Who's Listening?

WHO'S LISTENING? / Reginald Gibbons DON'T SEND A STORY THAT BEGINS AT DAWN THE LITERARY MAGAZINE. It appears in far too few bookstores and stands on the shelf for a few months, either to be returned unsold when the new issue shows up, or having been sold out, to remain an undiscoverable anomaly to readers trying unsuccessfully to find it. A magazine, issuing its avatars in succession, re-creating itself again and again, conspires with the unhappier side of its fate—ephemerality—and by doing so apparently defeats it: unlike a book, the magazine is always there on the book-seller's rack, and isn't. The magazine gradually builds an identity through successive issues, and each represents an extension of the project rather than a finished accomplishment. Yet for each of those ephemeral issues, the editor has worked as if at a book, laboring months, sometimes years, writing letters to authors, rejecting or cajoling or suggesting or congratulating; he and the staff—paid or volunteer—have pored over hundreds of stories in search of a few; they have dealt with typesetter, printer, authors, artists, middlemen, agents, hipsters, and hypesters, and typically, grant-givers and grant-refusers, university comptrollers and their minions, mail carriers, publicity directors, truckers, suppliers, typewriter repairmen . . . The editor has blue-pencilled manuscripts, scrutinized and hieroglyphed proofs, fretted over UPS and deadlines, torn his hair at screwups, taken to bended knee to pitch for funds; he has perhaps speechified, radio-talked, subscription-pled; and he has returned to the pile of manuscripts to burn midnight oil and down early coffee over astonishingly bad works as he searches for good ones. Dear Editor, Tm offering First North American Serial Rights to this new story (1983, about 7000 words), in which Zack and Susie probe the deeper meaning of adult relationships today. I think I have created believable characters in a tense situation. I studied at the University of X with A, B, and C. C read this story in an earlier version, said it was striking. He suggested I send it to you. I am of course willing to make any change you suggest. I have enclosed a small envelope for your reply, please don't bother to return the manuscript, which is disposable. AU those phrases I have quoted without change from a variety of letters. Is this the world into which the editor of the literary magazine sends his magazine, with its freight of work that is good and serious? Will it make any impression on those whose eagerness to write should, but may not, indicate a willingness to read? 294 · The Missouri Review The manuscripts do come in. The sheer quantity can be daunting. According to CODA, our trade journal, the Atlantic gets as many as 2000 fiction submissions every month, Mademoiselle 10,000 a year, Grand Street (the only literary magazine in the survey, because it pays $750 to $2000 for a story, amounts which other literary magazines cannot hope to match) gets around 3000 stories a year, The New Yorker 10,000 to 20,000 a year, and so on. CODA offers no such lists of what someone—anyone— thinks are the best works or literary magazines, but their calculations do perform the service of reminding us of one of the defining situations of the literary magazine today. It appears that about 20,000 stories are being written, typed, and mailed to magazine editors every year. There is another fact which is even more daunting in its implications. I calculate roughly from the listings of over 350 literary magazines in the CCLM Catalog of Literary Magazines 1982 that a year in our time sees the publication of more than 25,000 poems and more than 1000 stories, without even counting the fifteen commercial magazines in CODA's survey. A possible inference is that everything of any worth whatsoever and a lot of no worth at all is being published in America. In such an atmosphere, what is wanted is not another place in which to publish a poem or a story, but some sense of what it means to publish it in one magazine rather than in another—beyond a difference in...