>Are you a writer? Do you support literary magazines? Do you subscribe to one or more? I think every writer who wants to be published in literary magazines (which is an important first step for many emerging writers who want their work to be taken seriously by literary agents and book publishers) should subscribe. Not only to help those magazines survive but also to keep an eye on what editors are publishing and writers are writing. (Check out the New Pages Big List of Literary Magazines to find some you’d like to subscribe to.)
Because I let my mind wander from my writing just now and my gaze landed on my shelves of literary magazines, and because I have a database that allows me to do this easily, I decided to find out how many journals I have in my collection. It turns out that I have about 750 individual issues (700 or so if you subtract all the little One Story issues) of 160 different magazines. I wish I could say I’d read them all, and I get more behind each week as new issues arrive–last week the new Ploughshares came, as did a VQR, and Indiana Review, a Prairie Schooner, and a Redivider–but I’m comforted that I can dip into these magazines whenever I want.
Say, if you need to find something, come on by. There’s a good chance I’ve got it.
>Great advice, Cliff. I've got a nice stack of literary journals myself. That's one place where I look for new authors.
>Wow – 750! That's impressive. Mine pile up, too. My nightstand holds 35-40: 2 stacks of 12 or so on the main surface and a huge stack on the shelf below. It's disheartening when I peruse them and see that some of them are from a year ago already!
>I really like One Story. There's something about the size of it. It feels so…do-able! I like Meridian and Shenandoah, too. Not so keen on Beloit. It's a little too surreal at the moment for me. But yes, we need to grease the palm that feeds us…or that we hope will feed us one day!