Last month marked my eighth year in the Netherlands, a number I never expected to reach. It also marked the seventh year since a small handful of writers and I put our heads together to come up with what you now see here, Versal et al.
Just back from a trip to the States and still feeling the whir of jetlag; the sensation that I'm straddling the Atlantic is slightly more keen than normal, and the months of scribbled notes I have made to myself on translocality -- upon confrontations with art, late-night drinks with friends in bars, after people ask me "so what kind of Work does Versal publish?" (caps intended) -- seem rather daunting. I'm trying to work something out, and I promised Robert, sort of, that I would work it out on the blog. But I'm a reviser, see, and hesitant -- wary -- of absolutes. If you read my editorial in Versal 7, then you can probably guess that my work to define translocality is rather, in many ways, to undefine it.
But. Last weekend, Crossing Border put on a "minisymposium" on the "correlation between (literary) magazines and literary publishers", pivoting around the (in)famous McSweeney's and its various projects, with a few Dutch publishers thrown into the mix. I ended up not being able to make it down to The Hague in time, but regardless I feel the need to say something about the fact that Versal was not asked to join the local contingent of speakers at this event. To take a card from McSweeney's deck, we're a cool group of Gen X-cusp-Yers, and Versal is no Dutch eyesore.
The symposium's focus on the relationship between literary journals and publishers, and seemingly on how "paper" as a medium is the great savior of print (a recent Eggers theme), would have benefited from Versal's translocal perspective. Here is, perhaps, where I've lost you (if I didn't lose you already because you thought this was going to turn into a bitter rant). Here is also where all my little scribbles become a great daunting pile. But stay with me for a few more paragraphs; this isn't a five-paragraph essay. That Versal was not asked to join the program underscores the question the symposium seems to have started with, about the relationship between publishers and journals -- which is layered something like: between literary publishers and writers, between readers and printed matter, between the computer screen and paper, between global and local. One could say that it's all the same "between", just seen from different perspectives. And that between is the (growing) black hole that translocal writers fall into, or the crack we fall between, pick your metaphor/onomatopoeia.
What happens to the translocal writer, exactly? For many professions, longer-term work abroad is considered a CV must-have at any level, but writers who live more permanently abroad are better off, in many cases, going back home. From a logistic standpoint, an emerging translocal writer may face the following challenges:
1. Disengagement from his/her home literary community (e.g. loosening networks, lack of "being in touch" with "what's going on")
2. Limited engagement with his/her "new" literary community
3. Rejection from journals in either community due to the work's foreignness
4. Hesitation from "home" publishers who tend to prefer local (i.e. residential) writers who can give lots of readings, etc. to sell books
This symposium was an exciting event to hit the Netherlands, whether you like McSweeney's or not. If any of you were there, I'd love to hear about it. So here, finally, is my hypothesis: I believe that translocality is instructional, that translocal writing, e.g., can be a way of understanding literary production and craft in general. Journals like Versal are that greatly-needed bridge between national literary cultures, the spanning scaffolds that will enable literary publishers to notice the ever-increasing number of writers who are taking part (like so many others) in this global world. Using "the hell out of the medium" as McSweeney's asserts oversimplifies the answer to the great digital question of our literary age (i.e. how is the publishing community going to survive it). It's not just about making paper carry its weight. Part of the answer also lies in the traverse between the local and the global, and finding the writers who are working there.
November 23, 2009
November 21, 2009
More editor news
In my 6 November post I forgot to include news from Kate Foley who's on our poetry team. Kate was shortlisted for this year's Bridport prize (judged by Jackie Kay); she was commended in the Second Light competition (judged by Pauline Stainer); she has three poems and a review in the current Ambit and one poem in the forthcoming queer literary journal Chroma. Five of her poems also appear in the recently published anthology Cracking On. Congratulations Kate!
