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The Abiding Image: A Point of Entry
Tag: poetry
Look Over Here!
Sitting on a bench sharing a coffee with old friends in a little northern Pennsylvania village, I saw it for myself. How much poetry in public places matters, even there, in remote mountains, where only about a hundred people reside year-round. Dangling from the willing arms of trees, laminated cards with phrases from poems or short poems that captivated both young and old. Children read them to each other aloud. Adults stopped on their morning walk to pause, read, reflect, nod, sigh or smile. Even some hard to please teenagers stopped their bike tires to read. What I didn’t expect to feel is how much it meant to them and to me. Poetry matters, folks. It matters big time. All writing matters. The Arts make all the difference in the world.
This little town is reflecting other larger movements to display poetry in outdoor places from around the world. Many people have heard of the Poetry in Motion initiative launched 1992 by the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America to bring poetry to millions of harried and stressed commuters. Poetry was displayed is subway cars and digital screens in stations. Each poem was accompanied by artwork. By 2002, 150 poems had been shared from all over the world, spanning the centuries. The poems reached out and met people in their own busy lives and enriched them. Readers reported looking forward to a new poem. They would snap pictures and send them to their friends. The world was different, changed and better.
The Poetry in Motion Initiative was relaunched in 2012 under MTA Arts and Design. You can visit their website to read poems and learn of upcoming programs. Over 30 other US cities launched similar initiatives in the wake of Poetry in Motion including Philadelphia, LA, Nashville, San Francisco and Providence. Public poetry has popped up in many other places such as cafes, libraries, playgrounds and picnic tables in seven national parks thanks to Ada Limon our 24th Poet Laureate who championed the idea of transforming picnic tables into public art by including a historic poem with some connection to the park.
There is also a Facebook page “The Poetry in Public Places Project” that encourages everyone, you and me, to display poetry outdoors. You can visit this page to enjoy creative and inspiring ideas. For example, from Hoboken, NJ, a photo of a box of poetry where people are invited to TAKE ONE, yard signs from the Mercer County Library System, a poem painted on a breakwater in Milwaukee.
I wondered what poems went first in the NYC Poetry in Motion. There were four of them. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman, “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, “Let There Be New Flowering” by Lucille Clinton and one of my favorites. Enjoy this poem and cheers to more poetry in the open air and hope!
—Ginny
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
Emily Dickinson
If the New York Subway System asked you for a poem, what would you write?
Virginia Watts has been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, Watts won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction.
Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:
Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek
are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!
What Genre Scares You The Most?
By R. David Fulcher, Old Scratch Press Founding Member
While most authors have a preferred genre, many authors have dabbled in others. For example, while I am primarily a speculative fiction writer (horror, fantasy, and science fiction), I have also written historical fiction, drama, romance, and poetry.
However, I’ve always found one genre intimidating: Westerns.
I realize that author Louis L’Amour made a fine career out of writing Westerns, what he called “frontier stories,” but I haven’t been able to catch that particular spark. Perhaps it is simply that I’ve never invested the time to understand the difference between the gravy train or the chuck wagon, or when to precisely call in the calvary.
While I’ve enjoyed a few Western films such as Tombstone and True Grit, and appreciated the genre-blending Westerns such as Blazing Saddles, Cowboys & Aliens, and Firefly, I’d be lying if I said I were a true fan of Westerns.
Since every psychologist recommends facing your fears, I think I’ll give it a try.
So, without further ado, here is my flash fiction Western, “Down Goes the Rodeo Clown.”
Down Goes the Rodeo Clown
Roger Roy tightened his grip on the bridle. His horse, Mustang Sally, had a wild streak, and he didn’t intend to lose control while calf roping.
Suddenly the gate opened, and the crowd in the stands roared as a gate on the opposite side of the arena opened and a young black and white calf stumbled out.
Roger steered Sally towards the calf and reached for the lasso at his side to confirm it was there. Staring ahead, Roger didn’t notice that one of the loops of the lasso had caught the trigger of his six gun.
Something seemed off with the calf, too; it stumbled around like it was drunk.
Roger had a job to do, drunk calf or not, and approached the poor creature.
