How to Read a Literary Journal

I remember the incident distinctly. It was 2002 and I was attending the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, a eager-eyed grad student on the cusp of finishing his MA in English. I stood in line following a reading by two women whose work I admired greatly, looking to get them to sign their books for me. The first woman, from the east coast, had just published her second novel, her first having done very well four years earlier. (She had also published a successful short fiction collection in between.) The other woman, from the west coast, had just published her first book, a collection of short stories, with a major Canadian publishing house. She seemed more nervous and inexperienced than the first woman, unfamiliar with the mores of a literary event. Sitting at the signing table, she would ask each and every one of us in the line the same question with a kind of grating automation as we approached with our books: “Do you want me to sign it or sign it and inscribe it?” When it was finally my turn, having had to listen to this query 15 times in a row, I opted for just the signature, and while she scribbled it onto the title page, I said: “I really loved your book. I had actually read a number of these stories before, when they were published in journals.”

“Journals,” she replied, then turned to the first woman and laughed caustically. “Do people actually read those things?”

Her comment—and its tone—has stayed with me all these years. Here was a young writer who managed to get several stories published in Canadian literary journals, and (according to profiles run of her in our national media) used that track record to land an agent and score an impressive book deal with a major publishing house. Yet, she was more or less confessing in the semi-privacy of a signing line that she didn’t actually read the journals that had helped launch her career, and that there was something anomalous about me because I did. I’m not sure it’s relevant to point out that this writer has, in the 11 years since the incident, gone on to publish exactly nothing else; but I do think it’s relevant to say that there’s not necessarily anything anomalous about her view on journals. I know a lot of writers or would-be writers who don’t read them—even if they do submit to them on a regular basis, and occasionally get some stuff published.

On the one hand, the trepidation or lack of interest is understandable. Literary journals can be intimidating. There are so many of them here in Canada, and who can possibly keep up with them all? And isn’t the quality of their writing a bit iffy anyway, on account of most the contributors being at the beginning of their careers? I know that when I first dipped a toe into reading journals back in the mid 1990s as a wet-eared undergrad in journalism in Halifax, I certainly struggled with them. If a story or poem’s “lead” didn’t grab me immediately, I was prepared to write off the entire enterprise. Surely I, in my 19-year-old wisdom, was better suited to judge the quality of these publications than their long-suffering editors, most of whom slave away in their volunteer positions for years. Thankfully, I grew up and got over myself. I began reading more journals more thoroughly, and came to understand the nuances and the focuses that shape them. This in turn helped me to be a better reader, and a better writer. By the end of 2002, I had published my first short story in one of them.

Now, more than a decade later, I’m married to another writer who also reads journals regularly, and the stream of them arriving in our mailbox is relentless. In the last two weeks alone, we have received fresh issues of PRISM international, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, The Windsor Review and The Malahat Review. We also subscribe to The Fiddlehead, CNQ, FreeFall, and others. We will read them all, most likely from cover to cover. And we will discuss and pass polite judgment on the quality of many of them at the dinner table or on a road trip.

Admittedly, we’re a bit insane. I’m not saying that to be a literary writer in Canada you need to do what we do. Not at all. But if you’re a neophyte and looking to follow the same trajectory that has shaped both of our careers, and the careers of many fiction writers and poets in Canada—i.e. publish in literary journals first, build up your C.V., then land a book deal of some kind—then it sort of behooves you to read a least a few of these magazines on a regular basis. But as mentioned above, it’s kind of intimidating. Where do you start? With so many journals stuffed onto the literary newsstands, how do you find some that you’ll actually like? And what do you do once you start reading them?

So here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the last 20 years, and want to share them with you.

Tip 1: Get over the idea that they’re all the same. Okay, to be fair, a lot of them are the same, or at least appear to be very similar. A writer I know once said that you could rip the covers off several journals in this country and have no way of telling them apart, and it would be hard to argue with him. But still, many Canadian journals have specific sensibilities, and exploring the landscape out there means figuring out what those sensibilities are. I’m pretty sure I could tell, for example, the difference between The New Quarterly and The Malahat Review, even if they weren’t printed in different formats. Room certainly has a specific mandate, as does On Spec or Rampike. Last year, I received a subscription to Matrix magazine after entering a poem in its Litpop contest. I hadn’t actually read Matrix before, and what I discovered was that the magazine published all kinds of fascinating stuff, none of which was really my cup of tea. Now I know not to send them more of my writing in the future, as it probably wouldn’t be a good fit. As for nonfiction, if you can’t tell the difference between the literary criticism in, say, CNQ and the literary criticism in, say, Canadian Literature, then you’ve probably got bigger problems to deal with. Some journals have a regional focus; others focus on a certain style of writing. As the saying goes, find your niche.

