"the North" (issue 67, January 2022)

"the North" keeps going - about 130 big, square, two-column pages. 136 poems by 78 poets (Philip Gross, Maura Dooley, Graham Mort, Pascale Petit, etc). There are selections from the pamphlet competition winners. There are about 17 reviews, and articles on particular books/poems. As usual there's a "Blind Criticism" article where 2 poets comment on a poem without knowing who the author is.

It's a good read.

• I liked "The Chain Ferry, memory" (Philip Gross)
• I liked "Dutch Masters in Sepia" (Maija Haavisto)
• I didn't get "From Seat E39", "On Balance", or the Jenny King poems
• I liked "Before the frost" by Anthony Wilson
• Helen Evans' "It's fun, if you're a child" is an 16 line specular poem
• I liked "Night Journey" by Jamie Coward, though I would have preferred it as prose.
• I liked "David Hockney's flip-flops" by Tessa Strickland
• River Walton has 6 pages of poems with illustrations. 6 pages too much.
• I liked most of "Rewind" by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
• I liked "Today you went to lunch with a cave" by Sarah Barnsley. Had it begun life as prose, I think it would be considered damaging to quantize it into little chunks.
• Despite the hypey puffs I didn't like any of Helen Seymour's 6 poems.

Several of the articles (and even a few of the reviews) are appreciations - of dead or favourite poets; of single poems or books. I should practice writing these, keeping all reservations at bay.

My Writing Year (2024)

This year I've written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I've radically revamped 4 old stories - by merging 2 of them I think I've produced 1 printable piece.

I've had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that's about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I'd write some proper reviews. I haven't, though I've read (or listened to) about 200 books. The nearest I've got to writing reviews is writing in detail about some short story collections (my favourite type of book, I've realised). Long ago I wrote articles/craftnotes, sometimes many of them in a year. It's a while since I've done that. Maybe next year.

Currently I've 4 stories sent to competitions, 3 stories sent to magazines, 10 flashes with magazines and 10 poems with magazines.

Lessons from academic science publishing

What is the point of periodicals?

• To make work available
• To judge which work to publish (and edit it)
• To archive work
• To record who first had the idea

The Web had changed the speed/density of communications so much that ideas and feedback can be communicated in seconds rather than months. The Web has also encouraged the call for free access to publications.

The small-press literature world I'm interested in has tried to adapt to this changing world. Here are a few observations from the science/medical world, where careers and lives can be at stake.

• Minimal Publishable Unit - If you're being assessed by the quantity of papers you publish, it doesn't make much sense to put 3 good ideas into a paper when each of them could have been the foundation of a paper. So you use "salami slicing" to produce 3 papers.
  I've seen poetry sequences that seem to be thinly spreading ideas to the same end.
• Who pays? - In the old days, papers were printed in paper journals that libraries had to pay a lot of money for. The referees who read the submissions weren't (and usually still aren't?) paid - it was a good thing to mention on CVs. Nowadays journals are usually online-only. Submission is usually free but the publication fee might be thousands of dollars. This model of publication is open to abuse.
  Many literary magazines now charge for submission to fund their free-access publications.
• Pre-prints - Free-access sites exist where drafts can be sent to get comments, and to stake a claim on work. It means that important (perhaps life-saving) findings are quickly available to all. Some grants require that all the resulting papers are public access.
• Paper mills - Some periodicals have lax quality control. People pay to be published in them so that they have a publication they can quote. There are grey areas.

Helen Ivory at CB1

Helen Ivory read tonight, along with some open-mic poets who read 22 poems. Her pieces were all from her latest book about witches, hinting at how some of the issues associated with witches/women then (attitudes to menopause, beauty, etc) persist today.

The Cambridge (UK) writing scene

Writers new to Cambridge can take a while to find out what's on. Here's a list of starting points. I've mentioned web sites though often it's better to follow on social media.

• Literary Festivals - The Cambridge Literary Festival site gives news about their 2 annual festivals and some one-off events too. There are plans for a Cambridge Poetry Festival in 2026.
• Performance -
  • CB1 hosts monthly poetry open-mics, some with guest poets.
  • Cambridge Storytellers
  • The Junction hosts some spoken word events
• Bookshops - Heffers and Waterstones organise events. Secondhand bookshops like Amnesty International (Mill Road - it has a short story section which is always a good sign) and Oxfam offer interesting collections. Bodies in the Bookshop specialises in crime fiction.
• Public Libraries - readings and regular writing events
• Evening Classes and Clubs - Cambridge writers etc. There's also a budding Mill Road Poetry Group
• Cambridge University - student societies; readings; writers in residence, etc. Varsity offers some info. You can apply to browse in the University Library.
• ARU - Cambridge Writing Centre is a recent development that promotes many events
• Local periodicals/publications -
  • Cambridge Literary Review
  • Cambridge poetry
  • Students once a year produce a literary anthology - "The Mays".
• Environs - Ely has Toppings - a bookshop which runs many events. Also at Ely there is Fenspeak (open-mic and readings). At Norwich there's the National Writing Centre.

Redundancy in prose

The novels I've recently read/heard commonly have the following type of redundancy, the voice not always being one of the characters. Even when it is, I find it distracting. Me being pedantic?

• The building was triangular in shape ("It should have been me" by Susan Wilkins)
• I watched his Adam's apple rise up and down in his throat ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• He nodded to himself ("The Maidens" by Alex Michaelides)
• I thought to myself ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• I screamed out loud ("Unfaithful" by J.L.Butler)
• with audible clicks ("Dark Pines" by Will Dean)
• She lets out an audible sigh ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• hitting the ground with an audible thud ("The Last Library" by Freya Sampson)
• she paled visibly ("The Hidden Beach" by Karen Swan)
• Holgate visibly winced ("The Fine Art of Invisible Detection" by Robert Goddard)

Story magazine rankings

Brecht de Poortere's Top 1000 Literary Magazines ranks literary magazines that print fiction, 1st being The New Yorker and 1126th being Witcraft. They write that "The ranking is based primarily on prizes/anthologies. For journals that do not figure in any of these anthologies, the number of Twitter followers is used for lack of a better metric." As they point out, non-US magazines score badly with that system because UK/Eire anthologies aren't included - "The Stinging Fly" is only 299th, and "Stand" isn't there at all. Nevertheless it's a useful resource - a spreadsheet, so you can download it and add your formulae.

I've only been in 1 of the top 100 magazines. Here's my complete list

The Forge Literary Magazine	87
JMWW	171
Moonpark review	236
Necessary Fiction	239
Fictive Dream	317
Worcester Review	355
Splonk	404
Brilliant Flash Fiction	416
Dribble Drabble Review	426
Full House Literary	501
Paragraph Planet	503
Unbroken	556
Ink, Sweat & Tears	595
Toasted Cheese	695
Literary Stories	716
Every Day Fiction	770
Wensum Literary Magazine	967