He tugged on the lasso to remove it, and it seemed stuck on something. Roger tugged harder the second time and felt his pistol shift and the hammer cock.
A single shot reverberated through the air: bang!
The calf awkwardly fell to the dirt with a gut-wrenching cry of anguish. A red blossom of blood stained the black and white coat.
Roger leaped off his horse to help the poor creature, only to see a pair of cowboy boots sticking out from under the coat.
He threw back the coat, only to see the body of the rodeo clown shoot right through the heart. His painted face was twisted in pain and his orange hair fluttered in the light breeze.
The crowd began to point and scream.
Roger Roy tipped his hat in their direction and said, “I guess that’s his last joke. This one was on him.”
And with a jangle of spurs Roger swung into the saddle and trotted away.
So there it is – corny, unbelievable even, but my first Western nonetheless, and you, dear reader, were there to witness it.
The moral of this story is to confront your fears, try that genre that has always scared you the most, and you might strike pay dirt.
Or as an old miner forty-niner might say, “There’s gold in them thar’ hills!”
Happy Writing!
R.David Fulcher, Founding Member of Old Scratch Press
Like a blot from the blue: Are you reading your work?
Recently Robert Fleming was nice enough to get Old Scratch Press booked on Like a blot from the blue. Robert Fleming, Gabby Gilliam, Anthony Doyle, Alan Bern, Virginia (Ginny) Watts, and I showed up. I gave a little information on Old Scratch Press; Gabby gave some information Instant Noodles, and Anthony and Ginny read from their new books. Being there and presenting to an international audience was a fantastic opportunity for us, and the folks there were great.
What I liked even more were the other people who showed up.
I’m going to guess that there were about 30 people who showed up who were not us, one of whom was Fin Hall, the blot-in-chief. It was clear that many of these folks had been attending regularly for quite some time. One at a time, in turn, based on when they signed up, Fin called on each person, and the author read 1-3 poems, depending on length.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, which, sadly, I am not any more, I used to read at LIP (live, in person) open mics all the time, and I would often have to hang in until midnight to get my chance. Usually these were held in bars in Philadelphia, or in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I did my best to dress as “punk rock” as possible, and my general aim, if I’m honest, was to get laid. It’s frankly shocking how few times that happened, when that was clearly my intent. I usually had on a mini skirt and was showing cleavage, but, in truth, people who knew me then told me then, and will reiterate the very same thing today, that me punked-out and showing cleavage was, somehow, still giving Julie Andrews when what I was going for was Grace Slick. Ah well.
In any case, the thrill of reading, and the thrill of possibly getting lucky, and the location (always bars) also meant that, in all likelihood, by the time they got to me on the sign-up list, I was hella drunk. I was a smoker (Benson and Hedges 100s back then), but because I was also a poser: at those events I came with a pack of Dunhill Blue.
Waaaay too expensive to smoke all the time, but on open mic nights I always stopped at the news agent’s (Philadelphia had news agents!) to get a pack beforehand.
A few times/year the venues would ask me to be the featured reader, and I think that was because I was also volunteering with a little Zine called Magic Bullet (run by Andrew Craig, wherever he is today), which I had quite a few publications in, and, who knows, maybe I was good.
I was working my way through an MA and then an MFA from my twenties into my thirties, and my professors seemed to think I was good, as well, and I won the student awards each year, so maybe. When I read at the school events I was not drunk, but neither was I nervous, perhaps because my professors made me feel gifted.
And then, sometime around the end of my last degree, life took a turn. My very long relationship went very south. Another relationship pooped too quickly, and flamed out just as fast, and I remember I felt, while I was still prolific as a poet, that I had somehow lost at life. I wanted, you see, to become a published poet and a professor, and a spouse, and a parent, and I wanted all four things to work out perfectly, and just none of them did.
My life, then, became a series of edits. If it didn’t work to have the man with the red hair, then cut him from the piece, and write in another man, one with cheap beer on his lips. It was so time-consuming to send out work, one poem here, and one there, through the mail, keeping track of where it went, and keeping a lookout for the SASE to bring it back, and seeing if it was in decent enough condition to be mailed back out again, and I remember for awhile I was printing on onion skin to save money (who knows what that is?), and digging up the two dollars or eight quarters to send the piece of onion skin back out, and waiting for the SASE again to return, and each time writing a letter of introduction, sometimes including letters of introduction from my professors who were consistently and kindly encouraging. I remember two of them, who seemed to think my writing was the bee’s knees, were flummoxed that my poems weren’t getting entry, but maybe the long narrative style went out with Wordsworth. And life became more about driving from 9-5 job to college job to relationship, to moving out, to moving over there, to trying again, to keep on trying, to being, frankly, trying.
