Random
A Few Notes of Randomness
As an editor, sometimes the way writers value an acceptance into the print issue over an acceptance into the online version of the magazine is frustrating. As an academic, I understand why many writers value print publications. I also respect the desire for a physical artifact, something you can hold in your hands and leave on your coffee table and pass around with friends and loved ones. For many readers, longer work translates better on the page. I respect print. I get it. I also respect online publishing. I find it as valuable as print publication, I love the exposure it provides as well as the accessibility. We print 750 copies of our print issue. Our online magazine gets 7,500 or more unique visitors a month. Now, there are all sorts of factors that will dilute online traffic figures but I know without a doubt that more people can and do read the magazine online than the print version. This week a writer stated in his cover letter, “This story is only for print consideration.” I advised him we consider all work for both print and online publication and if that were a problem, he should withdraw his submission. He withdrew his submission. Sometimes when writers learn their work has been accepted for online publication they express disappointment, ask if there’s something they can do to get their story into the print version like it’s a back room casino in Manhattan. Twice, writers have declined publication. That is their right.
I am on a mission to eliminate the word that, whenever possible, from my writing. It is such an empty word. More often than not the that is not needed. I’m also getting ruthless with just and the excessive use of it as an empty signifier. I keep telling myself, say what something really is. Are there little words you try to eliminate from your writing or tics you try to overcome?
The Rumpus is doing a one off book club for Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. I signed up for it.
The literary magazine club is actually going to happen! I will pull together some more coherent details early next week for you all. If you would like to join you can watch this space where many of the discussions will take place or you can join the Google Group I’ve created for other discussions and top secret club communiques. NY Tyrant sells out so you might want to get your copy of NY Tyrant 8 (Vol. 3.2) pretty soon!
Have you read the new issue of The Collagist? Mary Miller, who never ever disappoints, has a story called The Cedars of Lebanon that I just love.
Here is a pretty thorough story on the very sad affairs at VQR.
I have an extra copy of Mary Hamilton’s We Know What We Are. If you’re interested, comment with a little story about what you know you are. I’ll pick my favorite on Friday at 5 and you’ll get this book and some other good reads.
Oh god I’m shaking my head.
Every time I get reviewed for tenure progress (yearly) I get asked about “online publications” and their worth, etc, etc.
Here is exactly what I say, and sure people who know me know this line: “The difference is people READ online magazines.”
I’m being facetious as to how often print mags are read, and not.
I NEVER (OK, maybe twice) got feedback on work in print mags.
I get daily feedback on e work. And I like that.
And come on. Journalists hated bloggers 5 years ago. Journalists are now bloggers.
You have a better chance stopping the rain than stopping journals going to electronic. It simply makes since.
I LOVE the book, the mag, the artifact. I also honestly read more online mags than print mags.
And sense. Cents. Etc
Roxane,
Thanks for pointing HTMLGIANT readers toward the most thorough article on the VQR situation.
I am actually surprised to have noticed the silence here thus far, but can understand that the severity of the incidents/respect for not being “in the know” has lead to the quiet.
I do think, though, a healthy discussion of ALL the related elements of the story (the personality of writers/editors when dealing with other writers/editosr;, VQR’s rise from a respected but small publication under Staige Blackford to, as some consider, a sell-out run by Genoways’s self-promotion machine; the connection between universities and literary magazines; the payment of writers) would benefit the community here.
Shane I too have wondered why we haven’t talked about it here. I think mostly people don’t know how to talk about it, because someone died and not only did they die, they took their own life. It feels a bit.. disrespectful I think to get into a vigorous discussion about the matter. That said, there’s a lot to talk about where VQR concerned. I suspect that discussion will take place when the time is right.
I think the ‘5 years’ point is spot on. Are we still going to be having this conversation about print magazines vs online magazines in 5 years or so? Somehow, I really doubt it.
I feel like we’ve debated this before but I still wonder about the number of readers after friends. Iget more feedback from people who see my Facebook link for online work, but when I’ve gotten feedback from strangers I think its mostly been print magazines. Which is not to say there aren’t great print mags or that online is somehow inferior…just not sure it has caught up yet
Although that’s a question of online vs different print mags, not online vs print at same Mag. I agree with what Roxanne said
I used to limit my submissions to print journals. Now I’m submit to online journals almost exclusively, when I actually feel motivated to submit anything at all. My reasoning is a lot like Sean’s: more people are likely to read it online than buy a print. Seems like print journals often talk about the difficulty selling copies, and a lot of the reading people do nowdays is online anyway, when they’re supposed to be working their office job.
Do you read more online fiction than print? I know sean said he did. Personally I do not.I read far more fiction in print, even if I read more nonfiction online. And outside of flash work I basically never read fiction online.
Id lve to see a poll about that on here. It would be intereting to see the results
My site is trying to illustrate the quality of online writing and hopefully breakdown the hegemonic belief that print is better than online.
The medium does not dictate the quality of the writing.
i hear you on the “it” “just” and “that” / perhaps nonsensical vigilance, but probably good practice for overall vigilance
I hardly ever pick up a printed literary journal, but I read a lot of them online. I also read a lot of books, and I get almost all of those from the library.
I read more online than in print though I do also read a lot in print. Everyone’s going to have a different answer based on preference. It’s all good.
The issue is much more than this. This is huge. I am glad a few of us now are wondering ‘why were not talking about it’ because nobody mainstream lit is talking about it. If you google it you only find one outsider blogger talking about it, and I think what he has to say (the bigger picture about literary publishing and the old boys club) is why nobody is talking about it. At least I think so.
I feel differently about it with PANK than I would about, say, The Kenyon Review. PANK explicitly values online and print editions similarly, and in PANK the online presence is the primary public presence so far as I can tell. Whereas, with the Kenyon Review or Agni or many other older magazines, the online edition doesn’t count the same, in the minds of editors or readers or anthologists, and when one publishes in those magazines, if one is of a mind to desire anthologization and all the ancillary benefits that can accrue with it (primarily a larger audience of readers who don’t read literary magazines), then one would really be gunning for the print edition, because it is still true that the big-time anthologies are really only reading those seriously.
