Monday, 9 December 2024

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.

Sunday, 1 December 2024

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.

Saturday, 30 November 2024

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 -
  • 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 -
  • 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.

Sunday, 24 November 2024

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)

Monday, 18 November 2024

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
JMWW171
Moonpark review236
Necessary Fiction239
Fictive Dream317
Worcester Review355
Splonk404
Brilliant Flash Fiction416
Dribble Drabble Review426
Full House Literary501
Paragraph Planet503
Unbroken556
Ink, Sweat & Tears595
Toasted Cheese695
Literary Stories716
Every Day Fiction770
Wensum Literary Magazine967

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

It's a book of statements by poets about poetry. I've added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

  • "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me" (John Heath-Stubbs)
  • "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh)
  • "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine)
  • "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas)
  • "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam)
  • "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams)
  • "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams)
  • "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams)
  • "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue)

Saturday, 9 November 2024

Fleeting gone

The link I had to a poem in Fleeting has gone dead, so I'll reprint it here -

The Gallery Affair

Then I see her, the girl of my crutched dreams -
Mona Lisa smoking a pipe that's not a pipe,
sipping absinthe from a fur-lined cup
that tickles her moustache.

We miss the train that leaves the fireplace,
but anyway it's raining businessmen so we stay in,
smooch to the Broadway Boogie Woogie,
sleeping in this tent with en-suite Mutt urinal.

We've learnt our lessons. Abstraction came too easy
for Brancusi, the universe already constipated with objects.
He fed his 2 white dogs lettuce floating in milk.
Schiele was more realistic - he couldn't afford the paint,

he said, when the judge who burnt his work in public asked
why he chose models with amputated feet. Our millennium
opened late for staff training. By the time we wake to
Turner's blazing sunrise, it's all on video, our taut bodies

reviewed as allusive symbols of when beauty was freer
than porn, though the cafe's a rip-off and the Impressionists'
cheap pigments are fading in the light, irreplaceable as our love,
the frame and signed canvas statements in themselves.