Little by little, returned SASE by SASE, edited dream by edited dream, the writing dribbled to a stop. Drip, drip, dr—
It was so quiet in my head.
Well, in the poetry part of my head at least.
And a decade and a half ran through my fingers.
And then I started writing again. Not only poetry, and not the plays I wrote in my twenties, but fiction, and memoir, which is, I guess, what this is.
I found myself in a place where the place, the locale, was so small and local, it felt small enough that I dared to go to a reading again.
But over the intervening years something just awful seemed to have happened. When I showed up to read at the open mics, even when I went with friends, I could not make it through a single poem without devolving into tears. And maybe there’s a reason for this shocking behavior, and maybe there isn’t, but it seems as inevitable to me as hair going grey, and as unavoidable as the red dot from a sniper’s gun in one of those movies with snipers.
And yet, at the simple evening with Blot from the blue I felt encouraged. The readers were great, and seemed normal (for the most part… I mean, poets, right?), and kindly, and on Zoom my head is no bigger than a Cerignola olive, so I am going to say I felt safe. I think it would be quite okay to join in, and I asked him later, and Fin said yes, folks can join. And folks could mean me, or you.
So what the hell, let’s try it!
And use this email to express interest likeablotfromtheblue@gmail.com.
And if you show up, be a goooood listener first, and a good reader second.
I’m not much of a drinker these days, so if I show up it will probably be very sober, and there hasn’t been any nicotine in these lungs for a long spell. I will, however, be caffeinated. And that’s at least something. The poem I am thinking of reading has some sound effects in it, which is probably ill-advised. But after I read, and make whatever sort of a fool of myself I am destined to be, I can write a new poem: Pearce With Her Pants Fallen Down.
Nadja often finishes her posts with a writing prompt, so here is me, stealing that excellent idea:
Think of an “edit” you made in your own life, by choice or by force. How did it work out for you?
Or
Have you ever read at an open mic? Write a flash memoir piece describing your experience.
Thanks for reading!
Dianne
Final Two Meet and Greets for New Members
Are you a flash fiction, poetry, or short memoir writer with a finished manuscript—or one nearly ready to go? Old Scratch Press, a collaborative collective supported by Current Words Publishing, is now accepting applications for two new members to join us in 2026.
We’re a tight-knit, skill-sharing group that publishes each other’s books, runs the lit mag Instant Noodles, and supports each other with editing, design, marketing, and community.
We are hosting meet and greets on August 6th and August 13. To be invited you have to send a small sample. There are no fees to submit, and there are no fees to join, and there are no fees to publish your collection. There are no fees. Who else you gonna find to collaborate with who dedicates an entire issue of a literary magazine to that most magical of elixirs… gravy?
If you’re eager to grow as a writer and be part of something creative and weird and wonderful, we’d love to meet you.
👉 Apply with a sample here:
https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/form.aspx?id=6idG3Mj-O0jFm-15Y7r2p
Spots are limited. Let’s make good things together.
Seeking Sanctuary in what you Read
For many of us, reading is a means of escaping the clamor of the real world for a brief time. The theme of the current issue of Instant Noodles is “Sanctuary.” If you’re seeking to give your brain a respite from the news feed, head on over to read the latest issue, curated by the members of Old Scratch Press!
Instant Noodles is open for submissions for our Winter issue! If you have a piece that fits our “Gravy” theme and is on the light-hearted side, please check out the submission guidelines here! We try to fill our Winter issue with fun and mayhem, so please remember that HUMOR, not melancholy is our ask for this issue!
Old Scratch Press is also seeking new members to join our collective! If you write short form pieces (like flash fiction, poetry, or flash memoir), and you’re interested in working with our collective to publish your collection of work, check out our submission guidelines at Duotrope to see if we might be a good fit! The submission window closes on August 31!
