Short and Sweet

The end of the year is approaching, and as I do each year about this time I take stock of the writing I've sent out to literary journals. Around fall, when my submission fatigue set in, it appeared that this would be a bumper-year for publications, however after several publications dates were postponed, it ended up just keeping pace with past years. Here's a selection from/of pieces that appeared on the world wide strangeness this year:

". . . His fingertips are like gentle sandpaper, soft from years of rubbing." - from Night Hungers, in Kill Author

"On the horizon a red sunset walls off the earth from grey rain clouds." - from Brick Harvest, in The Prose Poems Project

"Naturally, it is important for all business to be conducted reclining." - from To the Heart, in the Nashville Review

I know of a few pieces I'll have published in 2012, and meanwhile here's a final piece for 2011. After I submitted to Serving House Journal I had a brief exchange with the editor, Steve Kowit, about one piece, then SHJ decided to publish another and forgot to tell me.

No matter; it's so small (the smallest I've ever had accepted) that I might have forgotten to tell me too. You can read it here:

"At night, cars with one burned out headlight pretend to be motorcycles."


Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays and New Year!

Poetry Prize Finalist

My poetry manuscript, "Where the Bees Are Going," was a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

Poems from the manuscript can be found all over the internet (as well as a smattering of other places):

To the Heart
Night Hungers
Brick Harvest

The manuscript is still being considered for a number of late-Spring and Summer contests. Obviously I hope someone picks it up. And if not I'll continue to edit, cut, and add so hopefully it will be accepted next year.

New Piece in The Nashville Review

I have a piece in the current issue of the Nashville Review.

My piece, about an island with a uniquely evolved people and culture, is called To the Heart.

I'm pleased To the Heart is in the company of other provocative works. I particularly enjoyed Ben Loory's short story The Cracks in the Sidewalk and Sarah Vap's long poem excerpt Winter:aphorisms.

Postcard Rescue #5

Front: 302 Tunnel No. 4 Moffat Road Colorado
Postmarked: October 18, 1908

Stamp: Franklin, 1 cent

Recipient:
Miss Nora Sheriff
Sulpher, Springs
Colorado

Postcard Message:

Oct., 16 - 1908
Hello! Heaps of snow, almost
sleighing. Winter
must be comming
near. good-bye
Charles H. Yust

Self Promotion #2

Self Promotion
And why not? These are a few links to pieces of writing I have in internet literary (or baseball) magazines. I'm sort of hoping if I post these links enough maybe they'll rise to the top when people google my name and maybe push the link to my sub-par performance in a 5K race I ran 5 years ago out of the top hits (the same one where I'm mistakenly listed as female)...

And leaving aside self-promotion, these are some pretty good journals, if you're just looking for random things to read on the internet, as you clearly are if you're here, then you should give 'em a read.


580Split
580Split is an annual journal of Arts and Literature housed by the MFA program at Mills College in Oakland, California. This is their first web edition. Show them some love.

Slurve Magazine
Slurve: The literature and arts review that masquerades as a baseball publication

2 River View
Distinguishes itself by including audio of the authors reading their work. Sadly I had a cold when it was due, but I think it's a great concept. Hearing a work read can add a lot to the literary experience. Though I'm not sure how well these mp3s will mix into your gym work out.

Diagram
Diagram has a nice clean-quirky aesthetic. Diagram is one of the few literary journals, whether print or web, that consistently excites me with their content. Every issue has a few pieces that are just a little different, a sort of special surprise. Plus they have great merchandising, including the "POE TRY" booty shorts (poe on the left cheek, try on the right).

Opium Magazine
Famed creator of the "Literary Deathmatch." While the authors featured don't fight to the death, they do one of the more exciting reading series around. All pieces on Opium Online feature an estimated reading time. Good for when you have a very specific amount of time to want to spend reading.

More links to publications next month. Hopefully.

