Subscribing to litmags

Years ago, when I posted England's literary magazines, 1985-2012, I subscribed to many magazines. Now I only subscribe to "Under the Radar", "The Dark Horse", "Acumen", "Stand", "Flash" (Chester Univ) and "Orbis" because many of the magazines I used to subscribe to no longer exist. I try to rotate subscriptions nowadays, my choices rather affected by which magazines accept my work, though I've never been in "The Dark Horse" - it's 5 years since I even submitted.

I read occasional issues of many other magazines - "PN Review", "Poetry Review", "Poetry", etc. I'm less good at reading online magazines - I never read them cover to cover, though I regularly browse Antiphon, Spelk, and Jellyfish Review.

How much longer will paper literary magazines last? A couple of years ago MsLexia led with an article by Debbie Taylor which considered the plight of litmags. She wrote that a "combination of passion and (relative, if not outright) poverty is typical of the vast majority of souls working in the litmag sector", that in 2016 about a third of mags were print only, a third were online-only, and the rest were mixes of various proportions, and that the editors' own work often suffers because of time constraints. She pointed out that Granta and The London Magazine had private backing.

The situation's worsened since then, the souls working in the litmag sector getting older each year. On the bright side -

• The magazines still surviving presumably pick up a few subscribers from demised ones. I suspect the ones that do the best are tied into a press, have launches, run competitions, and have a social media presence.
• New paper-based magazines continue to appear, often with high production values.

Moroccan mules

Middle Atlas mountains. Waiting at the entrance to our hostel are the mules who'd carry our luggage.

Marrakech. A mule relaxing in a sunny side-road.

Zerhoun. Like most of the mules we saw, this one was well padded. I don't know what was in the tanks. Cooking oil?

Middle Atlas mountains. When faced with a mule, the rule is to stick to the inner side of the path. This mule was carrying supplies to the village where we stayed.

Second again

Before I retired from the rat-race I was first in the West Sussex poetry competition (1992), first in the "short Fiction" (Univ of Plymouth) competition (2006), and placed in competitions run by "Varsity", "Cambridge Writers", "Kent and Sussex Poetry Society", and "Staple". I've more or less given up entering competitions nowadays - my poetry's more suited to magazines, and my better stories are too literary, I suspect.

I make exceptions for some competitions that are free to enter, have book-publication as the prize, have a theme that I've already written a piece for, or publish an anthology.

I belong to a writers group (Cambridge Writers) that offers free entry to their competitions for members. I don't think I've ever won their story competition. Often I don't even get commended. This time I managed second again - worth £70. I think I'll try harder next year.

Blackboards

Short story books I've recently read

Over Xmas I caught up with some books that have been on my reading list for a while -

• "An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It" by Jessie Greengrass (JM Originals, 2015) - Plenty of the narrators share a suave, sub-claused style - e.g.

  Nor did the severity of the winters deter me. They would be hard, I knew; not casually hard, as the tedium of January in southern England is hard, with its mud and drizzle and skies like sodden newsprint, but a force in opposition, a way of being rather than a backdrop; and consequently their survival would confer the certainty of great courage, persistence and inner strength (p.37)

  Several are loners escaping from grief or bereavement by fantasising or staying in remote places, though we're told that

  While all of these putative new lives involved escape, to claim this as their function is a reduction of their appeal to the obvious and trite. They represented I think not so much a running away as a sloughing off (p.41)

  At the end they can't always re-enter the world they retreated from. "Dolphin" is my favourite piece.
• "Attrib. and other stories" by Eley Williams (Influx Press, 2017) - Lots of wordplay and synaesthesia, break-ups (of which there are several) triggering a dash into etymology/typography -

  An exclamation mark is a full-stop with a cockatoo's crest. Full stops, three full-stops. Had you been waiting for me to finish your sentence and to join the dots? Lichtenstein or Seurat (p.72)

  I'm impressed by "And back again", perhaps my favourite story in all these books.
• "Vertigo" by Joanna Walsh (DorothyProject.com, 2015) - The most self-consciously literary of these books perhaps. Almost an episodic novel, each story potentially having the same narrator with the same preoccupations. Other women are there to be compared with. Men are unreliable husbands, ex-husbands or potential bedmates. She's navigating through roles, loss of confidence leading to loss of cohesion - mind splits from body, language splits from mind. The narrator's state of mind is sometimes represented by language ploys - repetition, disruption, point-of-view changes, etc -

  I am too old to look good in a bikini and I have not, across the years, paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini for me to look good in a bikini. But, even when young, I never paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini (p.105)

  "The children's ward" is perhaps my favourite piece.
• "A book of blues" by Courttia Newland (Flambard Press, 2011) - The most conventional of these books, and the one that most dealt with social issues. The longest too, twice as long as some of the others, and with the most variety. He uses several viewpoints - first person female, first person male, various third person varieties - and various voices. "Beach Boy" was my favourite piece.

Recent publications

I'm behind on publication announcements. Here are the most recent ones -

• Bat enclosure (Dogzplot) - prose about adolescence, maybe
• "Love’s only a letter away" and "Some versions of Pastoral by William Empson" (Glasgow review of books) - word-play poetry
• What she missed (Spelk) - prose about missing, and about home

Offensive poetry

I've updated this and moved it - see Offensive poetry.