Exploring the Art of Creative Nonfiction
Before you read this you’ll want to check out the NEW issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine which has some excellent examples of creative nonfiction along with poetry, short stories and eye catching artwork.https://instantnoodleslitmag.com/
Now let’s talk a little about CNF.
In my previous profession as an antiques dealer, I came across many 18th and 19th century journals and often the most remarkable thing about them was their impeccable penmanship.
Nowadays the word journaling connotes the writing of innermost thoughts; but often the journals I encountered contained lists of items purchased and/or a record of weather events. If someone did write down deep and personal information, they hadn’t left it behind to be found by a stranger.
In the 20th century it was fashionable to keep a “diary” and diaries came with locks and keys. Many stories have been told about a diary being read by a parent or a diary falling into the wrong hands. The locked diary contained things not meant to be shared.
Whatever was written in a journal or diary was someone’s truth.
Gradually a shift in what can be shared and what must be kept secret occurred. True stories, nonfiction, became popular fodder for books, movies, and television series. We are intrigued by the unbelievable. In literature, the memoir that thoughtfully reveals the life of the author is celebrated.
Creative nonfiction is a writing genre that can be tricky to define. Based on a true event, the creative designation, indicates the importance of artistry. The writer seeks to use their craft to convey a feeling, a fear, a triumph, a predicament they personally experienced or witnessed.
Often creative nonfiction and poetry cross paths. A poem can be inspired by a witnessed event or experience, and therefore some might call it creative nonfiction. A flash creative nonfiction story with rhyme, alliteration, and rhythmic sentences could be categorized by some as a prose poem.
Here is an example for you to ponder, a prose poem by American poet Amy Lowell.
Bath
By Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.
***
Each person’s perception of what they witnessed is slightly different. Then the question shifts to how much is fact and how much is fiction. Has the story has been changed to suit the storyteller? In the telling and the writing, the emphasis of what was important may shift. Once again, this can be the result of artistic interpretation.
The process of writing creative nonfiction has me returning to it again and again. Pure fiction has its own joys, but creative nonfiction provides an opportunity for personal discovery. Why do i remember an event a certain way, I ask myself, while someone else remembers it differently? Maybe that tells me something about myself.
The best way to develop an appreciation for creative nonfiction is to read it.
Some magazines I like to read for their flash creative nonfiction include: Riverteeth https://riverteethjournal.com/beautiful-things/
Hippocampus Magazine. https://hippocampusmagazine.com/
and Bending Genres https://bendinggenres.com/
Thank you for reading this post and visiting the Old Scratch Press Blog. This Sunday, August 3rd. from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., several members of the Old Scratch Press Team are participating in an international Poetry Reading, Blot of Blue
And you can attend online. Here is the information and invitation.
Poetry in the Scroll: How Social Media is Reimagining the Poem
Poetry has always moved with the times, and it is about time for me to drag myself along with it. From verses passed down orally to broadsides nailed to doors, from hand-sewn chapbooks to poems read over the radio, the form has never been fixed. Now, in the digital age, poetry has found a new home in the scroll.
And by scroll, I mean the swipe of a finger across a screen. On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, a younger generation is shaping how poetry is written, read, and shared. But this isn’t just for the under-30 crowd. If you insist on thinking this way, you may well get left behind. More and more poets of all ages are exploring these platforms—not to go viral, but to connect in quiet, and sometimes beautiful ways. And if you’re a poet who’s been writing for decades, or just starting out later in life, there’s a place for you in this unfolding form. (Even if that means asking your children, or grandchildren, for help—which they might then turn around and use for content on Instagram or TikTok later).
This is not about abandoning your favorite notebook or legal pad. It’s about discovering what the poem becomes when the “page” can move, speak, and shimmer.
What’s Happening in Poetry Right Now?
Social media poetry isn’t a trend—it’s a growing corner of the literary landscape. Here’s how the form is evolving, and why it might just inspire something new in you.
1. Short and striking poems are thriving
Poems written for screens are often brief—just a few lines that catch the eye and echo in the mind. In many ways, it’s a return to the epigram, the haiku, or the Dickinsonian lyric. These poems are intimate and distilled. Think of them as poems meant to be read in the space between moments—waiting in line, sipping coffee, catching your breath.
