Category: Literary Publications

A quick thought on Boyd Petersen being named editor of Dialogue

While every fiction writer needs to have a strong internal drive to produce fiction, very few writers will finish and revise stories in a vacuum with no hope of reaching an audience. Literary markets create incentives to invest in the time and effort it takes to produce fiction.

Which is why I’m delighted that Boyd Jay Petersen has been named editor of Dialogue. There is no guarantee, of course, that he and his team will accept my work for publication. And I don’t know that I would have stopped if a different person had been named editor, but having a former president of the Association for Mormon Letters leading Dialogue, and, it specifically being Boyd, definitely amps up my interest in submitting and subscribing* to the journal.

I say amp up. I should say instead: maintain. Or: not diminish. Because Kristine L. Haglund’s editorship** is a key reason that I have continued to write Mormon fiction instead of focusing solely on mainstream SF&F/lit fic. Frankly, I still can’t believe that she published a 10,000 word, Mormon, near future, post-apocalyptic, second person POV story that I wrote. And I doubt that I would have written the straight up Mormon literary fiction story I wrote last fall without there being the slight possibility that Dialogue might be interested in it.

There’s no money in Mormon-themed short fiction. There is not much of an audience. But there is Dialogue‘s audience. Sure, much of the audience is more interested in the non-fiction. And yes, there’s also Sunstone. But when I’ve written Mormon fiction*** over the past few years, it’s been with Kristine and the Dialogue audience in mind. In fact, I don’t think that I would have even submitted to Dialogue if Kristine being appointed editor hadn’t caused me to take a closer look at the journal as a potential venue for my own work rather than just that place that publishes stuff by people I admire. Her editorship influenced my literary production.

So while I probably shouldn’t be creating competition for myself, I do hope that Boyd’s looming tenure will give a bit of a shot in the arm to all of you who write or desire to write Mormon short fiction and poetry. I’ve already decided that I need to write something this year so I have it ready to submit in 2016. I hadn’t planned on doing so. I’m delighted that I have now changed my mind.

*coincidentally, I actually subscribed for the first time a few days ago. I also gave them a $15 donation a couple of years ago because I discovered a PayPal account that had money it I had forgotten about and decided that that was the right place to redirect that discovery. I encourage you to not take after my bad example and become a more regular, active supporter than I have been.

**And that of fiction editor Heather Marx, which Kristine was gracious enough to remind of in the comments below.

***Or at least anything over 1,500 words. The Mormon Lit Blitz is awesome, but some stories require more words.

Vote in the 2014 Mormon Lit Blitz

Voting in the 2014 Mormon Lit Blitz contest ends at midnight Saturday, July 5. Please take a few minutes to vote. Here are the links you need:

Voting instructions for the 2014 Mormon Lit Blitz

My voting method for the Mormon Lit Blitz (it makes the process easier and faster). Please note that this year you’re asked to provide 4 finalists rather than 5. And there are 12 finalists rather 13. And you email everydaymormonwriter At gmail Dot com. But the core methodology for selection still works.

And congratulations to the AMVers who are finalists this year:

“The Primary Temple Trip” by Laura Hilton Craner

and

“Living Scriptures” by Scott Hales

Every book is a failure :)

.

. . . I hope to write another [novel] fairly soon.
It is bound to be a failure,
every book is a failure,
but I do know with some clarity
what kind of book I want to write.

– – –

By titling my Whitney recap as I have, I don’t wish to suggest the five books in the General Category sucked. After all, the novel Orwell was planning to write was Nineteen Eighty-four, an enormous success by about every criteria I can imagine (outside cheerfulness—huge bust on the cheerfulness front). Rather, as I revisit the books I’ve read and reviewed, I want to think about what they suggest about us as a writing community in 2014. I’ll cover them in the order they are listed on the Whitney site which, coincidentally, is the same order I ranked them in.

whitney finalists Continue reading “Every book is a failure :)”

Replacing Irreantum: Readership

Wm concludes his discussion of the issues related to replacing the defunct Mo-lit journal Irreantum by looking at the readership for Mormon fiction.

This post brings to an end my analysis of the barriers involved in replacing Irreantum, the now defunct literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters.

Other installments: Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions |Financial Models | Starting Up | Readership

READERSHIP

This series began by me thinking through the issues related to replacing a small, now defunct Mormon-themed literary journal (Irreantum). Looking at all the challenges (and choices) involved, it’s easy to see why very few are willing to take them on. But if there’s a reason to do it, then it’s for this — the readership. That’s true of any publication, but I think it’s especially true for the Mormon readership. In my experience, although the readership may be small, the actual readers are delighted to find something on the page that they can relate to. It’s important, rewarding work, and if a replacement could come about that expanded the readership that Irreantum had developed, that would be a great gift to the Mormon people.

