Hard out There … if You’re in Print

Anyone who’s been spending time lately at the major book fairs knows this already – about the only thing that’s sure to pack the conference rooms these days is either a book that’s got a movie contract, with celebrities attached, or a panel about e-publishing.  And yet there’s no end to the interest, in writing at least.  Reading may be another story.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses currently lists 274 magazines as members, 106 presses.  Another 56 venues are combinations of the two, and 55 online presses are members as well.  Wikipedia lists around three hundred literary magazines as well.  So … is anyone out there reading all this stuff?

Writers are, presumably. But there’s another group too, their editors. 

If we judge simply by the thousand or more submissions each year at MR, the number of short stories, essays, and poems that gets written is mind-boggling.  Probably not 300,000, but still… And somewhere there’s an editor who will read them. Every one.

So then.  How often does it happen that we find one from over the transom, or its e-equivalent, that just stops us cold?  Something without fanfare, no instant name recognition, not even a personal hit list appended full of journals of record?  Well… it happened to me, just a couple of days ago.

This story is set in Michigan, where I happened to grow up, and – to risk shorthand contradicting my own critique – it hit home like a rust-belt Winter’s Bone.  Denis Johnson, maybe, or David Rabe (I can’t resist giving our current issue another plug).  In short, the near nihilism and brutality that comes from economic devastation: meth addicts, parking-lot partiers, and football as a form of gang warfare. 

But there’s also a trio of friends – two star players and their reporter girlfriend – so close as to seem inseparable, each mad with desire to get the hell out.  You can imagine where that goes.  Oh, and did I mention the mysterious apparition with the “iron gray hair, beak nose, and the houndstooth hat”?

One more thing.  You won’t be reading this story in our pages.  Much as we wish it were otherwise, this one was the third in three weeks simultaneously submitted, and snatched away already, unbeknownst to us, before we sent the acceptance.  I won’t mention here who did get the story, or even the author’s name.  I do think, however, that he’d have done better with us. 

Oh yeah.  Even if we won’t be printing it, you still have to read that story.  It’s that good.