2. Poems paired with image and rhythm
Instagram poetry often appears one line at a time across a series of images, like flipping through a visual journal. Some use soft colors or textured backgrounds. Others feature the poet’s handwriting, scrawled on a napkin or journal page. On TikTok, many poets read their work aloud over quiet imagery—footsteps on a forest trail, candlelight flickering, steam rising from a teacup.
It’s not performative. It’s present. The screen becomes a small stage for the inner voice.
3. It’s not about perfection—it’s about presence
You don’t need to be tech-savvy or camera-ready (well, it helps, or, again, you can ask your kids) And, you don’t even need to post anything publicly. For many writers, playing with these tools becomes part of the creative process. Recording yourself reading a poem on your phone, overlaying it on a favorite photo, or sharing it with a few close friends—these are all meaningful ways to engage with your own voice.
How You Might Try It
Here are a few gentle ways to dip your toe into the scroll-space:
- Take a short poem you love—or one of your own. Try formatting it so that each line stands on its own. How does it feel to see each phrase alone, framed by white space?
- Record a reading. Use your phone’s voice memo app to record yourself reading your poem aloud. Don’t worry about background noise or perfect delivery. Sometimes the quiet rustle of real life is part of the music.
- Use a free design tool. Sites like Canva.com let you pair text with images. Choose a background—an old photo, a sunset, a textured piece of fabric—and overlay your poem.
- Share it—or don’t. You might post it on social media, email it to a friend, or simply keep it in a folder. The act of making something new is what matters.
As for me, let me just say I am a SLOW work in progress. Good luck to all of us over age 60 and remember to think of moving our creative work onto social media as just another way to flex our creative muscles, have fun, and play!
Ellis Elliott
Founding Member, Old Scratch Press
Bewilderness Writing
Bewildernesswriting.com
Poets and Punctuation
In his sonnets, Shakespeare would use end-stops rigorously, with most lines ending in commas, semi-colons, and colons. Sometimes he relied on enjambment or exclamations, but as far as possible, he seemed to save his full stops for the very last line.
Take Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee…”: six commas, four semi-colons, two colons, one question mark, and one full stop.
Ezra Pound, on the other hand, would often refuse to use any end-stops at all.
Take these lines from Canto LII:
The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven
Then goes the Sun into Gemini
Virgo in mid heaven at sunset
indigo must not be cut
No wood burnt into charcoal
gates are all open, no tax on the booths.
No commas, no colons or semi-colons, “midheaven” is split for emphasis or for pause. There’s as little punctuation as possible, down to “gates are all open, no tax on the booths.” That solitary comma functions almost as a speed bump near an intersection.
According to Daniel Albright, W.B. Yeats had ‘punctuational quirks’ which he was happy to leave to his editors to sort out. It was as if those technicalities were above or below the poet, who belonged to another realm of language.
T.S. Eliot, like his mentor Pound, would sometimes drop punctuation altogether, but then he would go and stick in a full stop just to confound the reader:
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with Nothing
(“The Waste Land,” lines 300–302)
Most people read those lines as “On Margate Sands, / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” So why the full stop? Some say it’s to heighten the sense of isolation and fragmentation, but it actually spoils the drama rather than intensify it. “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing” is no longer restricted to this moment, here-and-now, on Margate Sands. It steals some of the bombast. Perhaps that was the point, who knows?
One thing that seems pretty clear is that punctuation plays by different—or fewer—rules in poetry.
In “Un Coup de Dés,” Mallarmé throws punctuation out the window almost entirely, relying on spaces and font size to convey the necessary pauses and emphases. Punctuation becomes visual and spatial, and all the more effective for it.
Compare that with Sylvia Plath, who was a heavy punctuator:
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
(Opening lines of “You’re”)
Apostrophes, hyphens, and commas in all the right places.
So, the question is: does punctuation really matter in poetry?
Perhaps it depends on whether it’s intended to be read aloud or read off the page. At a reading, intonation and cadence work magic that is sometimes hard to replicate in print, where that same impact disappears somewhere between too much and too little punctuation.