A Brief Note on Self-Promotion: when I started this blog I was kind of hoping that this would be the top site one would find when they searched for "Ori Fienberg." However, I've since discovered that the only way to raise this site in those rankings would be to constantly insert Ori Fienberg's name, ideally in every post. But while I wanted this blog to be contiguous to my identity I don't want it to be so blatantly obvious. Alas, I have another problem, an ethereal web nemesis named Uri. No matter how many things I get published, or have articles that feature my name (Ori Fienberg) google still asks me whenever I search myself if I meant "Uri Feinberg." My main motivation to be published used to be entirely to get a wider audience for my writing and build up my C.V., but now I have a new goal. Someday I hope when Uri searches his name google will emasculate his sense of pride and identity by asking, did you mean "Ori Fienberg?"

Going Somewhere...?

A couple of years ago I worked as an assistant editor/reader at The Iowa Review. During that time assistant editors, mainly students were encouraged to contribute book reviews. I'll admit, I cared precious little for the enterprise of reviewing and was more concerned with entering my name, in a very small way, into the national literary dialogue. I went to the library and picked up several collections of new poetry from the University of Iowa's library. While I picked up books that had blurbs by authors I'd heard of and a couple that had won significant awards, I didn't find anything that I found exciting, or memorable. In response I wrote a couple lukewarm reviews, and one patently negative review.

However, when I submitted them to The Iowa Review's editors they were widely rejected. The general consensus was that publishing a negative review was petty, and in some way detrimental to the enterprise of poetry as a whole. The Iowa Review's main editor David Hamilton explained that to him it seemed as though there was no point in damning a collection with faint praise, because most poetry is doomed to obscurity anyway. Instead he preferred to use the reviews as an area to showcase and promote writing that the editors felt deserved a better readership.

Certainly that's a worthy editorial stance, however, it then seems disingenuous to call these sections and contributions "reviews." To my mind a review should at least have the option of being negative, or at the very least, critical. Otherwise literary journals should rename their review sections "Writer Showcases" or succinctly, "Props."

The most recent edition of POETRY includes an opinion/review piece Going Negative, by Jason Guriel, that addresses this issue. Guriel is perturbed that reviews tend to have a generically positive slant, and he offers up three brief reviews that take a more analytically critical approach. While I appreciate the candor of Guriel's reviews I'm not certain what he hopes their impact will be. However, Jason does offer this reason for why we read so few "negative" reviews of poetry collections:

"Maybe poetry is so marginal, so fragile a commodity, we worry about kicking it when it’s already pretty clearly down."

This captures at least a part of The Iowa Review's sentiment. Unfortunately, this fear is holding poetry back. It seems as though most books of poetry are reviewed by another poet, often times a poet who knows the author, or would like to be on good terms with the insular academic community most poets are a part of. This means reviewers are taken not as independent arbiters of opinion, but instead as members of a club dedicated to promoting other club members. If all reviews are positive it artificially inflates the value of poetry as a commodity.

But more than the issue of reviews, the poetry community needs to do some serious consideration of the last part of his statement, poetry is "pretty clearly down." And so I ask, why is poetry down? How is that poetry has become so culturally irrelevant? And what can the poetry community do to change that perception?

As a start I think acknowledging the over all state of poetry and minor individual failures, or "going negative," is at least an honest first step, and it's significantly better than running, or hiding scared.

FREE!

Swag with Swagger:
Second Run had a circus theme going on at its table. A roll of the dice could win you several prices, including peanuts, and in my case a little bag of caramel corn. Puerto Del Sol was giving away beer cozies, and alligator clips with magnets (a double whammy). The Macguffin had several types of swag, including magnets, and a nift pen/highlighter combo. Wichita State University had the best temporary tattoos and were also giving nifty post-it note book tabs. Finally Oxford Magazine was giving away back scratchers.

Other common forms of swag:
Postcards: Probably the least utilitarian swag available. Yes, I know, you could potentially send these postcards, however nearly everyone I think would be interested in receiving a postcard featuring the cover of a literary magazine was at AWP, and if they wanted that particular image, they probably took it. Now if each postcard were postage paid, that would greatly increase the likelihood that I'd send one. On the other hand, while I love swag and I was also on the look out for new literary journals to submit to I was also reticent to pick up too many flimsy photo-copied submission guidelines. Most of the postcards listed their journal's website, so at least they're sturdy and informative.

