Incendiary Lit

The Mid-American Review’s annual Sherwood Anderson (fiction), James Wright (poetry) and Creative Non Fiction contests are all nearing their postmark deadline of October 20th (Saturday). MAR’s a really cool journal with accessible, well crafted work. The contest judges are David Kirby(poetry), Anthony Doerr(fiction), W Scott Olsen(cnf). I’m really excited about the James Wright prize because I love David Kirby’s work. I know this has no effect on luck I’ll have, but still, the possibility of David Kirby reading my poems is pretty awesome. The entry fee for each contest is $10 (which includes a copy of the winning issue) and the prize is $1000 in each division. Send up to 3 poems, or 6,000 words for prose. Also, if you enter more than one contest, you can also move your second free copy to the next issue (ostensibly)  so it’s like you get a year’s subscription… Here’s the rest of the information about it. It’s a good opportunity to justify buying a sample issue of a journal you’ve never seen at Barnes and Noble at the very least. You get the satisfaction that you made strides to get your work the acclaim it rightly deserves (right?) and you get to read wonderful work, as well as see what a potential market publishes. Win win win.

The Briar Cliff Review from Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa is always a surprising treat to get in the mail. The most artistic and high quality 8×10 format journal I’ve come across.Very top notch artwork (BCU has a quality art department) along with accessible, but not light poems and stories. In the 2007 issue there were an especially large amount of general reading goodness. Some particularly inspired moments came in Joshua Robbins’ wonderful poem “Dawn Above Spokane, Sacred Heart Hospital, 2001″ for instance, early on “precise sutures of crows across the wire” was really cool, as was “false dawn of hospital gowned light / thinning over commuters’ stop-and-go and the river’s / broken prosody.” Other lovely moments were in James Doyle’s “Necking in the Ford”- “It takes real romantics // to cauterize the ordinary.” Or in Emma Bolden’s “Assurance”- “I love your body the way I love the slur of grass against my feet.” Isn’t that nice? The slur of grass against my feet. Very cool phrasing. The art is varied quite widely from some beautiful river shots from Randall D Williams (though he’s only credited for one) to amazing macro plant photography to some beautifully simplistic, Rothkoesque paintings from Jacqueline Kluver and Bill Welu. Pretty solid content all the way through too. Some journals have a couple wonderful pieces, a lot of mediocre pieces, and some dreadful ones. BCR keeps the bar high, and while it may be shorter than other journals, it makes up for it in substance. Definitely a journal to check out, here, at the Briar Cliff Review homepage. They have a contest running, fiction, poetry and creative non fiction with $1000 prize in each category, $15 entry fee (which includes a copy of the spring 2008 journal the winner appears in.) More info on their page.

Thank you to the wonderful people at www.newpages.com who offer writers one of the most valuable websites online, behind, of course, icanhascheeseburger.com for their lolcats. Everyone should bookmark New Pages, and move that bookmark to the top of their bookmark list. No scrolling through old links to get to that one. Same with Duotrope.com. Anyway, the point of this is to link to New Pages’ recent literary magazine reviews, which include 6×6, Brilliant Corners (jazz literature), Cave Wall, Columbia, Diner, “Forklift, Ohio” High Desert Journal, Insolent Rudder, Iowa Review, The MacGuffin, Missouri Review, Polyphony HS, Quarterly West, Quay, Smartish Pace, and Versal. That’s a mouthful. Then there’s links to a whole bunch of other reviews. It’s always a good thing to get an outsider’s perspective of a magazine you’re thinking about submitting to. Usually journals don’t like to say what they tend to publish, claiming eclecticism, and though that’s usually the case to an extent, everyone has their own personal lean.

Magazine

Time has almost elapsed for Poetry Magazine’s summer student submission spectacular. OK, not only students, but as I posted about here, in Yo Bum Rush the Poetry Show(with a wonderful graphic I might add. haha) Poetry Magazine is only accepting submissions from people who have not published their previously, which includes 99.95% of students, if not a bit more.

Willard and Maple is the product of Champlain College in Vermont. Literary and Fine Arts, Perfect Bound, This last issue weighed in at a hefty 230 pages. Some of my favorite pieces in there were “Testing” by Vermont SLAM champion (now, I know what you’re thinking when you see SLAM, but think more Billy Collins, writing that holds its own on a page) Geof Hewitt, “Late Summer Dew” by Justin Perreault and John Grey’s “To the Old Men in Harry’s Diner” with some also fine work by Gary Nowacki, Robert Cooperman, and, uh, Zebulon Huset. Their art section also stands out with some very fine photography. Overall it’s a good buy. There’s enough to keep you happily reading throughout many line waits, commercial breaks, bus rides, flights or lunch breaks that, though there are some definite space-fillers, you can flip past them to another enjoyable piece. However, they don’t even have a website yet, tsk tsk. Their submission info: (also see their listing in the ever-valuable Poet’s Market)

3-5 poems or one short story per submission, between 9/1 and 5/1, mail to the address:

Willard and Maple; 13 South Willard St.;Freeman 302, Box 34; Burlington, VT 05401

Here’s a little blog by Kenyon Review editor David Lynn posted about simultaneous submissions, and here’s a blog about the blog. So yes, this is in essence, a blog about a blog about a blog about a magazine. For those who don’t know, a simultaneous submission is when you send a story or poem or what-have-you to more than one journal at the same time. Some journals allow the process, on the understood basis that if the work is accepted at another journal, they will be immediately informed and they will stop considering the piece. Now, you can have a piece accepted on the first submission, but most writers know that’s a rarity, some poems/stories end up not being accepted until 10 submissions, or even 20, 30 before it is finally accepted. Even great pieces. David Kirby, said in Best American Poetry 2000, that the poem they’d chosen as one of the best of the year, had been rejected 17 times before it finally found its home at Parnassus. Seeing as most journals ask you to allow 3-4 months, sometimes as many as 9 months for them to consider your submission before even checking on its status, your entire wardrobe could be out of fashion by the time it’s accepted. You’d be wearing your Kris Kross overalls (backwards of course) writing a poem that may not be published until your mother sends you a pair of those ridiculous Croc shoes.

Anyway, there are two sides to the argument of Simultaneous Submissions, or, as I call them SS’s. It’s like pretending you’re Kaa from The Jungle Book… Trusssst in me. But yeah, most journals take SSs, but some don’t. Of those who don’t are the likes of The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Playboy (for fiction, at least) and many more prestigious magazines. Some respond very quickly (Michigan Quarterly Review usually in under a month from personal experience, and Poetry right around a month) while others take many months. So basically, there’s a decision to be made. Your options?

1. Submit your work only to one journal at a time and hope that your work attracts someone’s attention while you’re still stylish enough for an author’s photo on your dust jacket.
2. Only submit your work to journals who accept simultaneous submissions, and cry bitterly that you’ll never be in The New Yorker unless they change their horrible ways.
3. Submit your poems simultaneously everywhere, even to magazines that don’t accept simultaneous submissions, and if a piece happens to get accepted, sit under your covers with a flashlight hoping the editors don’t find you in the night and ruin your literary career with a publication embargo.
4. Submit some poems simultaneously, and when poems happen to not have any overlap at other journals, venture a submission to a NoSS journal, and hope they send you a prompt rejection, or for that miraculous acceptance.

Poetry Magazine, for this summer only, is only accepting submission from poets who have never been published in their hallowed halls. So all you wordsmiths who have dreamt of getting a piece in the illustrious Poetry, here is your big chance!