literary magazines

River Furnace’s Fashion Issue is absolutely everything.

Fashion has always been a point of contingency for me. Fashion is made to a standard size or specification than it is to order. It’s like an ancient text that seems to offer an inventiveness for Black people and Black folk’s pleasure where the rest of the world vehemently rejects it. However, the marketing, fashion and entertainment industry aims to exploit these inventive Black spaces. It obfuscates just as much as it brings to light.
~ Juju

Fashion is more than expression. Fashion is denial, refusal and incoherence where they are not allowed — and through this defiance, self fulfillment. Fashion, like art, is the product of imagination, of energy and soul put to purpose for a goal that is under no obligation to be explained. That vacates still life to give birth to more. This, too, is fashion.
~ Warpath Slave

Fashion occurs at the intersection of body and world, an opportunity to (non)conform. Online, it is an invitation for commentary, which you can ignore. But if you’re ditching the lesbian sport shorts to go out in a dress, prepare to absorb their stares, or have a hand on your mace for when the men follow. Remember, t/girls, our accessories are also part of our fashion.
~ Neptune

Read River Furnace: The Fashion Issue here.

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September 9th, 2020 / 1:30 pm

Roxane Gay

Too Many Of Us, Too Much Noise

Over on the Versal blog, one of the editors (Megan M. Garr) talks about the impossible economics of publishing a literary magazine and there’s a great discussion taking place in the comments. Money and literary magazines–there are no easy answers. The whole post is worth reading. After a conversation with some strategy consultants, he writes:

They were appalled by some of the cliches we throw around every day. Like, writers are poor. Like, people submit to journals they’ve never read. Like, bookstores buy the journal at a 40% discount. Like, bookstores don’t even buy it, they just take it on consignment.

I was floating after that meeting. I took a breath, got some perspective, confirmation that we navigate somewhat crazy waters here, that we model ourselves after the socialist university mags or the utopian zines but we’re actually crashing against regular-old capitalist realities. So of course our survival has become rather freaktified and precarious.

Gee, This is Awkward

smashglass7 Your piece in Lit Mag X was all Oil Glow/Lick-Stick Skillz. I fell in love. So I asked you to submit to a Mag I edit, Lit Y. You did, kind soul. But that piece is only good, not Oil Glow/Lick-Stick Skillz. Now what do I do? Why?

Blake Butler

How Not To Design an Online Lit Mag

It’s not hard to design a nice website. Even if you know dick-all about HTML or builders, it’s pretty easy to find someone who does, and pretty easy to build a minimal site, or a weird and compelling on, that compliments the words. With all the crap against lit journals in the world, the last thing we need is when someone is actually interested enough to have a look, that they come see some cookie-cutter eye-sore that looks like it was designed by a ‘special’ 8th grader in 1995 (in a bad way).

Take a site like DIAGRAM: this site looks so nice sometimes I just sit and stare.

Other sites, though, well, they’re still on training wheels, and those wheels are made of Jell-O.

(1) Expanded Horizons: What in the shit is this? First of all, when I come to your page, the first thing I see, the VERY FIRST THING, is you asking for donations through Amazon. Not a table of contents, not even some bitmapped image of a goat with a lily flower. Just begging for money. First of all, we all know it costs money to run a journal (even though with an web journal it is little to none) but if you are going to build your site with that bit of info up front, you’re making it hard for anybody to even get interested in what you’re supposedly promoting enough to want to give you money to ‘keep you afloat.’ I mean, it actually took me a minute to find the link to your first ‘issue’ so that I could even read what you are ‘publishing.’

This is a pretty long post, so if you’re interested, we’ll continue after the jump.