Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair 2025

I visited today's Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair in London. Poetry book publishing still looks healthy. The books are well produced too.

Getting short stories published (with a UK bias)

Let’s face it, short stories aren’t popular in the UK. In 2002 "fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two thirds were by writers from abroad" (Debbie Taylor, Mslexia). Things have improved since then – mostly because of small presses. Even so, when a collection does well it’s because the author’s already famous - Jojo Moyes, Tom Hanks, etc.

Before you try to publish a story collection (or publish it yourself) it’s a good idea to get individual stories published (not least because publishers look in magazines for authors). There are several ways to find the right place for your stories -

• Each year Salt publishes “Best British Short Stories”. All the stories have been previously published, so you can find out where the stories come from. Alas, none of the 20 stories in “Best British Short Stories 2024” came from English literary magazines, largely because hardly any exist (Scotland’s “Postbox” is the only UK paper-based story magazine I know). The best-represented magazine was US-based (online) “Fictive Dream” with 3 Flashes from UK-based authors.
• If you like a short story collection, look at its Acknowledgements page to get ideas for where to send stories.
• There are several online lists of magazines that accept stories. One of the most useful ones is Brecht de Poortere's, freely downloadable from https://www.brechtdepoortere.com/rankings which tries to rank them objectively, 1st being “The New Yorker” and 1126th being “Witcraft”. It’s a spreadsheet with many columns of information so you can add your own formulae to search etc.
• “Stand”, “London Magazine”, “Granta”, “Dream Catcher”, "Confingo", “Orbis”, and “Under the Radar” are about the only UK print literary magazines that print stories between poems. In the USA and Ireland the situation is much better.
• There used to be quite a few themed anthologies – SF in particular. Nowadays they're not usually open-submission - they tend to be themed around illness, ethnicity, LGBTQ, etc
• There are Facebook groups that tell you what opportunities are available – e.g. “Submissions: Magazines and publishers”
• Many magazines use Submittable to deal with submissions. Magazines have to pay if they get too many monthly submissions. Some magazines stop accepting submissions once they reach their limit, so submit early in the month. Duosuma - is an alternative to Submittable, more focussed on writers’ needs. They have details on over 7,500 publishers/agents which can be searched using over 20 search criteria – free for a trial period.
• You often need to pay to submit nowadays - $3 is typical. Sometimes you get money if your story is published. If you’re going to pay, perhaps you might as well enter competitions. Several produce anthologies of the long-listed pieces, and publishers notice prize-winners. I wouldn’t bother entering competitions unless the 1st prize is at least 100 times the entry fee.
• Flash is the big growth area. There are many online options available, and collections are increasingly common. Flash can be as long as 1500 words - a short story!

Warning – for any decent magazine, acceptance rates are likely to be below 1%.

Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I've already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I've not read Laurie Bolger's book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger's anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I'm looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father's death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn't respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn't a space. This all makes sense to me - some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be "stage" versions of "page" poems.

Spain

I stayed a week in Spain, mainly based in Sevilla, which I've not seen before. Beer's cheap, drivers are very well behaved, and OAPs get 50% discounts on many of the attractions. We walked over 15km/day, seeing most of the attractions and chancing upon other things - covered markets, the Hungarian pavilion of the Seville Expo '92, a multi-venue craft fair in courtyards/studios etc. We tried a tapas bar, a vegan restaurant, a roof-top bar, a Michelin-listed restaurant (I tried calamares) and the same "family restaurant" twice.

We didn't hire bikes - cycling up to Toledo would have been a struggle. Once there, I saw chess sets, swords and marzipan. Jews, Muslims and Christians sometimes lived together, sometimes fought.

In Cordoba, the Mezqita (Mosque) incorporates a 16th century cathedral. The river's wide enough to have had 4 watermills. A big Arabic waterwheel had been copied.

Culture wars continue to this day. Here someone (a purist Italian maybe) has defaced a menu, crossing out the Hawaii option.

In a church shop they were selling this nativity scene accessory - a version of the "Jesus saves" joke.

The Alcázar was impressive. The peacocks performed for the tourists. The place appeared in Game of Thrones. We also went into the smaller but still impressive Casa de Pilatos - a private house

The Arabs in Sevilla had a notable poet long ago.

The later Cervantes' name and characters appear in several places

This bookstall was part of the big flea market in Madrid.

I hardly saw any charity shops. This, I think, is a charity bookshop.

And here's an English language bookshop.

Madrid has a cemetery of 5 million graves (we saw it from the train), and much else besides.

States of Independence, 2025

Today I visited Leicester's "States of Independence" event - crowded as usual with small press publishers and writers (Roy Marshall, Emma Lee, etc). I bought the 2020 and 2021 "Leicester Writes Short Story Prize" Anthologies (a bargain), and "Flash Fusion" (by South Asian Writers) - the pieces I've heard from it so far sounded good.

Sleepy heads

When Italian artists began to imitate classical statues, they copied the blank eyes. On rare occasions a statue’s eyes were closed, not blank. If the figure was in action we had to imagine that their pose showed us their dream. More commonly such statues were lying, or at least their head was sideways, like this sculpture in a village outside Cambridge.

Sophie Cave's "The Floating Heads" (Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) uses another trope - floating, which is more to do with dreaming, I'd guess.

In painting, the "sleeping lover" is a genre, but that's not what Dali's depicting in "Sleep" - the head looks more like a dirigible that's lost all hope, precariously propped up. In paintings, closed eyes can mean death, but except for crucifixions statues of the dead are rare. I suppose using stone to represent death is too literal.

But couldn’t these figure with eyes closed be blinking? We spend about 2% of our waking life with our eyes closed. Perhaps Venus de Milo was caught in the moment of blinking so we can see her but she can’t see us. Nowadays kids sometimes paint eyes on their eyelids. Eyes, after all, are the windows of the soul. If Michelangelo had known that old statues had painted eyes, would he still have given David sculpted irises?

Vona Groake and Karen Solie

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room - a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristram Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I've read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening's poetry - "fog makes surprising what it does not conceal", etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance to read one's poems out is worth paying for. I didn't read but at least half the attendees did.