And yet, I don’t want to downplay the concerns. Mormon publications have a mixed track record. There are no unqualified successes and the trail has been hard sledding the past few years for outlets that focus on fiction (Dialogue and Sunstone seem to be doing okay, but neither focuses primarily on creative work). Literature has long been in last place in terms of attention from the Mormon Studies crowd. And what readership there is seems to me to be fragmented along several axes in relation to content appropriateness; genre-literary; types of narrative art (fiction, essay, poetry, film, theater); socio-cultural experiences (Mormon corridor – diaspora); cultural aspirations (deseret school – missionary school); etc. Continue reading “Replacing Irreantum: Readership”

Replacing Irreantum: Starting Up

Wm looks at some items relating to the starting up phase of starting a successor to Irreantum.

This is a continuation of my analysis of the barriers involved in replacing Irreantum, the now defunct literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters.

Other installments: Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions | Financial Models | Starting Up

STARTING UP

There’s such a wide range of factors involved in starting up a successor to Irreantum that I almost didn’t do this section, but there are a few items to think about in relation to starting up a Mormon literary magazine/journal that I decided I had something to say about.

Irreantum Assets: I’m not sure what all these would be, but at the very least there’s the Irreantum name itself and associated domain name [irreantum.org, which was never utilized for much]. But there may also be electronic files for previous content and those archives (and I don’t how extensive they are–it’d be awesome if there are electronic files that go all the way back to the beginning) could be leveraged for some value. Of course, anyone who wanted to put together a successor to Irreantum would need to put together a proposal for the board of the Association for Mormon Letters. I don’t know enough about the situation to say whether or not building on the bones of Irreantum is a good idea, but it may be worth exploring.

Minimal Start Up Costs: A domain name and a year of web hosting will cost about $100. Depending on the web development skills of the start up team, you may need to add on a premium WordPress (or other free CMS) theme as well as premium. Prices can vary, but a good premium theme can be as low as $40. That’s the minimum. Let’s say you want to produce 4 issues (I think 6-12 would be better) and pay for cover art (which is a good idea). In my opinion, $100 a cover is the minimum you should pay. And then let’s say you publish 6 pieces per issue and pay a token average payment of $20 per work. That’s $400 for a year’s worth of covers and $480 for content. Or say you were willing to pay 3 cents a word and averaged about 4,000 words per story/essay. That would make for 24k words per issue and 96k words total for the year at a total cost of $2,880. That’s all without paying for layout or editing or any additional services or advertising. But let’s say you operate under the exact submissions model as Irreantum and run a contest. For first, second and third place, Irreantum provided $300, $200 and $100. Assuming you’d do both fiction and essay, that’s $1,200 a year.

Crowdsourcing: One way to cover the start up costs would be to crowdsource them using something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The beauty of crowdsourcing is that you are essentially pre-selling subscriptions. The genre community has found some success in funding anthologies and/or a year’s worth of issues of a magazine. Such a campaign could also test whether there is a readership for the magazine. The thing is, though, that Mormon fiction projects don’t have a great track record of being funded via a crowdsourcing campaign. Another barrier is that because crowdsourced campaigns rely on a variety of deliverables to gain traction, often a print product is involved and print versions can quickly eat up funding. On the other hand, it’s easy to see why crowdsourcing is attractive to those looking to kickstart magazines or (more often) anthologies. Let’s say a magazine was able to offer a good range of virtual incentives (no print version) from $5 to $30 and average $15. If you could attract 150 funders (which, make no mistake is a lot in the world of Mormon fiction — it’s certainly no given, but it’s doable), then you’d have $2250 to work with. That’s enough to pay for some covers and token payments to contributors as well as for basic webhosting. On the other hand, what happens if the Kickstarter fails? That can suck the air out of a project. An audience for a fiction publication especially can take a long time to build as potential readers (as well as potential contributors) wait and see if they like the editorial direction of the publication (or just see if the thing is going to make a go of it).

Recruiting Volunteers: based on my experience, here’s how to effectively recruit volunteers.