By the way, I’m not saying that I share in that value judgment, and I think with time it will change as Sean predicted. I’m just describing the present-day situation, and arguing that for some writers it does make a difference when making decisions about where to place pieces that might have a chance at being competitive for the external validations that make possible access to an audience that is not reading literary journals.
Now I will duck and cover, because I know it is not popular to acknowledge that a writer would think about such things. But some writers do.
Oh god I’m shaking my head.
Every time I get reviewed for tenure progress (yearly) I get asked about “online publications” and their worth, etc, etc.
Here is exactly what I say, and sure people who know me know this line: “The difference is people READ online magazines.”
I’m being facetious as to how often print mags are read, and not.
I NEVER (OK, maybe twice) got feedback on work in print mags.
I get daily feedback on e work. And I like that.
And come on. Journalists hated bloggers 5 years ago. Journalists are now bloggers.
You have a better chance stopping the rain than stopping journals going to electronic. It simply makes since.
I LOVE the book, the mag, the artifact. I also honestly read more online mags than print mags.
And sense. Cents. Etc
Roxane,
Thanks for pointing HTMLGIANT readers toward the most thorough article on the VQR situation.
I am actually surprised to have noticed the silence here thus far, but can understand that the severity of the incidents/respect for not being “in the know” has lead to the quiet.
I do think, though, a healthy discussion of ALL the related elements of the story (the personality of writers/editors when dealing with other writers/editosr;, VQR’s rise from a respected but small publication under Staige Blackford to, as some consider, a sell-out run by Genoways’s self-promotion machine; the connection between universities and literary magazines; the payment of writers) would benefit the community here.
Shane I too have wondered why we haven’t talked about it here. I think mostly people don’t know how to talk about it, because someone died and not only did they die, they took their own life. It feels a bit.. disrespectful I think to get into a vigorous discussion about the matter. That said, there’s a lot to talk about where VQR concerned. I suspect that discussion will take place when the time is right.
I don’t read online fiction unless there’s someone’s name I recognize. I love print journals the way I love books. Opening them and reading them.
I think the ‘5 years’ point is spot on. Are we still going to be having this conversation about print magazines vs online magazines in 5 years or so? Somehow, I really doubt it.
Renee,
I agree with you. I respect Roxane’s comment about the time needing to be right, and actually think she is one of the few writers who practices what she preaches when it comes to reasonable online communication. But I still want to talk about this–not Morrissey, per se, since we should wait on that, but the problems that his passing has revealed.
It is especially telling that Genoways, who pissed off so many people with the Mother Jones piece, is now at the center of this, and the claims made in this article (and on the C-ville blog, and at Chronicle) are pretty damning:
1) He essentially participated in self-publication with taxpaper money through the UGA series (and publication of his best friend, the son of the president).
2) He bloated the budget of VQR and paid advances well beyond the means of the publication.
3) He attacked the larger “little magazine” community while nearly dallying (a la Binx Bolling) with his well-paid public relations assistant whatever she is.
VQR is, I think, quite important in the literary magazine world. I hope all of this can be a learning experience.
I feel like we’ve debated this before but I still wonder about the number of readers after friends. Iget more feedback from people who see my Facebook link for online work, but when I’ve gotten feedback from strangers I think its mostly been print magazines. Which is not to say there aren’t great print mags or that online is somehow inferior…just not sure it has caught up yet
Although that’s a question of online vs different print mags, not online vs print at same Mag. I agree with what Roxanne said
I used to limit my submissions to print journals. Now I’m submit to online journals almost exclusively, when I actually feel motivated to submit anything at all. My reasoning is a lot like Sean’s: more people are likely to read it online than buy a print. Seems like print journals often talk about the difficulty selling copies, and a lot of the reading people do nowdays is online anyway, when they’re supposed to be working their office job.
Do you read more online fiction than print? I know sean said he did. Personally I do not.I read far more fiction in print, even if I read more nonfiction online. And outside of flash work I basically never read fiction online.
Id lve to see a poll about that on here. It would be intereting to see the results
My site is trying to illustrate the quality of online writing and hopefully breakdown the hegemonic belief that print is better than online.
The medium does not dictate the quality of the writing.
i hear you on the “it” “just” and “that” / perhaps nonsensical vigilance, but probably good practice for overall vigilance
I hardly ever pick up a printed literary journal, but I read a lot of them online. I also read a lot of books, and I get almost all of those from the library.
I definitely read more online than I do print. I read a ton of print, too, but I basically get paid to be online all day so I’m in that space, plus I’m forever seeing stuff linked here, at writers’ blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, etc–I click the link and read. It’s the way I find most stuff through other people.
I read more online than in print though I do also read a lot in print. Everyone’s going to have a different answer based on preference. It’s all good.
The issue is much more than this. This is huge. I am glad a few of us now are wondering ‘why were not talking about it’ because nobody mainstream lit is talking about it. If you google it you only find one outsider blogger talking about it, and I think what he has to say (the bigger picture about literary publishing and the old boys club) is why nobody is talking about it. At least I think so.
I feel differently about it with PANK than I would about, say, The Kenyon Review. PANK explicitly values online and print editions similarly, and in PANK the online presence is the primary public presence so far as I can tell. Whereas, with the Kenyon Review or Agni or many other older magazines, the online edition doesn’t count the same, in the minds of editors or readers or anthologists, and when one publishes in those magazines, if one is of a mind to desire anthologization and all the ancillary benefits that can accrue with it (primarily a larger audience of readers who don’t read literary magazines), then one would really be gunning for the print edition, because it is still true that the big-time anthologies are really only reading those seriously.
By the way, I’m not saying that I share in that value judgment, and I think with time it will change as Sean predicted. I’m just describing the present-day situation, and arguing that for some writers it does make a difference when making decisions about where to place pieces that might have a chance at being competitive for the external validations that make possible access to an audience that is not reading literary journals.