Tip 2: Dip a toe in by entering contests. You don’t have to tell me that the annual writing competitions that most journals put on seem, at least on the surface, to be a little suspect. It’s no coincidence that the entry fee is usually exactly the same price as a subscription, and the main objective may be to inflate subscription numbers in time for yearly grant applications. But still. You may want to try reading a journal regularly but are worried about spending money on something you may not like. Entering a contest is essentially a twofer: it means your work will be read on its own terms (that is, your name is not allowed on your entry) with the added bonus that the journal will arrive in your mailbox at regular intervals over the next year. When it does, read it. Read the contest winners with an open mind and see how their work compares to yours. Read it with the idea of figuring out exactly what the soul of the journal is, and whether you want to continue subscribing to it in the future.    

Tip 3: Read journals cover to cover, like a book. It took me a while to embrace this idea. For the longest time, I would only spot-read journals, going in and finding names I recognized or reading pieces out of order. But what I’ve learned is that if you want to have a relationship with a literary journal, you need to read it on its own terms. This means recognizing that most good journals want to take you through an aesthetic arc, that they put a lot of thought into the order and mix of the stories and poems. It’s very easy to parachute into a journal, read one piece, decide you don’t like it, and then dismiss the entire issue as flawed. But if you do this, you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff.  

Tip 4: Get over the idea that journals only publish so-so work by newbies still learning their craft. Patently false. No journal I know of has a mandate to publish only beginners who show some potential for greatness. Most journals accept work from both new and established writers with the only objective being to publish good writing, however they define it. I always marvel at how some of the country’s best writers—writers who may even publish regularly with big presses—continue to put stuff out in journals. For readers, it’s a great way to keep track of what people are working on and get excited about forthcoming books. Speaking of which …

Tip 5: Engage with the work, however you define that term. For me, this means not just seeing the writing in journals as someone’s publication credit, but something worth getting excited about. There are a number of writers whose books I came to specifically because I first encountered them in journals: John Wall Barger and Catherine Owen are two recent examples that jump to mind. I actively seek out more stuff by writers whose works in journals excite me. I also have a number of acquaintances and colleagues in the writing community, and I make sure to let them know if I loved something they published in a journal. I myself had a story recently in PRISM international, and it’s a testament to the reach and impact of that magazine that I received a number of comments from strangers who had read and loved my piece. The lesson is: if you dig something you see in a journal, let the writer know.            

I want to close by pointing out that it’s entirely possible to get your stuff published in journals even though you never read them. Despite what submission guidelines might say, this happens all the time. If you adamantly refuse to even give journals a try, and yet see them as pivotal stepping stones to your own fame and glory, I suppose that’s your business. But let me say this: if a journal publishes you, at least try and read the issue you appear in. I mean, it strikes me as the minimum one can do to acknowledge the hard work that editors and contributors put into these things. And like with anything you read, come at it with an open mind. What you find inside might surprise you.

Review: Waking in the Tree House, by Michael Lithgow

Michael Lithgow’s debut collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House, offers up a mixed bag of styles, sensibilities and approaches as it attempts to reconcile the author’s inner world with an external reality. Here you’ll find narrative poems, observational poems, minimalisms and confessionals, all couched in a language meant to transcend the commonplace and amplify itself to the level of revelation.

For the most part, it works very well. Waking in the Tree House is one of those collections where the titular poem is well-deserved of being singled out. In it, Lithgow infuses the page with visions that are, as he puts it, “so often terrible … so perfectly, beautifully askew.” The poem is about a man who climbs into his childhood tree house after a night of drunkenness to discover he has outgrown the space, and yet is enraptured by the portal it provides into the slightly terrifying natural world around him. Lithgow writes:

 … I lay prone 

beside the soft puckering of sap. And such wind! What coy
stirrings sweep treetops at night, lifting away remnants of what
passes through us in the dark. The little house moved
with my weight; I was too big, too solid for that place.

The musicality of these lines is pitch perfect, yet belies the frightening realizations that the narrator experiences about himself as he trespasses upon his own youth.