  1. Have a system in place to manage the work being done. Note that email + attachments is not a good system. Also have a style manual and production manual.
  2. Create a defined list of positions along with the job duties and expected time it will take to do the job well.
  3. Make sure a few of the positions can accommodate a fair number of volunteers just in case they appear (for lit pubs, that’s often slush readers and copyeditors). These are folks who can grow into other positions (either through experience or the ability to commit more time to the cause).
  4. Provide training.
  5. Have people in charge who are responsive and friendly.

Social Media: use it. It’s a must in this day and age. You don’t have to be prolific, but you should be consistent in posting, interact with your followers and have a point of view/unique voice. I’d say that Twitter and Facebook are the place to start, but I’d also play with Pinterest and Google+.

That’s all I have to say in terms of starting up a successor to Irreantum. Any othe analysis would be in response to specific efforts. What did I miss?

And with that, we have one more to go in the series: Readership.

Replacing Irreantum: Financial Models

Wm looks at financial models and especially revenue generation for any potential successor to the Mormon lit mag Irreantum.

This is a continuation of my analysis of the barriers involved in replacing Irreantum, the now defunct literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters.

Other installments: Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions | Financial Models | Starting Up

FINANCIAL MODELS

Any replacement to Irreantum is going to have to have a viable financial model. By viable, I mean one that allows for the continued production of the publication. There a variety of ways that continuity can happen. Technically I’m mainly going to talk about generating revenue so this post should perhaps be named revenue models, but how much and what types of revenue generation is required for a lit mag/journal to continue to put out issues is driven by the financial model of the team behind it. In brief: the financial model can either be for-profit or not-for-profit. The legal structures (assuming that this is a U.S.-based publication) can be anything from a sole proprietorship to an LLC, LLP or S corporation to a cooperative (informal or legal), 501(c)(3) nonprofit, or private foundation. While the underlying legal structure matters, it doesn’t change the essential financial imperative of any publication: covering the costs of producing each issue. Here then are what I see as the range of revenue models for a lit mag/journal. Note that these can be combined and configured in many different ways.

Benefactor: The advantage of having a benefactor fund the successor to Irreantum is obvious: there’s immediate start up money and (often) money to fund on-going operations. The major disadvantage is that one is almost impossible to find. But let’s say that one could be found. There are very few benefactors who are willing to be completely hands off. Even if they are hands off at first, eventually they want some say in where there money is going (as well they should). In addition, they also usually expect that the organization raise as much money as possible in other ways, which means you still have to undertake some or all of the below. As far as I know (and I don’t know much), there are no major benefactors (note the term major; there have been some minor ones: see the next section) out there who would be willing to fund a Mormon lit mag/journal. Continue reading “Replacing Irreantum: Financial Models”

Replacing Irreantum: Generating Submissions

Wm discusses how to generate submissions to a lit mag, specifically: exposure, prestige, editing, contributor copies, cash prizes, token payment, pro payment and revenue share.

This is a continuation of my analysis of the barriers involved in replacing Irreantum, the now defunct literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters. Other installments:

Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions | Financial Models | Starting Up

GENERATING SUBMISSIONS

You would think that with so few outlets for Mormon short fiction that submissions wouldn’t be a problem for any successor to Irreantum. My understanding is that that’s not necessarily the case. Very few Mormons fiction writers write Mormon fiction that shows the craft and maturity and potential appeal to readership that one would want in a lit mag that publishes more than four or five stories a year. A key reason for that, of course, is that there is little incentive to do so.

Any potential successor to Irreantum is going to have figure out how to increase both the number of submissions and the overall quality of them. That’s may be difficult, but I don’t see why one would even bother to launch a Mormon lit mag if you’re not going to aim to increase the number of stories written, submitted and published. If all the field needs are 8 or so short stories a year and a dozen to two dozen poems then that’s already covered between Dialogue, Sunstone and BYU Studies. So what can/do lit mags offer submitters?

Continue reading “Replacing Irreantum: Generating Submissions”

Replacing Irreantum: Staffing/Production

Wm discusses staffing and production for any potential successor to Irreantum.