Now I will duck and cover, because I know it is not popular to acknowledge that a writer would think about such things. But some writers do.
The NEA caved in a while back and now allows 50% print/ 50% online publications for CW fellowship requirements. Internet publishing is becoming more and more respected. My guess is that in the next two years we’ll see this discussion shift to Ebooks.
One thing I do hate about a lot of online journals is that many, not all, have word limits of 1500 or less. In an age when print journals largely limit work to no more than 5000 words it’s ridiculous for online journals to have such small word count limits.
I absolutely agree about the word limits. It’s frustrating also in terms of print journals that so few magazines are reading work longer than 5,000 words. Baffling.
I want to further amend this line of thought, even though it’s probably inadvisable. (The pursuit of inadvisability — sometimes on principle, sometimes out of foolishness, sometimes both at the same time — has cost me a lot lately, but what the hell.)
I am writing in a variety of genres. I care about the things I am making. I do not make them primary to get rich or to cater to a particular reader. However, I would love to get rich and I would love to be loved by readers. The more readers the better. And, to be honest, the better readers the better. I want people who love books as much as I love books to love my books. So after I am done making things, I think about what might be the way to bring them into the world that would best honor the effort by way of an intelligent engagement with the marketplace that receives literary things.
The biggest project I’m completing is a large, complex novel. I would like to sell it to Farrar, Straus, Giroux or Alfred A. Knopf. Since I am not famous, they are not likely to take it. Since I am well published and will be agented, they will certainly read it with care. Perhaps they will like it. If they do, my life will have just been changed in a significant way, because literary writers of the kind to which I aspire who publish with those two publishers are most likely to achieve largish readerships, win prizes and fellowship money, and be competitive for really good teaching jobs that provide a teacher-writer (I am and enjoy being one) with a lot of resources, chiefly time and money but also challenging collegiality and bright students who push a teacher to be a better, smarter writer. All of these things are very desirable, and I would like to have them. They are not writing or art, but they are not unhelpful to the pursuit of either.
These things also (but seemingly to a lesser degree) are a likelihood if I sell the novel to a top-tier New York house and also that house makes the novel a priority in-house. Here I’m conflicted, though, because part of me would rather eschew all of this New York stuff and just stay with Dzanc, which is in my opinion very good company (Kesey, Lopez, van den Berg, etc etc etc), which is helmed by two men I admire and who are friends and who treat me like gold, and which is in every way a class-act operation. I have not decided what I will do about this issue. But because I would like to have a chance to one day be a writer like, say, Jeffrey Eugenides, with the audience and the life that comes with it, I know that I would probably have to be with an elite publishing house as a prerequisite for entry. (Here I’m simplifying, too. For example, I really admire the HarperPerennial paperback originals line, and the books they choose, and the way they invest in good young writers. It’s very complicated.)
With this discussion, it’s important to say: The work precedes all of it. If the work’s not great, then it doesn’t matter. To me, the work is first. But these are ways of serving the work.
Okay, that’s the novel. But let’s say I wrote a novella. Perhaps I will want to send it to one of the very good literary journals known to publish novellas, such as Epoch or Alaska Quarterly Review or The Gettysburg Review or Ninth Letter. Perhaps the novella is about a crime. I will think: Best American Mystery Stories publishes crime stories and garners their inclusions a larger and attentive audience. Stories in Epoch and the Gettysburg Review frequently appear in BAMS. So maybe I ought to send my crime novella there first. Or: Adam Desnoyers’s beautiful long story “Bleed Blue in Indonesia” first appeared in the Idaho Review, where it was picked for the O. Henry volume by Laura Furman. My story sort of works in a similar way, and it’s sort of lush and dense like many O. Henry stories. It has already been rejected by Harper’s and Tin House. Perhaps I will send it to the Idaho Review, in the hopes that Ms. Furman will read it and like it and introduce my work to a larger audience. I’m trying to give this thing I just spent five months writing a fighting chance to garner some readers, even though, let’s face it, novellas are a hard sell.
Next let’s say I write a one-page story that is metafictional. Now I’ve only written the story because I must, of course. Nobody wants to anthologize my one-page story. I don’t think many people read one-page stories in second-tier print journals. So I think: The people who enjoy this kind of story tend to read stories in the very good Internet journals that have created the community that nourishes the practice of making these stories. I’ll be thinking of PANK, Wigleaf, Dogzplot, Elimae, etc. Places that publish very short stories that make me feel things in a similar way to how I hope people might feel when they read my one-page story. So I send the story there, and I am grateful and happy, and I enjoy the way that the story often starts a conversation with readers in my email box or on Facebook or when I’m out doing a reading somewhere. And I feel like I’m part of the vital conversation about that part of literature that HTMLGiant seems to love.
Then maybe I read a book and want to talk about it. I don’t want to fit my review to a literary journal’s 300-word count. I don’t want to write to a house style, either. I want to write frankly about my experience with a book, and talk about it as intelligently as I can. So I approach HTMLGiant or The Rumpus or The Faster Times — places where I know people who are interested in books the way I am interested in books are hanging out. And I write for them about the book, and I love it, because I can do it the way I want to do it, and because I know that other people are reading with interest. If it’s two people, fine, and if it’s two hundred, also fine, but we’re about to have a conversation because it’s the Internet, and we know where to hang out to have a conversation there. People will show up and we’ll talk smart, and maybe we will get smarter or maybe we won’t, but it will be interesting and fun and I’ll walk away learning that I might like to read David Markson for the first time, or I might discover that I’m interested in Continental philosophy even though I was resistant to the idea at first.