Other pieces in the collection are, unfortunately, not nearly as successful. There were times when I felt Lithgow finished his poems in a very closed-off way, as if he were merely cresting toward a pre-determined insight rather than leaving wiggle room for the reader to find—or create—his own. An example of this would be “The old man was laughing,” a narrative poem about youth encountering the elderly, that ends with the line “As if there could be anything more important in the world.”  Or “Bog dweller”, a metaphoric romp about “[t]he parcel of land” in your own head. It culminates with these rather wishy-washy lines:

How did it get this way? Me calling at shadows
in an imaginary fen, and you so near
though far away,
holding this light, guiding me home.

Despite these lapses and the occasional imprecise description (“The smell was wretched …”, from “A rescue”; or “I remember a man’s generosity,/a rough hand in mine, always treating/the child like a man” from “Accounts”), Waking in the Tree House does reward close and repeated readings. One of the other gems in the book is “The boy who planted his words in a flower,” which opens with a quote from Christian Bök’s controversial project to encode a sequence of DNA with verse. Here Lithgow’s words practically trip over themselves with zest and playfulness as he explores the ramifications of this queer hybrid of poetry and science. The reader will want to read it several times to revel in its delights. Even poems that frustrated me upon first encounter came to grow on me. This was especially true of the opening piece, “Swimming”, which struck me as heavy-handed upon first reading but quietly brilliant upon the second.

Overall, Waking in the Tree House is as much a mixed bag of quality as it is of form, but it announces a new poet well worth paying attention to and expecting greater work from in the future.

Review: The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage, by Kingsley Amis

This is a curiously titled tome by Kingsley Amis—curious because it was released in 1997. Should it not then be called “The Queen’s English”? Of course, the title is a play on Amis’ first name: this book, published posthumously two years after the author’s death, is very much a collection of Kingsley’s English, his sense of what the language is and should be, and a grumpy guide to its spelling, pronunciation and overall usage.

Those expecting a farrago of anachronism, snootiness, misogyny, class obsession and good ol’ arbitration, all delivered with tongue placed lightly in the cheek, will not be disappointed. Unlike the other Amis collection I recently read and reviewed, Everyday Drinking, The King’s English doesn’t exactly wear its humour on its sleeve. This book takes as its key antecedent the Fowler brothers’ seminal text The King’s English (1906) and wishes to expand and contemporize their rules surrounding the modern usage of English. The problem is that reading this book in 2013, one can’t help but feel that Amis’ observations aren’t very contemporary at all. And we’re not just talking about his rant about how useless word processors are compared to typewriters.

Take, for example, his section on the proper pronunciation of the word “either.” We all know that “eye-ther” and “eee-ther” are both generally accepted, though we may have our individual preference. Me, I favour the former and agree with Amis that it sounds more officially learned. Yet, that’s not how he puts it. Instead, he takes a gentle dig at lingering class distinctions, saying that eee-ther comes off sounding a bit “underbred.” Of course, there is humour in the audacity of such a statement, and yet I still mistrust the voice saying it.

The King’s English is also not a particularly helpful book to read if you happen to be female. Amis goes to great length outlining the regrettable trend of allowing gender neutral terminology to creep into the language, as if it were a necessary but annoying change on par with, say, no longer being allowed to smoke in bars. He has a whole section on what he calls “womanese”, and states, inaccurately, that malapropism is almost exclusively the domain of the female sex. “I had better take refuge behind the rock-hard factual observation that, unlike most men, women are always getting set phrases wrong.” Is the tongue in the cheek when he writes this? It’s hard to take any of it seriously, especially when it’s coming from someone who considers equality between the sexes to be nothing more than a chimera we should all just give up on.

There are other problems, of course. For a man who published several volumes of poetry, Amis appears to have a rather loose grasp of what it means to speak or write metaphorically. How else would we explain, for example, his chastising us for using words like “panacea” or “crescendo” for anything other than their literal definition? Even when Amis is inarguably right about something, he doesn’t quite get it completely right. He should, for example, be applauded for saying that the rule around split infinitives is nonsense. But he doesn’t go on to say, as Bill Bryson does in his far superior book Mother Tongue, exactly why the rule is nonsense: that it originates out of the fact that, in Latin, the infinitive cannot be split because it is a single word (example: “to love” is amare) and English simply transmuted the rule from that.

