Resolutions: Resolving!

Remember way back when, when Shane and I resolved to support more literary magazines?

The literary magazine, once known for its ability to stimulate and titillate the minds of intellectuals across a vast spectrum of existences, is making its triumphant return into the hearts and conversations of millions and millions and millions and millions of beautiful people just like you.

Well, I’m happy to say I now have a subscription to One Story, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Redivider, and come March 15th, Ploughshares. Though I have absolutely no idea when I plan to read all of this, I know that I hope it will be underneath my covers with a flashlight.

What lit mags have you subscribed to or read at the library?

Where We Live: Wigleaf, etc.

By Melanie Yarbrough

It’s been a busy week, what with my preparations to go home for the holidays and Shane’s working crazy hours. We’re sorry if you’ve felt abandoned. It doesn’t mean we haven’t been thinking of you, checking up on you, missing you. Have you been missing us? Is this creeping you out?

This week’s Where We Live is a hodge podge, as are our brains at the moment, and we beg forgiveness.

Yes On 1: A Literary Proposition

By Shane Solar-Doherty

I’ve got some pretty ridiculous news to spill. The literary magazine, once known for its ability to stimulate and titillate the minds of intellectuals across a vast spectrum of existences, is making its triumphant return into the hearts and conversations of millions and millions and millions and millions of beautiful people just like you.

I see that you’re skeptical. Well. Read this. Read this. Read this and this and this and this (not necessarily in that order). Read these.

Here at TTTR, we’ve not been shy about lauding the importance of exposing more readers and writers to literary magazines. Now, with all this good news, our blood is pumping and our veins are gushing with excitement. That’s right, I said our veins are f’n excited. Imagine how other body parts must feel. Mel and I are getting in on all the hype, pooling what little spending money we have together, and wildin’ out on literary mags, starting with Keyhole Magazine, Paper Darts, and Electric Literature. (More on our choices in posts to come.)

And that plan, to venture out together and put our financially unstable lives on the line for literature, got us thinking: If more of us who care about the current state of literature, but can’t afford to independently shell out the dough for a subscription, found a friend to join us in tapping into our inner fiscally irresponsible teenage selves and splurging on a year-long lit mag subscription, this would be a truly beautiful world. Thus, we have Yes on 1: A Literary Proposition.

Support for Literary Magazines Begins with Writers

As you could probably tell from reading Mel’s review of Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go, which appeared in this year’s Best American Short Stories, we’re pretty pumped about tomorrow’s BASS panel event hosted by Harvard Bookstore. For my own preview leading up to the event, I’ve considered some subjects here that series editor Heidi Pitlor discusses in the preface to this year’s edition of BASS.

By Shane Solar-Doherty

Since 2007, Heidi Pitlor’s first year as series editor of The Best American Short Stories, a lot has changed. E-readers have grown vastly more popular; reputable lit journals have folded and new ones have been trying to fill the holes; publishers’ budgets have been cut and established editors have lost their jobs. All of which makes Pitlor’s job more difficult when, at the end of a year, she has to sit down and sum up the events of the past twelve months in about three pages.

The preface to this year’s edition of BASS packs in a lot. Being that this is the last BASS of the first decade of the 21st century, Pitlor sums up the 2010 edition in terms of where we were a decade ago. In 2000, Katrina Kenison, then the series editor of BASS, read submissions from about fifty more journals than Pitlor did this year; ten years ago, John Updike, Saul Bellow and J.D. Salinger were all still kickin’ it; lit journals Story, DoubleTake, and Ontario Review were still publishing at the beginning of the decade, but since they’ve gone under, it’s been left up to McSweeney’s, Tin House and One Story to pick up where they left off.

In illustrating her point about struggling journals, Pitlor points to an article by Ted Genoways in Mother Jones, in which Genoways cites the struggles that The Southern Review and New England Review have had in trying to stay afloat. Genoways’ February 2010 article, titled The Death of Fiction?, explores much more than just those two journals’ troubles. Genoways adamantly encourages young writers to take risks with their writing, to explore themes that will challenge both reader and writer, and to step out of the comfort zone that academia allots them. He suggests that lit journals are flopping largely because no one’s reading them anymore, not even writers. As a result, Genoways thinks “writers have become less interested in reaching out to readers – and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try.”