What I’m saying is that it’s not about the Internet or print, and it’s not about old journals or new journals. It’s about how different kinds of work and different kinds of engagement about ideas and different goals for what you’re making and how you hope to make a home for it in the world require a variety of approaches when it comes to what I guess we’re calling publishing, although I mean that in the broadest way. I just spent two hours typing this in a comment that is late in the comment cycle, so maybe only Roxane will read it. But now that I typed it, I know better what I think about it, and why, and now I can engage Roxane on the topic, and that’s a meaningful publication to me, because I care about what she thinks and like to exchange intelligent talk with her whenever I can, and I know from past experience that she reciprocates. I could send her an email, but maybe if I do it here, some nineteen-year-old newly aflame with literature because he took a class at Hunter College or Rutgers or Santa Fe Community College will read it and want to become part of this conversation the same way I did when I was sitting in an admissions office in Lake Wales, Florida, reading Robert Birnbaum’s interviews with Ethan Canin and Richard Ford and learning in that way a little bit about how some writers think, and then seeking out their books, and then one book led to another led to another, and before I knew it I had to be writing them, too, and I had to read everything, and I had to flee my old life so I could give myself over to reading and writing and loving literature.
That’s what’s at the core of these questions for me. I care deeply, and my whole life has been ordered at some cost around the pursuit of literary art. So I must give my choices about publication the same kind of care I mean to lavish on the work. To me, it is everything.
I am reading this and will respond more meaningfully tomorrow.
I don’t read online fiction unless there’s someone’s name I recognize. I love print journals the way I love books. Opening them and reading them.
My suspicion on this is that editors are figuring in that visitors want the “quick punch”; they’re calculating in the attention span of what they figure as the ‘average visitor’.
Websites, after all, are generally designed to deliver as much information as possible as quickly as possible, and preferably as much as possible instantaneously. The idea is that if the visitor feels the slightest sense of boredom, they’re going to go someplace else.
This is horrifically poisonous for literature, and as a theory applicable to literature: personally, as an editor myself, I won’t buy into it. Gone Lawn will publish long pieces, even really long ones, as willingly as short ones, if they’re good and the author feels that publishing such a long piece in one place is what they want to do. The criteria is the same as for short pieces: it doesn’t have to be “near genius” (as many editors put it) to be considered. It just has too be interesting, and good.
After all: it costs no extra money, and if people are interested then they’ll keep reading. If they lose interest and move on, well, they lose interest. Sometimes they’ll come back later. (I do the same, myself. On a day when I have less patience or less time: I’ll read a little then put it off, then go back again another time.) But the bottom line is that if I get a good piece that I really want to publish, then I’ll publish it, for one essential reason: I want people to see it.
And see it people will, year after year: it’ll still be there, it’ll pop up in your favorite search engine when you’re trying to find out what a certain writer’s work is like. Can’t say the same for print journals, can you?
And even if the visitor doesn’t read the whole piece on their first visit: often times they will eventually.
Worrying about how length MIGHT affect traffic is just silly, I think. You have a great piece in your hands that you want people to read? It’s 12,000 words? Who cares! Publish the damn thing!
Renee,
I agree with you. I respect Roxane’s comment about the time needing to be right, and actually think she is one of the few writers who practices what she preaches when it comes to reasonable online communication. But I still want to talk about this–not Morrissey, per se, since we should wait on that, but the problems that his passing has revealed.
It is especially telling that Genoways, who pissed off so many people with the Mother Jones piece, is now at the center of this, and the claims made in this article (and on the C-ville blog, and at Chronicle) are pretty damning:
1) He essentially participated in self-publication with taxpaper money through the UGA series (and publication of his best friend, the son of the president).
2) He bloated the budget of VQR and paid advances well beyond the means of the publication.
3) He attacked the larger “little magazine” community while nearly dallying (a la Binx Bolling) with his well-paid public relations assistant whatever she is.
VQR is, I think, quite important in the literary magazine world. I hope all of this can be a learning experience.
“primarily” (type — I bet there are more, too.)
Ha! I typo’d typo and typed type instead.
Ah, Kyle cracks himself up.
Yes.
I definitely read more online than I do print. I read a ton of print, too, but I basically get paid to be online all day so I’m in that space, plus I’m forever seeing stuff linked here, at writers’ blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, etc–I click the link and read. It’s the way I find most stuff through other people.
@KM: Everything above sounds entirely reasonable; that’s pretty much the attitude of everyone I know (up to ten people!) with a few pubs under their belt. Who doesn’t want an audience? Or a great job? Or a variety of choices? I’m sort of shocked you seem at all hesitant about expressing those views.
The NEA caved in a while back and now allows 50% print/ 50% online publications for CW fellowship requirements. Internet publishing is becoming more and more respected. My guess is that in the next two years we’ll see this discussion shift to Ebooks.
One thing I do hate about a lot of online journals is that many, not all, have word limits of 1500 or less. In an age when print journals largely limit work to no more than 5000 words it’s ridiculous for online journals to have such small word count limits.
I absolutely agree about the word limits. It’s frustrating also in terms of print journals that so few magazines are reading work longer than 5,000 words. Baffling.
I want to further amend this line of thought, even though it’s probably inadvisable. (The pursuit of inadvisability — sometimes on principle, sometimes out of foolishness, sometimes both at the same time — has cost me a lot lately, but what the hell.)
I am writing in a variety of genres. I care about the things I am making. I do not make them primary to get rich or to cater to a particular reader. However, I would love to get rich and I would love to be loved by readers. The more readers the better. And, to be honest, the better readers the better. I want people who love books as much as I love books to love my books. So after I am done making things, I think about what might be the way to bring them into the world that would best honor the effort by way of an intelligent engagement with the marketplace that receives literary things.
The biggest project I’m completing is a large, complex novel. I would like to sell it to Farrar, Straus, Giroux or Alfred A. Knopf. Since I am not famous, they are not likely to take it. Since I am well published and will be agented, they will certainly read it with care. Perhaps they will like it. If they do, my life will have just been changed in a significant way, because literary writers of the kind to which I aspire who publish with those two publishers are most likely to achieve largish readerships, win prizes and fellowship money, and be competitive for really good teaching jobs that provide a teacher-writer (I am and enjoy being one) with a lot of resources, chiefly time and money but also challenging collegiality and bright students who push a teacher to be a better, smarter writer. All of these things are very desirable, and I would like to have them. They are not writing or art, but they are not unhelpful to the pursuit of either.
