Seen the Call for Entries for the spring issue of Hot Metal Bridge? The deadline is Feb 25, and the subject matter is up to you. Rumor has it that more submissions in creative nonfiction are welcome.
Looks like Hobart is looking for stories for their baseball issue. I hear spring training has started. Batter up!
Yesterday I went to a crazily well-attended panel with editors from Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction and No: A Journal of the Arts. The upshot was: we get a lot of submissions, be smart and read the magazine you’re submitting to, don’t be discouraged if you get rejected, keep trying. Pretty standard, seemed to me, but the room was packed; maybe it was new to everyone else.
Duotrope has a searchable database of literary venues — 2100, they say — and their deadlines. So go get ’em.
Nothing much has changed about submissions since I edited a poetry magazine during 1972-87. There will be only a few editors who “edit” per se — who develop relationships with a stable of writers and help to shape their work. There will be only a few editors who offer a product that reflects not just a specific taste or range of tastes but who strive to explain those tastes via parallel criticism (reviews, essays, etc). I don’t mean the sort of partisan griping one hears, especially on the web. And only a few editors know how to promote their magazines. My advice to the writer is: write your book, find and leverage a mentor (someone who will teach you how to revise, if you’re capable of learning such a thing), take your mss to a publisher who gets a “first shot” at your work, and then, once the mss is taken, go to the magazine editors. Best to use them to promote your forthcoming book. What else are most of them good for?