Defeating the Literary Industrial Complex

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In the 1980s, young writers were often advised to submit their work to literary journals and small magazines.

This was the era of Ray Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and the Barthelme brothers. The “little magazines”, as they were called, were how those guys found each other, and got their early stories published in the 1970s. The literary journal route was the way undiscovered writers could be discovered.

And so I looked into it. It was 1985. I was living in San Francisco. I was one year out of college. I was ready to get serious about my writing career.

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I probably went to City Lights Bookstore to get physical access to these publications. The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, there were plenty to choose from.

I studied the current issues of these journals. Most of them had a list of famous author’s names printed on the front. These were the famous authors contained inside that issue, the famous authors that would probably take up a lot of space, leaving not very much space for the new writers, which would be me.

I was skeptical from the start. Maybe the little magazine route worked in 1972. But how practical was it now? You had to type up your story, xerox it, and then send it off to some far-flung place. It took them 6 months to get back to you. And even if they accepted it, you’d spend a year waiting for it to come out.

You’d get paid $20 or some other modest amount. Maybe someone would notice your story, some important editor or agent, though that seemed unlikely.

But what choice did you have? Where else could you send your story? Esquire? The New Yorker? That seemed even more impossible.