These things also (but seemingly to a lesser degree) are a likelihood if I sell the novel to a top-tier New York house and also that house makes the novel a priority in-house. Here I’m conflicted, though, because part of me would rather eschew all of this New York stuff and just stay with Dzanc, which is in my opinion very good company (Kesey, Lopez, van den Berg, etc etc etc), which is helmed by two men I admire and who are friends and who treat me like gold, and which is in every way a class-act operation. I have not decided what I will do about this issue. But because I would like to have a chance to one day be a writer like, say, Jeffrey Eugenides, with the audience and the life that comes with it, I know that I would probably have to be with an elite publishing house as a prerequisite for entry. (Here I’m simplifying, too. For example, I really admire the HarperPerennial paperback originals line, and the books they choose, and the way they invest in good young writers. It’s very complicated.)
With this discussion, it’s important to say: The work precedes all of it. If the work’s not great, then it doesn’t matter. To me, the work is first. But these are ways of serving the work.
Okay, that’s the novel. But let’s say I wrote a novella. Perhaps I will want to send it to one of the very good literary journals known to publish novellas, such as Epoch or Alaska Quarterly Review or The Gettysburg Review or Ninth Letter. Perhaps the novella is about a crime. I will think: Best American Mystery Stories publishes crime stories and garners their inclusions a larger and attentive audience. Stories in Epoch and the Gettysburg Review frequently appear in BAMS. So maybe I ought to send my crime novella there first. Or: Adam Desnoyers’s beautiful long story “Bleed Blue in Indonesia” first appeared in the Idaho Review, where it was picked for the O. Henry volume by Laura Furman. My story sort of works in a similar way, and it’s sort of lush and dense like many O. Henry stories. It has already been rejected by Harper’s and Tin House. Perhaps I will send it to the Idaho Review, in the hopes that Ms. Furman will read it and like it and introduce my work to a larger audience. I’m trying to give this thing I just spent five months writing a fighting chance to garner some readers, even though, let’s face it, novellas are a hard sell.
Next let’s say I write a one-page story that is metafictional. Now I’ve only written the story because I must, of course. Nobody wants to anthologize my one-page story. I don’t think many people read one-page stories in second-tier print journals. So I think: The people who enjoy this kind of story tend to read stories in the very good Internet journals that have created the community that nourishes the practice of making these stories. I’ll be thinking of PANK, Wigleaf, Dogzplot, Elimae, etc. Places that publish very short stories that make me feel things in a similar way to how I hope people might feel when they read my one-page story. So I send the story there, and I am grateful and happy, and I enjoy the way that the story often starts a conversation with readers in my email box or on Facebook or when I’m out doing a reading somewhere. And I feel like I’m part of the vital conversation about that part of literature that HTMLGiant seems to love.
Then maybe I read a book and want to talk about it. I don’t want to fit my review to a literary journal’s 300-word count. I don’t want to write to a house style, either. I want to write frankly about my experience with a book, and talk about it as intelligently as I can. So I approach HTMLGiant or The Rumpus or The Faster Times — places where I know people who are interested in books the way I am interested in books are hanging out. And I write for them about the book, and I love it, because I can do it the way I want to do it, and because I know that other people are reading with interest. If it’s two people, fine, and if it’s two hundred, also fine, but we’re about to have a conversation because it’s the Internet, and we know where to hang out to have a conversation there. People will show up and we’ll talk smart, and maybe we will get smarter or maybe we won’t, but it will be interesting and fun and I’ll walk away learning that I might like to read David Markson for the first time, or I might discover that I’m interested in Continental philosophy even though I was resistant to the idea at first.
What I’m saying is that it’s not about the Internet or print, and it’s not about old journals or new journals. It’s about how different kinds of work and different kinds of engagement about ideas and different goals for what you’re making and how you hope to make a home for it in the world require a variety of approaches when it comes to what I guess we’re calling publishing, although I mean that in the broadest way. I just spent two hours typing this in a comment that is late in the comment cycle, so maybe only Roxane will read it. But now that I typed it, I know better what I think about it, and why, and now I can engage Roxane on the topic, and that’s a meaningful publication to me, because I care about what she thinks and like to exchange intelligent talk with her whenever I can, and I know from past experience that she reciprocates. I could send her an email, but maybe if I do it here, some nineteen-year-old newly aflame with literature because he took a class at Hunter College or Rutgers or Santa Fe Community College will read it and want to become part of this conversation the same way I did when I was sitting in an admissions office in Lake Wales, Florida, reading Robert Birnbaum’s interviews with Ethan Canin and Richard Ford and learning in that way a little bit about how some writers think, and then seeking out their books, and then one book led to another led to another, and before I knew it I had to be writing them, too, and I had to read everything, and I had to flee my old life so I could give myself over to reading and writing and loving literature.
That’s what’s at the core of these questions for me. I care deeply, and my whole life has been ordered at some cost around the pursuit of literary art. So I must give my choices about publication the same kind of care I mean to lavish on the work. To me, it is everything.
I am reading this and will respond more meaningfully tomorrow.
My suspicion on this is that editors are figuring in that visitors want the “quick punch”; they’re calculating in the attention span of what they figure as the ‘average visitor’.
Websites, after all, are generally designed to deliver as much information as possible as quickly as possible, and preferably as much as possible instantaneously. The idea is that if the visitor feels the slightest sense of boredom, they’re going to go someplace else.
This is horrifically poisonous for literature, and as a theory applicable to literature: personally, as an editor myself, I won’t buy into it. Gone Lawn will publish long pieces, even really long ones, as willingly as short ones, if they’re good and the author feels that publishing such a long piece in one place is what they want to do. The criteria is the same as for short pieces: it doesn’t have to be “near genius” (as many editors put it) to be considered. It just has too be interesting, and good.