Still, there are a few joys coming out of this book. Amis is always engaging and knowledgeable, and he’s able to bring a breadth of knowledge to bear on various elements of our language. The split infinitive rule notwithstanding, his exploration of Latin’s influence on English is thorough and very much worth reading. His guide to common errors between similar words – example: alternate(ly) and alternative(ly) – can also be a great refresher for those of us who learned about them elsewhere.

But the book overall has a mildly dated feel and doesn’t have nearly as much pluck and re-readability as Everyday Drinking. For me, The King’s English will no doubt be a (very) occasionally used reference guide to usage, and little more.

Review: Li’l Bastard, by David McGimpsey

Ah yes, the ‘chubby’ sonnet—David McGimpsey’s innovative retrofit of two extra lines onto this traditional poetic form, plaything of Shakespeare and Milton Acorn, confounder of high school students and other haters of poetry. So instead of the typical 4-4-4-2 breakdown, McGimpsey’s final stanzas get two extra lines, for a total of 16. This affords the pieces in his 2011 collection, L’il Bastard, some additional wiggle room, but it also establishes an air of the unconventional, a bald statement that says, No, this ain’t your daddy’s sonnet.

Even this feels like an understatement. The poems in Li’l Bastard take us to places we rarely go in Canadian verse: part picaresque, part ribald exposé of the middle-aged self, part send-up of the ubiquity of pop culture, McGimpsey’s work is unafraid to explore both the high and the low aspects of our ultramodern world. The book’s 128 sonnets are divided into eight sections, mostly geographic in nature (spanning Montreal, Texas, and other locales that have played a role in the poet’s life) but also includes a flight of ventriloquism involving the 1970s detective show Barnaby Jones. If there is a unifying refrain to this collection, it is that of the poet having to return over and over again, for financial necessity, to the role of teacher. As McGimpsey puts it in sonnet 49, one of the many references to this reality:

In the end, I had to go back to teaching.
I missed the apartment buildings and bookstores,
and by that I mean I needed the money.

One imagines various poetic exploits coming to an end after some prize money or grant funding runs out. But to focus on this binary—of poet as free spirit vs. poet as participant in the work-a-day grind—would be to do Li’l Bastard an injustice. McGimpsey writes with smash-mouth intensity about how even a writer deeply committed to the rich tradition of poetry cannot escape the relentless chatter of popular culture in every aspect of our Western world. He doesn’t critique this noise; he relishes it, finds musical verve in references that span everything from Twitter and The Flintstones to Major League Baseball and the Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire. It shouldn’t work—in lesser hands it wouldn’t work—but the author’s grand vision wins us over.

McGimpsey can be comic and serious, silly and condescending, a prankster and cool observer, all in a single 16-line poem. The success of Li’l Bastard—if I may pay it a slightly backhanded compliment—is that McGimpsey is able to perform his antics on the page without the book growing tedious or predictable. He skirts pretty close to that line in several pieces, especially near the end of the book, but he thankfully has the talent and good sense never to cross it. The result is a poetry collection unlike most you’ll find in Canada, a book as loud and unapologetic as it is clear-eyed and insightful.    

My Q&Q review of Under Budapest, by Ailsa Kay

is now posted on Quill & Quire's website. It's been a while since I've read a book that started out so iffy but then turned into such an engrossing and satisfying read. Kay's exploration of the lingering effects of Soviet aggression in Hungary is well worth checking out. Also, she's guest writing the National Post's Afterword blog this week. Here's the latest post.

M.

My Toronto Poetry Vendors poem is out!

Got word today that my poem "Dressing in Layers" is now out in the spring issue of Toronto Poetry Vendors. As mentioned when I posted about the acceptance, TPV is a really cool concept and I'm pleased to be included in it with so many fine poets. Currently you can find these poetry-dispensing machines in four venues here in the city: the Terragon Theatre, TYPE Books, Saving Gigi, and 3030 Dundas West. So go pop in, buy a poem (they're only a toonie each) and then come back here and tell me what you think.

M.

Review: Flip Turn, by Paula Eisenstein

Stories about competitive sports enjoy a well-earned place within the pantheon of Canadian fiction and poetry. We’ve seen stellar contributions over the years on everything from boxing (Steven Heighton, M.T. Kelly) and the Winter Olympics (Priscila Uppal) to running (Alexander MacLeod) and our ubiquitous national sport, hockey (Mark Anthony Jarman, Cara Hedley, Lynn Coady, Jeffery Donaldson, among many, many others). Why athletic competition lends itself so well to creative writing, I would argue, is that there is often a built-in tension already there for the author; sports can provide a clearly defined set of characters we can root for and an arc that mirrors the tenets of traditional storytelling.