This is a continuation of my analysis of the barriers involved in replacing Irreantum, the now defunct literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters. Other installments:

Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions | Financial Models | Starting Up

STAFFING/PRODUCTION

A literary magazine/journal is nothing without an audience, but it can’t even try to establish an audience without staffing to create the thing. That’s an obvious statement, but in the world of Mormon letters it represents a major challenge to any ongoing attempt to publish fiction. Very few fiction magazines can support a full-time staff. Many rely on institutional affiliation or at the very least on key staff who have faculty positions at institutions that will give them the time and even credit towards promotion/pay increases for their work on the journal. As far as I know there is no institution that would be willing to provide that. I don’t know that that’s the best idea anyway because of the issues I raise in the previous post. Academic or foundation support comes with a certain set of expectations that are often inimical to the more populist scope that a successor to Irreantum probably should attempt. Irreantum struggled with staffing, especially succession planning. In fact it’s amazing that it lasted as long as it did, and I personally am grateful for all of the hours that its various editors and other staff put into it. Continue reading “Replacing Irreantum: Staffing/Production”

Replacing Irreantum: Scope/Positioning

Wm explains the scope/positioning issues that Irreantum had and what that might mean for any replacement to the now defunct Mormon lit mag.

Earlier this month Margaret Young confirmed that Irreantum , the literary journal of the Association for Mormon Letters is now defunct. For all I know there may be a crack team of AMLers working to revive it, but I want take this opportunity to think through some general notions of what this unfortunate turn of events means for the field and specifically what (if anything) we should replace Irreantum with. Note that at the moment these are just some musings on my part that are independent of any specific actions I might personally take to help out with any effort that steps up to fill in the vacuum left by Irreantum’s demise. I start with where we should start: scope/positioning.

Links to other installments: Scope/Positioning | Staffing/Production | Generating Submissions | Financial Models | Starting Up

SCOPE/POSITIONING

One of the things that the AML in general and Irreantum specifically have struggled with is positioning, that is, where Irreantum fell in relation to other Mormon culture endeavors. It began as a literary magazine that had low production qualities but was more popular in tone, including author interviews, industry news and genre fiction. In that incarnation, it didn’t really have a competitor, but it also struggled with the fact that it was trying to bring together a variety of very different audiences (to be reductive: the LDS fiction crowd, the Mormon fiction crowd and the Mormons into SF&F crowd). Later it morphed into more of a traditional literary journal with higher production values and a focus on literary fiction/essay and poetry, which competed in the same space as Dialogue and Sunstone. This made it a more natural fit with its parent organization, but also meant that it had little to differentiate itself from the other publications other than it offered solely creative narrative work (while the other two also publish essays in academic disciplines such as history and sociology). It offered more creative narrative work than the other journals, but that wasn’t necessarily a strength as it would seem that the audience for scholarly Mormon journals is skewed (more on audience in the post on readership) more towards the social sciences. This should not be a surprise as the same is true of the overall in the field of Mormon Studies (in terms of courses, fellowships, endowed positions, book-length works, seminars, conferences, etc.). Continue reading “Replacing Irreantum: Scope/Positioning”

Review of Field Notes on Language and Kinship, by Tyler Chadwick.

I approached this review with a lot of trepidation. I am not a schooled poet. I took exactly three writing classes in college, and I haven’t read nearly the amount of poetry that someone who professes to be a poet ought to have. I have written many poems, but I didn’t really figure out what a poem was supposed to be, for me, until I took that one poetry class (Jimmy Barnes, BYU, “writing poetry”) about ten years ago. So beware and bear with me. I’m coming at this from a very unschooled angle.

Field Notes on Language and Kinship is, essentially (I think) an observation on poetry and the way it fits into LDS culture in particular. Chadwick explores, in turn, how to read poetry (don’t force interpretation, instead give way to the language), why to write poetry (poetry can “give shape to ideas”¦ that might otherwise be too diffuse”), why to read poetry (poetry is often intended to be mediation–an act of “moving” and “softening” for a reader and for the poet, and thus might draw them closer to God, the gospel, or other redeeming forces/ideals.)

The first story Chadwick relates in the book is about his grandmother who loved to hike, and went on many difficult excursions during her life. At each hike’s summit, or endpoint, she would collect a rock and label it. She collected these rocks in a jar. And Chadwick inherited this jar–chose it from his grandmother’s possessions after she died. As a boy, it intrigued him–rocks from all of these high points of his grandmother’s experience.

I believe this book is a similar rock-collection for Chadwick, only instead of pieces of granite, he has assembled poems to mark high points, important conflicts, switch-points and turns in his development as a human being and as a reader and writer of poetry.  Each of the sections focuses on a different aspect of his own relationship to language and how it developed and was influenced by life events, whether that be his mission, his mentors in college, his explorations of Sonosophy, his wife’s first pregnancy, the birth of a child, a sister struggling with infertility, and of course the time and attention he spent putting together Fire in the Pasture. Continue reading “Review of Field Notes on Language and Kinship, by Tyler Chadwick.”