After all: it costs no extra money, and if people are interested then they’ll keep reading. If they lose interest and move on, well, they lose interest. Sometimes they’ll come back later. (I do the same, myself. On a day when I have less patience or less time: I’ll read a little then put it off, then go back again another time.) But the bottom line is that if I get a good piece that I really want to publish, then I’ll publish it, for one essential reason: I want people to see it.
And see it people will, year after year: it’ll still be there, it’ll pop up in your favorite search engine when you’re trying to find out what a certain writer’s work is like. Can’t say the same for print journals, can you?
And even if the visitor doesn’t read the whole piece on their first visit: often times they will eventually.
Worrying about how length MIGHT affect traffic is just silly, I think. You have a great piece in your hands that you want people to read? It’s 12,000 words? Who cares! Publish the damn thing!
“primarily” (type — I bet there are more, too.)
Ha! I typo’d typo and typed type instead.
Ah, Kyle cracks himself up.
Yes.
@KM: Everything above sounds entirely reasonable; that’s pretty much the attitude of everyone I know (up to ten people!) with a few pubs under their belt. Who doesn’t want an audience? Or a great job? Or a variety of choices? I’m sort of shocked you seem at all hesitant about expressing those views.
i’m trying to eliminate ‘that,’ too. more often than not, it makes my sentences sound stilted. or like they take too long.
Kyle,
This is fantastically well set forth. No sarcasm. Glad to see this put this way at this length.
I know I am the only one who has said what they know they are thus-far.
Great two posts, kyle
Wow, so much to comment on here.
1. Roxane – it’s frustrating, online vs. print, but it will change in time. Kyle spoke to that very well, excellent job Kyle, really said it all there, I couldn’t agree more.
2. VQR – holy crap, had no idea this was all going on, sad and messy and, well, sad some more.
3. Mary Miller – off to read that, she’s the best, go buy BIG WORLD right now up at Hobart, it’s really amazing.
4. LMC – has been very cool so far, can’t wait to get into Tyrant.
i’m trying to eliminate ‘that,’ too. more often than not, it makes my sentences sound stilted. or like they take too long.
Kyle,
This is fantastically well set forth. No sarcasm. Glad to see this put this way at this length.
I know I am the only one who has said what they know they are thus-far.
Kyle, you say a lot of really important and interesting things here. I admire the amount of attention and thought you give to where you send your work. Where to send work and why is something I think about quite a bit too, particularly with regard to book length work. I have a project being shopped around and I’ve thought about where I want it to go and if I want it to be published by a big publisher or a small press and what those choices would mean for my writing and my career. I agree that the distinction, ultimately, isn’t about online versus print. I also think its valuable for writers to talk about cost/benefit analysis more often. So many people say it’s all about the art and so on. It’s nice to hear someone vocalize that they put thought not just into their writing but also into what happens to their writing.
Great two posts, kyle
The problem isn’t any structural or essential difference between “Print” and “Virt” but one of empirical taint: right now, Online standards are just too low. There are too many zines and they are stuffed with too much meh-level material. It’s sort of ostrichy or disingenuous to ignore the issue (no pun intended).
And will it really change in time or will “Print” take on a legendary aura (“When giants walked the earth”, they’ll sigh) when Virt is everything?
Wow, so much to comment on here.
1. Roxane – it’s frustrating, online vs. print, but it will change in time. Kyle spoke to that very well, excellent job Kyle, really said it all there, I couldn’t agree more.
2. VQR – holy crap, had no idea this was all going on, sad and messy and, well, sad some more.
3. Mary Miller – off to read that, she’s the best, go buy BIG WORLD right now up at Hobart, it’s really amazing.
4. LMC – has been very cool so far, can’t wait to get into Tyrant.
Kyle, with this post, count me as one 20-year old aspiring writer affected. Well done, and thanks.
Roxane, question for you— I remember you having some misgivings bout the whole Tin House independent bookstore receipt-with-submission gimmick. Do you think there are similar issues with the Franzen one-off book club (don’t buy from Amazon, Borders or B&N), or no?
Personally, I’m cool with both, just curious to hear what you think—there’s some interesting discussion going on in the comments of Stephen’s Rumpus post about it, including that Borders manager getting all hot/bothered.
Kyle, you say a lot of really important and interesting things here. I admire the amount of attention and thought you give to where you send your work. Where to send work and why is something I think about quite a bit too, particularly with regard to book length work. I have a project being shopped around and I’ve thought about where I want it to go and if I want it to be published by a big publisher or a small press and what those choices would mean for my writing and my career. I agree that the distinction, ultimately, isn’t about online versus print. I also think its valuable for writers to talk about cost/benefit analysis more often. So many people say it’s all about the art and so on. It’s nice to hear someone vocalize that they put thought not just into their writing but also into what happens to their writing.
The problem isn’t any structural or essential difference between “Print” and “Virt” but one of empirical taint: right now, Online standards are just too low. There are too many zines and they are stuffed with too much meh-level material. It’s sort of ostrichy or disingenuous to ignore the issue (no pun intended).
And will it really change in time or will “Print” take on a legendary aura (“When giants walked the earth”, they’ll sigh) when Virt is everything?
True. The stigma is that “online means sub-standard” . . . and worse, the websites of some of these webjournals are just poorly designed, and some of them don’t present the work in a way that either looks ‘professional’ or allows the work to appropriately speak for itself. (I’m not naming anyone.)
For example: adding crazy backgrounds that make the work half-legible does NOT help, and it doesn’t respect the work.
But I happen to think that there are better long-term advantages for people who publish on the web: it’s important that people are able to see what your writing is like: it helps them to make a decision on whether or not you buy their book. Seems to me people are more likely to buy if they’ve read your stuff first, and more than just one piece.
But of course: no reason you can’t publish both in print and online.
Kyle, with this post, count me as one 20-year old aspiring writer affected. Well done, and thanks.
Roxane, question for you— I remember you having some misgivings bout the whole Tin House independent bookstore receipt-with-submission gimmick. Do you think there are similar issues with the Franzen one-off book club (don’t buy from Amazon, Borders or B&N), or no?
