Ever wonder how a publication chooses the books it will review? In “A Feast of Books,” The Missouri Review‘s Associate Editor, Evelyn Somers, shares her experience. (And she also shares the news that TMR, which currently publishes three issues each year, is “going quarterly” in 2006.)
A few days ago I received an e-mail from Meridian, the Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia, announcing that the journal is now accepting electronic submissions of poetry, fiction, and essays. This is good news if you like to submit your work online, not necessarily via e-mail, but by using a journal’s specific online submission system.
Using such a system typically requires you to come up with yet another password, and you’ll have yet another e-account to keep track of. But there are benefits: you don’t need to print out a copy of your work and prepare an entire submission package; you don’t need to spend postage on the submission (or the SASE); you don’t need to leave your chair to get your work “out.” It’s less likely that the work will get “lost in the mail” and you can log in and confirm manuscript receipt and find out if the editors have rendered a decision yet.
But some people may wonder: is this convenience worth paying a reading fee that one can forego by sticking to the old snail mail system?
Meridian is charging a $2 reading fee for work submitted online (apparently one prose submission or up to 4 poems). The editors’ e-mail explained that this fee is necessary for two reasons. First, using the online database software raises their operation costs. And second, they’d like authors “to hesitate, a little, before just clicking a ‘send’ button.”
Two dollars isn’t outrageous, and as the editors point out, it’s possible that postage costs would end up “about the same,” anyway (and don’t forget the money saved along with the toner and paper). Still, plenty of journals (One Story and Kenyon Review are two examples that come to mind) accept online submissions through their own database systems without charging a penny.
Yes, these also tend to be journals that don’t accept snail mail submissions at all. Still, if they can run an online submissions system without charging writers money to use it, it seems that others should be able to, too.
You may not yet know about Scott McLemee’s “Intellectual Affairs” column, which runs twice each week over at the Inside Higher Ed site. On Thursdays McLemee covers new books; on Tuesdays he offers, as he recently phrased it: “the usual smorgasbord: thumbnail accounts of scholarship, glosses on current events, interviews with academics and writers, personal essays, reading notes, and the occasional targeted spitball.”
Last week the column addressed “general-interest cultural quarterlies.” Practicing writers who target these journals will be especially interested in what McLemee has to say about The Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, The Minnesota Review, Boston Review, and others.
Here’s how this article came to be: on a discussion board a poet mentioned encountering some difficulty trying to locate paying market possibilities for a longer poem. She was finding that most guidelines specified line limits that didn’t accommodate her work, or they didn’t address the question at all.
So the next time I checked all the guidelines for our e-book directory of paying poetry markets (I do recheck each and every source when I revise the e-books; I’ve once again updated and expanded the poetry market directory just this past month), I made a note of publications that seemed particularly welcoming to longer poems, saying as much on their websites.
I posted a couple of times back on the thread to let that poet know about what I was finding. Now all of our own practicing poets can benefit, too.
Artful Dodge
Department of English
College of Wooster
Wooster, OH 44691
Literary journal. Send six poems, maximum. Note that “long poems are encouraged.” Pays $5/page, plus copies.
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Gettysburg Review
Gettysburg College
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1491
Literary journal where “both short and long poems are of interest, including longer narrative poems.” Pays $2.50/line for poetry. Contributors also receive two copies of the issue containing their work and a one-year subscription.
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Massachusetts Review
South College
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Literary journal. Submit up to six poems. “There are no restrictions in terms of length, but generally our poems are less than 100 lines.” Pays $.35/line for poetry ($10 minimum) on publication, plus 2 copies.
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Meridian
University of Virginia
PO Box 400145
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4145
Semiannual, student-edited literary journal. Submit no more than five poems. Doesn’t mind long poems “but we aren’t likely to publish any ‘epics.'” Pays $15/page, $25 minimum and $250 maximum. “These amounts are subject to change without notice.” Download a complete printer-friendly version of the guidelines at the site.
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New England Review
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753
Literary journal considers “long and short poems.” Submit no more than six poems at a time. Pays $10/page, $20 minimum, plus two copies of the issue in which your work appears.
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Online literary journal is “open to a wide variety of poetry, from the highly experimental to the traditional formal.” No length restrictions. Pays $30/poem.
And don’t forget the Malahat Review’s biannual Long Poem Contest (it does charge a fee). For details on this competition, open to both Canadian and foreign entrants (and to be held again in 2007), check with the journal.
(This article was originally published in The Practicing Writer Newsletter, October 2005.)
NEWN (formerly New England Writers’ Network) publishes on a quarterly basis and describes itself as “devoted to helping writers around the world to get published and to teaching through content and example.” And its submission period has very recently changed. Regular submissions will now be welcome from January 1 through March 31. This is a low-paying market for fiction, essays, and poetry (but a paying market nonetheless). Read more about it and check the guidelines here.