Which makes Flip Turn, the debut novel from Toronto writer Paula Eisenstein, such a curiosity. The sport in question is competitive swimming—an activity that requires intense focus, rigorous diet, and an endless regimen of early-morning practices—and Eisenstein overlays her examination of this sport with a story about a murder committed by the brother of our nameless narrator. Yet despite these promising elements, Flip Turn is almost completely devoid of tension or anything resembling a narrative arc. Eisenstein has instead written her novel as a set of murky, vaguely defined fragments, as if recited to the reader under water. She may very well be trying to subvert our expectations as to what a sports novel can be; but having reached the end of the book, I wondered what she thought she was replacing those expectations with.

A big part of the problem is the awkward and stilted sentences with which much of Flip Turn is written. There were many opportunities with both the swimming and the story of the murder for Eisenstein to use sharp, evocative descriptions and poignant internal monologue. Instead, the book provides passage after passage that left me baffled by what the author was attempting to evoke. Sentences like “Our class feels quiet in an effective, superior way” or “But Julie said she couldn’t be best friends with me because she was already best friends with Donna Snowden so then I wouldn’t be friends with her anymore because it wasn’t good enough for me” had me scratching my head. How am I to imagine a class being “effective” in its quietness? What, exactly, wasn’t “good enough” for the narrator? (That “it” just sort of dangles there.) The worst of these passages came near the end when the narrator is describing her French class. She says, “At least in French I can feel the dark closing in around me, like I have a chance to survive. Math is like the brightness of already being on the other side.” In the margin below this, perhaps channeling Mordecai Richler, I wrote: I have no idea what the author is expressing here. Does she?

But the real issue with Eisenstein’s book is how it overdoes the elusive and elliptical approach to its core story. The narrator’s brother Cal sexually assaulted and murdered a young girl named Selena at the local YMCA, and is now doing time in a psychiatric prison. The narrator takes on the improbable obsession of using her victories in the pool to clear her family name—or at least induce a different response when the public sees it printed in the newspaper. But Flip Turn never fully explores the impact of Cal’s crime on the community, and his actions’ influence on the narrator’s family remains frustratingly obtuse. What’s worse, there are other horrible things going on with our protagonist: she and her swimmates are sexually abused by more than one of her swimming coaches, and yet these encounters are given but a cursory mention. (The narrator seems to have a warped sense of sexual boundaries anyway, to the point of even indicting Selena in her own assault. She says, “Like being that way was Selena’s fault, what she did wrong, for attracting Cal. Not a fault she could be blamed for, just a fault.”)

What Flip Turn does explore, inexplicably, is an array of petty relationships that the narrator has with other girls at school and at the pool. A motley assemble of vague, poorly drawn female characters are marched out, given some kind of trivial interaction with our protagonist, and then scarcely heard from again. This approach goes on for dozens of pages, and left me wondering what all these relationships would amount to, what sort of jouissance they would instill by the end of the story. The answer, sadly, was nothing and none.

Sill, Eisenstein does have her moments in this novel. There are times when she does get the balance of elusiveness and detail just right to create little sparks of pleasure in the reader’s mind. Here’s a passage, of the narrator describing womanhood, that stunned me with its off-kilter beauty:

The reason the moon is a woman and your mother and one day you is because of its pulling power. Your mother pulls you into doing things for her all the time. Like being a great swimmer. Like not being a problem. The reason there’s a man in the moon is the man represents men getting sucked up into her.

Yes, that first sentence is grammatically awkward and yes, there's a lot of jarring repetition in this passage, but it all works. It has the spirited cadence of a fully formed thought.

Sadly, there just isn’t enough of this kind of writing in Flip Turn. The book feels so bogged down with the need to challenge our assumptions about narrative that it undermines itself and misses opportunities for emotional impact. There may be a better story buried somewhere in there, full of tension and well-formed characters and little moments of catharsis. But Eisenstein doesn’t seem interested in running that race. Instead, she’s happy to have her book just do practice laps over and over again in the pool, in the hopes that we’ll still watch even though nothing appears to be at stake.