Personally, I’m cool with both, just curious to hear what you think—there’s some interesting discussion going on in the comments of Stephen’s Rumpus post about it, including that Borders manager getting all hot/bothered.
“Seems to me people are more likely to buy if they’ve read your stuff first, and more than just one piece.”
I’m always leery of advertised books with only blurbs, and no excerpts, to offer… true.
To the larger point: Literary Criticism of Online Material remains weirdly pupal. Is anyone doing *serious* critiques of Online Material yet? The medium will have grown up when perceptive critics arrive to set up triage and put that terraflop of online lit-matter against or through some kind of comparative framework, laying the groundwork for a real conversation and for writers to develop in a way that has nothing to do with the mediocratizing, market-research crutch of workshopping. The crafts-camp-like-encouragement that passes for “reviewing” at the moment is holding the medium back.
What are needed are workshops, degrees, departments, programs – many of them – and, especially: Perfessers and Criticks of Twitterature.
——
Steven, do you think the problem is one of scale? that the many-to-the-manieth people trying to write well online means that the many who do (in, say, your view) are just hard to find?
It’s not simply a matter of finding a community of taste, ‘people who bought this also bought …’ style. The people you communicate with probably all would vary by, as a guess, 50% with you in Top Ten lists (living Europeans, dead Americans, Russian novels, books with characters named ‘Gomer’, etc.). You’re not pleased to be in touch with them because they rate DeLillo and Roth as highly as you do; the literary part of your enjoyment of their company (in whatever media) depends on their articulations of their judgements, right? (It’s different with political economy – being friends with someone whom one thinks is politically a dunce, one just can’t get into current affairs and not say angry things that can’t be walked back.)
I think it’s a matter of the nearly complete disintegration of an elite consensus of Quality, and the growth of a honeycomb of canons, where, for however much history, there had been a series of terraced mountains of The Canon. Which magazines, which blogs, which new (or newly rediscovered) writers . . . it’s exhilarating, but also confusing and wearying, not to be able to trust almost any disclosures of data on a largely-trackless aura-continent like the internet.
For the moment, I’m mostly concerned with how to develop an up-to-date, well-sustained and comprehensive catalog that will actually prove popular. A board of judges evaluating the content of every online endeavor is a little more than I’m willing to plan for, at the moment.
Hi K. My misgivings were largely with having to jump through a hoop to send a submission. I felt it was punitive more than meant to encourage people to buy independently because most writers are already buying books, doing so at independent stores, and also, some people, such as myself, don’t live near independent bookstores. Now, Indiebound mitigates that to an extent but still… The Franzen one off club not allowing people to buy books from a big box store is silly but whatever. Just as with the Tin House thing, I don’t really care. These are matters of principle. I personally don’t have a problem with shopping at Amazon, Borders, B&N etc. I enjoy independent bookstores. I think, ultimately, people have to stop looking at this topic as an either/or scenario and think more in terms of an ecosystem where there’s a place for everything.
“What are needed are workshops, degrees, departments, programs – many of them – and, especially: Perfessers and Criticks of Twitterature.”
Hah! Okay, I’ll give you credit for that one.
I think I know what Steven is gently alluding to, and it’s not about scale. Well… it is and it isn’t. The scale is indicative of another issue. I don’t want to say it, but you know what I mean. C’mon… c’mon… .
True. The stigma is that “online means sub-standard” . . . and worse, the websites of some of these webjournals are just poorly designed, and some of them don’t present the work in a way that either looks ‘professional’ or allows the work to appropriately speak for itself. (I’m not naming anyone.)
For example: adding crazy backgrounds that make the work half-legible does NOT help, and it doesn’t respect the work.
But I happen to think that there are better long-term advantages for people who publish on the web: it’s important that people are able to see what your writing is like: it helps them to make a decision on whether or not you buy their book. Seems to me people are more likely to buy if they’ve read your stuff first, and more than just one piece.
But of course: no reason you can’t publish both in print and online.
“Seems to me people are more likely to buy if they’ve read your stuff first, and more than just one piece.”
I’m always leery of advertised books with only blurbs, and no excerpts, to offer… true.
To the larger point: Literary Criticism of Online Material remains weirdly pupal. Is anyone doing *serious* critiques of Online Material yet? The medium will have grown up when perceptive critics arrive to set up triage and put that terraflop of online lit-matter against or through some kind of comparative framework, laying the groundwork for a real conversation and for writers to develop in a way that has nothing to do with the mediocratizing, market-research crutch of workshopping. The crafts-camp-like-encouragement that passes for “reviewing” at the moment is holding the medium back.
What are needed are workshops, degrees, departments, programs – many of them – and, especially: Perfessers and Criticks of Twitterature.
——
Steven, do you think the problem is one of scale? that the many-to-the-manieth people trying to write well online means that the many who do (in, say, your view) are just hard to find?
It’s not simply a matter of finding a community of taste, ‘people who bought this also bought …’ style. The people you communicate with probably all would vary by, as a guess, 50% with you in Top Ten lists (living Europeans, dead Americans, Russian novels, books with characters named ‘Gomer’, etc.). You’re not pleased to be in touch with them because they rate DeLillo and Roth as highly as you do; the literary part of your enjoyment of their company (in whatever media) depends on their articulations of their judgements, right? (It’s different with political economy – being friends with someone whom one thinks is politically a dunce, one just can’t get into current affairs and not say angry things that can’t be walked back.)
I think it’s a matter of the nearly complete disintegration of an elite consensus of Quality, and the growth of a honeycomb of canons, where, for however much history, there had been a series of terraced mountains of The Canon. Which magazines, which blogs, which new (or newly rediscovered) writers . . . it’s exhilarating, but also confusing and wearying, not to be able to trust almost any disclosures of data on a largely-trackless aura-continent like the internet.