I suppose we’ve all got our own punctuational foibles. I often neglect end-stops. I know I shouldn’t, but putting in a comma, semi-colon or colon just feels wrong at the end of some lines. Not all, just some. I could not actually say why. It’s not a rational thing. It’s pure feeling.
So whether you’re partial to Elizabeth Bishop’s em-dashes or agree with Joyce that quotation marks “are an eyesore,” rules are strange visitors in poetry. You can choose whether to follow them, or which ones to follow, and no one can really complain—except the reader, who will have to read in all the end-stops and what-nots we choose to leave out.
Anthony Doyle is a founding member of Old Scratch Press. He is the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the recently-published Jonah’s Map of the Whale and Other Poems.
Submitters Beware
There has been much in the news within literary circles lately about literary journals with questionable practices, mostly focused upon submission fees and how these fees are used. No one should question the idea that it is expensive to run a literary magazine with such costs as editing and overhead, and most importantly, not everything about submission fees should be seen as negative. It is possible that when writers must pay a nominal fee to submit their work to literary magazines, they may be inspired to submit a more edited and stronger piece. However, it’s one thing to pay $3.00 to one journal to submit but let’s face it, most writers must submit the same piece to many magazines if they want to increase their chance of having it published. This is why submission fees can really add up. There is also the idea that if submission fees are charged, less submissions will come in and this will lead to faster publication decisions by editors. Like it or not, it does seem that submission fees are here to stay. If we accept that fact, then we must understand some realities about submission fees.
I am not going to name names here, but some well know literary journals have been engaging in practices that are shameful. It’s hard enough and expensive enough to be a writer trying to get work published in literary journals without these bad actors but, unfortunately, they do exist. One well known journal accepted submissions and charged for over a year but had already stopped reading and publishing new word. They later folded and changed their name. I have personally submitted to journals several times only to realize they had gone defunct. I was never able to get my submission fees back. Recently, several well-known journals held contests, charged the high submission fees customary in literary contests, and never announced any winners. Suffice it to say that just because something calls itself a literary journal doesn’t mean it should.
So, what is a writer to do? How can we protect ourselves from unethical practices and scam journals? Here are some practical ideas to consider.
- Is the journal listed on reputable databases such as Poets and Writers, Submittable, NewPages.com, Clifford Gastang Literary Magazine Rankings, MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR
- Is the journal’s website polished, free of grammatical and spelling errors. Is it easy to navigate? Does is look professional? A poor website design might be a cause for concern.
- Do their publication terms comply with normal industry standards. Publication guidelines should always be clear and concise and include all requirements such as formatting parameters.
- Be very concerned if a journal is asking for all rights to your work. They should be asking only for first serial rights.
- RED FLAG: Is their submission fee unreasonably high? Are they charging $15.00 as an example when most journals are at $3.00. This should worry you.
- Do they explain why they are charging a submission fee of any amount?
- If they do charge submissions fees, do they also have yearly contests where they offer a monetary prize?
- It should never be difficult to find contact information on the journal’s website, and there should be some explanation of who the editors are and what their editorial process is. A journal should have a physical address and an email address.
- Look at their publication history. Have they been publishing consistently? Can you purchase copies of the journal on their website? Look at the most recent issue. Look at the quality.
- If the journal has a blog on their website, is it being maintained?
- Does the journal submit work to contests such as Pushcart Prize or/and O. Henry Awards?
- Do they have a social media presence such as Facebook where they regularly promote the work they publish?
- Be aware of any unrealistic or boastful claims about readership.
- If you are submitting to a contest, look to see if the list of winners from last year’s contest is listed on the journal’s website. It should be.
- Be aware if a journal repeatedly pushes back contest deadlines.
I have been submitting to literary journals for many years and have been lucky to have some level of success. Be aware of where you are sending your writing, but don’t let a few bad apples dissuade you from submitting to literary journals!!! The overwhelming majority are ethical to a fault and the writing world would be lost without literary journals. They are an invaluable part of our art form. I read literary journals, subscribe to them, admire them immensely and thank them for all the wonderful writing they bring to the world. So, happy submitting to my fellow writers and the best of luck to you all!
~Ginny
Virginia Watts has been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, Watts won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction.
Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:
Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek
are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 