to drop an F-bomb, and several of them have dealt with sexual subjects, either directly or indirectly.
I don’t necessarily think F-bombs and sex are necessary in all stories, but I feel reassured when I see them in print journals. That generally means that there no limits—or very few limits—when it comes to the kind of work you can submit to such a journal. Even if I have no plans to break them, I don’t like limits when it comes to creative work. When you put limits on submissions and contest entries, I sort of wonder why you bothered to get into the business of literature in the first place. Literature has no limit. You can’t put a fence around your imagination and expect to do good work—and no one should expect that of you, least of all the people who claim to be attempting to advance literature.
I feel like I am in a better place as a writer and reader because I accidentally happened upon this particular journal during a random stop in at Barnes & Noble one night after work. If the journal had existed only on the magic Internets, I probably would never have run across it; likewise, if the bookstore I went to (now that the good ones in the city have closed) had not been carrying this particular issue of the journal, I probably would never have run across it. These are the kinds of happy little accidents that make bookstores so necessary. They are the kinds of things I hope are happening to other people and that I hope keep people other than just myself going into bookstores—bricks and mortar physical bookstore—on a regular basis.
(I will update this later, with links and a few more sentences about a David Hoppe NUVO article from back in April, when the River Crossing Borders was going away. I have to sign off for the moment because Amy and I have the rare opportunity to go out on a date.)
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