A PUBLIC SERVICE?

Perhaps all literary controversies are minor controversies, but, even on the Lilliputian isle of letters, there are scales and differences in degree to consider.  An excellent case in point: the recent back-and-forth that erupted around author and Gigantic editor Lincoln Michel’s “A New Literary Magazine Ranking” (headline since revised to “A Guide To Literary Magazines”), published at The Faster Times.

Before its subsequent transformation, “A New Literary Magazine Ranking” took the form of a “tiered” guide of serial markets for fiction, with journals taxonomized based on a formula measuring: Pushcarts and other prizes won; circulation figures; whether or not the market actually pays (and if so, how much); and reputation, which Michel tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to subsume under the heading of “buzz.” Why undertake such an effort? To help writers, particularly aspiring writers, increase their chances of getting published.

This is nothing but laudable, and Michel’s piece initially held much promise. Practical applications aside, a coherent, as opposed to vehement, scrupulous and transparent rendering of the Baroque economies of regard, patronage and potlatch and on which literary publishing depends is desperately needed, if “only” for ethical reasons. (Let’s indulge quickly in a bit of early 21st Century nostalgia, before Mo Rocca can start delivering “Foetry” one-liners on VH1’s I Love The Naughties) Unfortunately, via the alchemy of reader feedback, Michel’s piece instead deteriorated, perhaps inevitably, into a soggy morass of injured pride, hurt feelings, and offended palates. “Ranking elimae as high as The American Scholar is pretty funny, and probably a result of the fact that our trusty list-maker has contributed to the former. I declare this list suspect!” Net result: a largely abandoned project.

This is not to say that Michel’s rankings were not without their conceptual flaws.

THERE IS NO ORDER TO THE UNIVERSE

1) Michel’s list was far too indebted to previously assembled rankings (such as John Fox’s), with all the built-in prejudices (prizes as a measure of quality) and limitations (highly localized sense of what qualifies as “recognized”) of the same .

2) Specific weightings for each factor, if employed, were not provided or adequately explained by Michel.  For example, if a journal  showing off multiple Pushcarts and respectable circulation figures nevertheless pays very little, did Michel place that title above a less anthologized publication with a larger subscriber base and a reputation for generous compensation?

3) As several comments on Michel’s original piece point out, not all fiction markets are apples.  Some are oranges, some lemons, some clusters of grapes, some tomatoes (technically fruits, but commonly classified as vegetables) and some creatures as exotic and hothouse-y as the mangosteen.  While from one perspective, it just feels “right” to place The New Yorker at the top of the food chain — for reasons of pay, because the magazine reaches a national audience, and because history has lodged its hefty thumb on the scale — it is not primarily a publisher of literature. Bemoaning the fact that your prose poems based on a critical reading of Whole Foods Market product descriptions weren’t picked up by Esquire is a bit like feeling defeated because your in-depth profile of January Jones wasn’t selected by Ander Monson for the latest issue of Diagram.  The whole notion of “market” seems to be compromised by the presence of established, almost pre-fetishized commodities like The New Yorker, Playboy and The Atlantic alongside sweat equity overachievers such as Fence, N+1 and No Colony.  Michel tries hard in his introduction to prepare readers to be ready to exercise reservations (“Consider first of all your work and where it will fit.”), but a ranking folding in upon itself with as many exceptions and caveats as are opened up in that advice is only offering excuses for its own collapse. The fact that Michel confined his rankings to markets for fiction — traditionally viewed as a more mainstream and ”conservative” form than poetry — can be offered as one excuse for construing kind as degree, but that leads us to…

4) Poetry, anyone? More to the point, creative nonfiction? Hybrid forms?

5) Although Michel does make brief mention of duotrope’s digest, I find it disappointing that he did not make a greater effort towards incorporating the vast amount of information duotrope collects about rejection versus acceptance rates, response times, genres and subgenres, etc. into his own rubric.  With the proper funding — surely there’s a research grant out there for this — Michel could even have augmented duotrope‘s data with information regarding the educational background of journal editors, editorial turnover (especially a factor for journals associated with MFA Writing Programs, which draw much of their staff from student populations who are only affiliated with the publication for 2 to 3 years at a time), appearances by individual authors in multiple issues of each periodical, and so on. This is the kind of information that could be very useful to writers hoping to use Michel’s list to identify likely outlets for their work.  Not to mention that such an aggregation would go a long way towards a presenting a much more comprehensive picture than we’ve ever had of precisely with how much calculated casualness and through such tortured causality literary magazine publishing actually operates.

PUT THAT IN YOUR SPREADSHEET AND SMOKE IT

Ultimately, however, the issue becomes: how much does information like this really inform, and, given the context, how much more valuable is subjective opinion?  On the one hand, the inherently subjective nature of Michel’s exercise does damn it as just that.  On the other hand, literature, like all the arts, thrives on word-of-mouth, shared passions, and, increasingly, a sense of what is hip and what is not.  It is also worth remembering that literature has a contemporary cultural existence not unlike that of endangered species: for its own good, it is restricted to a protected habitat — academia — and is subject to a scrutiny attentive less to the intangible benefits of ensuring its survival and much more interested in recording behaviors… before there are no more behaviors to observe. For good or ill, literary studies are “trending” more and more toward scientific models of scholarship (cf. Franco Moretti; Jonathan Gottschall; Brian Boyd.) Consequently, something like an algebra of submissions feels right, and, if not almost like a corrective, then at least genuinely au courant. Yet there is no comparable calculus of publication.  Each journal has its own bent, and each journal, at least in my experience, approaches each issue as a gestalt, an object to be carefully designed, a form with its own expressions.  The editor’s challenge is not just to pluck the “good” writing out of the slush pile, but to recalibrate what “good” writing is within the aesthetic parameters of the publication itself, which is bigger than any one individual set of proclivities or choices. If you’ve ever been on the wrong end of a rejection letter, you may scoff, but it is true: “no”s can be labored over much more so than “yes”es, which are often caught in the first sort and do not demand to be read again and again until it is time to begin thinking “between the covers.”

But how can one most effectively quantify something that is as inherently qualitative and experiential as publishing? As Michel notes, the oldest advice in this regard is perhaps still the most applicable:

“As always, it is essential to read the journals you are considering submitting to.  Not only to keep abreast of current work, but to understand where your work fits and to support the literary world you want to be a part of.  Really, if you are submitting you should be subscribing to at least one or two journals.”

I don’t believe there is any accident accountable for why this knowledge owes its shape and its sound to the anecdotal.  For isn’t that what knowledge is: the product of living with information, the actual handling and processing of it.  In a similiar fashion, no writing “of publishable quality” can be understood as possessing literary quality based on a word by word analysis.  Michel could just have easily have said, “Look, you have to be more than someone who just writes.”  To which I would add: you have to have done more than purchase all the accessories required for a “literary lifestyle.”  Rather, you must give yourself over to the care and tending of a literary ecology, stooping and shouldering, wasting resources now in order to conserve them later, rotating your crops, learning to recognize the beneficial effects of “pests,” and reconciling yourself to the tragedies associated with the intellectual commons.  In other words: always, you just have to keep on toughing it out.

by Joe Milazzo
an Associate Editor of Black Clock and Director of Community Education and Outreach at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, whose writing has appeared in Electronic Book Review, Chronometry, Tea Party, In Posse Review, Antennae and Black Clock