writing life

Submission Fees and Their Discontents

I have a think-piece – I love that expression – at Mark Danowsky’s newsletter Stay Curious this week. The piece is about submission fees, as the title hints at. I don’t love them, as the title also hints at. Here is a taste:

As a poet with a personal policy of not paying submission fees – except for a good cause or the rare contest fee – the number of journals open to me steadily grows fewer and fewer, not to mention those which have gone defunct. Of course, there are always new journals cropping up to replace them, and while many of them are promising, there is nothing quite like a long-serving journal, one that has survived the storms of time like an old ship, weathered and battle-scarred.

Please read the rest at SC, if you’re interested.

The Way It Was

I’ve got some deep archives, and they’re a mess. I’ve been writing and submitting poetry since the late 1990s, and this submissions sheet is a reminder of just how much has changed since then. Now almost everything has been updated to online submissions forms – Submittable foremost among them – and only dinosaur journals like the Paris Review still require you to send them a SASE. (I remember knocking on the door of their offices on E. 72nd St. in order to drop off a package for George Plimpton, on assignment for the Gotham Book Mart.) These, anyway, were my first attempts at publishing, and you can see the titles of my very first published poems on the right. It’s funny how the passage of time gives value to the most banal artifacts of our lives. Glad I saved this one.

lit mags_90s