For the moment, I’m mostly concerned with how to develop an up-to-date, well-sustained and comprehensive catalog that will actually prove popular. A board of judges evaluating the content of every online endeavor is a little more than I’m willing to plan for, at the moment.
Hi K. My misgivings were largely with having to jump through a hoop to send a submission. I felt it was punitive more than meant to encourage people to buy independently because most writers are already buying books, doing so at independent stores, and also, some people, such as myself, don’t live near independent bookstores. Now, Indiebound mitigates that to an extent but still… The Franzen one off club not allowing people to buy books from a big box store is silly but whatever. Just as with the Tin House thing, I don’t really care. These are matters of principle. I personally don’t have a problem with shopping at Amazon, Borders, B&N etc. I enjoy independent bookstores. I think, ultimately, people have to stop looking at this topic as an either/or scenario and think more in terms of an ecosystem where there’s a place for everything.
Yep.
“What are needed are workshops, degrees, departments, programs – many of them – and, especially: Perfessers and Criticks of Twitterature.”
Hah! Okay, I’ll give you credit for that one.
I think I know what Steven is gently alluding to, and it’s not about scale. Well… it is and it isn’t. The scale is indicative of another issue. I don’t want to say it, but you know what I mean. C’mon… c’mon… .
Yep.
I’d guess that “twitterature” has occurred to lots of people in the last couple (?) of years, Owen, but I invented it, too. Is the common term ‘flash fiction’? I should say: I don’t mean to sneer with the word. I don’t see why a stream of pops can’t be a form of literary art – it’s easy to think of genres of literature coming in similarly pithily bursting (or decompressing) units.
I’m also pretty sure, thanks to the post I was responding to, that Steven does not agree that “scale” is the problem: “too many zines […] stuffed with too much meh-level material.” Optimism of the will; pessimism of the intellect — I like being an optimist, and resent reality for making pessimism the smarter play.
Steven’s Ina “screenplaypoem”, at his blog and linked-to on another thread ‘here’, is a funny spate of twitterature. Check it out.
I don’t know . . . when you said “twitterature” I took it literally — I thought of the people who seem to be starting to treat Twitter as a means of self-expression. Which is fine, of course, I’m not knocking it. But it also reminds me of that ‘cell phone book’, or whatever it was called, that craze that started up in Japan among teenagers.
Everything has it’s place. I don’t knock anyone for the means they choose to express themselves. But in your post: what I found most funny was “we need workshops”.
As for flash fiction: while I don’t like the term, I don’t see anything wrong with that, either; in fact I don’t see how you can compare flash fiction to Twitter, that’s pretty derogatory. I mean: I think I understand your point, I just don’t think it’s totally fair.
Vonnegut wrote in short bursts. It’s just how he wrote. Some people write best in short bursts, it’s just how they’ve found they can best express themselves, in writing.
Deaders, Owen:
“Steven’s Ina “screenplaypoem”, at his blog and linked-to on another thread ‘here’, is a funny spate of twitterature. Check it out.”
It was a deliberate formal challenge to myself to boil a longish-short-story’s-worth of narrative (with tragic subtexts of death and incest) to the barest bones without losing anything essential to the story. So I “invented” these weirdly-uniform lines, half of which were dialog/description/and stream-of-conc all-in-one. It’s Twitter-y and Twitter-allusive but not really Twitter-inspired. I was pleased with the very strange tone I found. I worked very hard on that surface; word-by-word. Most of my stories are formal challenges.
I want to read more of the results of the deliberate formal challenges that *other* writers present to themselves: that’s my plea/gripe/dream, in a nutsac.
(for the sake of convenience: http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/introducing-ina-boyd-a-screenplaypoem/ )
I’d guess that “twitterature” has occurred to lots of people in the last couple (?) of years, Owen, but I invented it, too. Is the common term ‘flash fiction’? I should say: I don’t mean to sneer with the word. I don’t see why a stream of pops can’t be a form of literary art – it’s easy to think of genres of literature coming in similarly pithily bursting (or decompressing) units.
I’m also pretty sure, thanks to the post I was responding to, that Steven does not agree that “scale” is the problem: “too many zines […] stuffed with too much meh-level material.” Optimism of the will; pessimism of the intellect — I like being an optimist, and resent reality for making pessimism the smarter play.
Steven’s Ina “screenplaypoem”, at his blog and linked-to on another thread ‘here’, is a funny spate of twitterature. Check it out.
I don’t know . . . when you said “twitterature” I took it literally — I thought of the people who seem to be starting to treat Twitter as a means of self-expression. Which is fine, of course, I’m not knocking it. But it also reminds me of that ‘cell phone book’, or whatever it was called, that craze that started up in Japan among teenagers.
Everything has it’s place. I don’t knock anyone for the means they choose to express themselves. But in your post: what I found most funny was “we need workshops”.
As for flash fiction: while I don’t like the term, I don’t see anything wrong with that, either; in fact I don’t see how you can compare flash fiction to Twitter, that’s pretty derogatory. I mean: I think I understand your point, I just don’t think it’s totally fair.
Vonnegut wrote in short bursts. It’s just how he wrote. Some people write best in short bursts, it’s just how they’ve found they can best express themselves, in writing.
Deaders, Owen:
“Steven’s Ina “screenplaypoem”, at his blog and linked-to on another thread ‘here’, is a funny spate of twitterature. Check it out.”
It was a deliberate formal challenge to myself to boil a longish-short-story’s-worth of narrative (with tragic subtexts of death and incest) to the barest bones without losing anything essential to the story. So I “invented” these weirdly-uniform lines, half of which were dialog/description/and stream-of-conc all-in-one. It’s Twitter-y and Twitter-allusive but not really Twitter-inspired. I was pleased with the very strange tone I found. I worked very hard on that surface; word-by-word. Most of my stories are formal challenges.
I want to read more of the results of the deliberate formal challenges that *other* writers present to themselves: that’s my plea/gripe/dream, in a nutsac.
(for the sake of convenience: http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/introducing-ina-boyd-a-screenplaypoem/ )