Bookmarks: Second only to postcards in blandness. A bookmark at a bookfair? Big surprise. Also, who uses bookmarks anyway? I usually remember the page, or stuff a random piece of tissue in there, or with mass market paperbacks I'll tab a corner. In all fairness, many of the tables with bookmarks also had other forms of swag.

Totebags: Most commonly offered by MFA programs, which were giving them out for free, while literary journals were giving them away with purchases. I think there's really a limit to how many tote-bags a person needs, particularly since everyone started the conference with an AWP 2009 tote. I mainly appreciated the totes as another bag for swag.

Stickers: When I was younger stickers were a big thrill and I used to wear them, or display them on my school notebooks. The problem with wearing a sticker is that you can pretty much only wear it once.

Pens: Again not so exciting, but extremely high on utility. I'm in a constant state of using and losing pens, so getting them for free is fine by me.

Magnets: High on utility and exposure. All the magnets I picked up at AWP are sure to find a place on my fridge.

Temporary Tatoo: This one is curious. In the 90s I used to apply tatoos from Zebra Stripe Gum despite the fact that those tatoos were in no way cool. The tatoos at AWP were amusing, but I'm not sure if I'll actually wear any of them. Furthermore, very few of them took the tattoo concept very far. I would have like to have find literary journals incorporating their logos or names in tramp stamps or perhaps with a little barbed-wire. But the idea is fun. Maybe they'll make their way onto my body during the summer.

Copies of journals: Apparently at past AWP bookfairs free copies were much more common. Maybe it's a sign of the financial times that nearly every booth was selling them, albeit at a discount. And also, journals with humongous endowments or plenty of funding, like Poetry Magazine couldn't give copies away fast enough. Poetry Magazine was also giving out CDs, DVDs, postcards, and bookmarks. They were not giving out temporary tatoos.

Pay to Play

Just a little anti-shout-out to Narrative Magazine.

Publishing resource after resource instructs authors to avoid magazine where you have to submit a reading fee, and yet Narrative Magazine is still heralded as a beacon of online literary journal legitimacy. From their own submissions page:

"The reading fee is $20 for prose manuscripts, $10 for up to five poems, and $10 for audio submissions."

They try to justify this by pointing out that this is less than the subscription fee for many literary journals. However, I'm not aware of any online publications that require a subscription. You just go to the website and read as much as you want. That's as opposed to the Narrative website, for which you must create a log-in profile before you can access full pieces. Leaving aside that argument I can't think of another reputable literary journal that charges writers to submit. The closest I can find is The Missouri Review, which has a $3 fee for online submissions, but they still offer the option of submitting in hard-copy with no fee. Narrative's $10 fee for audio submissions is especially ridiculous, given that you're not supposed to send in audio of more than five minutes. Five minutes of audio is roughly equivalent to 500 words, or two double spaced pages.


Narrative further tries to justify its fee by referencing their non-profit status and the fact that they pay contributors, however the numbers just don't add up. Part of the appeal of starting an online literary journal is that it only costs at most a few hundred dollars every year, with maybe a one time cost web-designer cost if you want your journal to be extra snazzy. On Narrative, if your story is selected as a "story of the week" they'll pay you $150 (after your $20 fee). While this is more than any other online publication, it's not more than many print publications. When I had a poem accepted in Subtropics they paid me $200 (Narrative pays a max of $50 for poems), and no one ever has to pay a submission fee.

Furthermore, Narrative features a page listing the Narrative Circle, Friends, Patrons, Donors, and support from readers . If we assume the minimum contributions for each level than before we even get to Donors the total contribution is at or over $241,000. That's a pretty large chunk of change to still be charging a submission fee.

And while there is proof positive that they publish new and emerging authors, they also regularly feature work by best-selling authors. This issue includes T.C. Boyle and Anne Beattie. There's nothing wrong with publishing well established writers. In fact it's great to have the balance, and provides a special thrill to the emerging writers who appear in their company. But I wonder... Does T.C. Boyle have to pay $20 when he submits a short story? And then does he only get the standard $150-200, or does he get a little more...

For further discussion check out the articles on these blogs:


Wet Asphalt

and

Arts and Palaver

Forcing already under-paid writers to pay a submission fee when your journal has hundreds of thousands of dollars of donor support? Not what O.J. would do, if he did it.

-O.J.