November 10, 2009
Versal welcomes another new editor
I am excited to announce another addition to our fiction team – Bonnie J. Rough. Bonnie is an American writer living in Amsterdam, Netherlands with her family. Her memoir, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in spring 2010. Other work has appeared in MODERN LOVE: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion (Three Rivers Press, 2007), The Best Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 2007), The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), as well as magazines, journals, and newspapers including The New York Times, The Sun, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, and Brevity. She holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Most recently, she lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she was a Teaching Artist with The Loft Literary Center, and became the recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship, a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers, and a Minnesota Arts Board grant. On her blog, The Blue Suitcase, she writes mini-essays about life as an airline family abroad.
With her experience as a writer and as an editor at The Iowa Review, Bonnie brings another new perspective to our fiction universe.
With her experience as a writer and as an editor at The Iowa Review, Bonnie brings another new perspective to our fiction universe.
November 06, 2009
Read all about it
Every so often we will use this space to post literary news of Versal contributors and editors. Here's our first round-up:
Marilyn Hacker's new book Names will be published next month by W.W. Norton in New York. He and I, her translations from the French of poems by Emmanuel Moses, was just published by the Oberlin College Press FIELD Translation Series in Ohio. Both contain poems published in Versal 5. Nicole Walker (Versal 7) has a book out in December, This Noisy Egg, from Barrow Street Press. Dawn Lonsinger (Versal 6) published her first chapbook, the linoleum crop, at the start of this year with Jeanne Duval Editions. It was the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest chosen by Thomas Lux. Her second chapbook, The Nested Object, came out this August from Dancing Girl Press. She has poems forthcoming in The Journal, Blackbird, Cream, City Review, Post Road, Bateau and Packington Review.
Some editors have news too: fiction editor Robert Glick has stories forthcoming from Black Warrior Review and Denver Quarterly. Contributing editor Laura Chalar received the honorable mention for fiction in the Annual Literary Awards of the Uruguayan Ministry of Culture, for her short story collection The discreet charm of lawyering.
Congratulations, everyone! We love to hear about what past contributors are doing now, so please send any more news to us via our versaljournalATwordsinhereDOTcom email address.
Marilyn Hacker's new book Names will be published next month by W.W. Norton in New York. He and I, her translations from the French of poems by Emmanuel Moses, was just published by the Oberlin College Press FIELD Translation Series in Ohio. Both contain poems published in Versal 5. Nicole Walker (Versal 7) has a book out in December, This Noisy Egg, from Barrow Street Press. Dawn Lonsinger (Versal 6) published her first chapbook, the linoleum crop, at the start of this year with Jeanne Duval Editions. It was the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest chosen by Thomas Lux. Her second chapbook, The Nested Object, came out this August from Dancing Girl Press. She has poems forthcoming in The Journal, Blackbird, Cream, City Review, Post Road, Bateau and Packington Review.
Some editors have news too: fiction editor Robert Glick has stories forthcoming from Black Warrior Review and Denver Quarterly. Contributing editor Laura Chalar received the honorable mention for fiction in the Annual Literary Awards of the Uruguayan Ministry of Culture, for her short story collection The discreet charm of lawyering.
Congratulations, everyone! We love to hear about what past contributors are doing now, so please send any more news to us via our versaljournalATwordsinhereDOTcom email address.
October 22, 2009
meditations on the rejection
Yesterday I received an electronic rejection email from The Kenyon Review. The generic aspect of the rejection surprised me; not because I expected that they would take a special interest in my work (the number of submissions they receive precludes such a thing except under very unusual circumstances), but because I had noticed that someone from Kenyon college had, two days before, looked at my website. So I went online to see other rejections sent by Kenyon Review, to see what rejection letters they usually send.
In searching Google, I noticed a number of other sites, including a blog site that rated rejections (http://awritingyear.blogspot.com/). The not-so-surprising thing about the rating of rejections was that the writer (to a large extent, rightfully so) expected that the rejection slip would convey a sense of care and respect. That is to say, an ideal letter, short of including personal information about a person's work (always, always a good sign), succeeded in making the writer feel a combination of hope, admiration, and respect as well as a general support for the act of writing itself.
I'm not saying that journals should be cold, callous, or unprofessional. I'm saying that even a good rejection slip (again, short of a personalized letter) is presenting the illusion of personal attention, and we might be better off if we understood that.
Why? First, the cold truth of quantity. Given the number of submissions a journal receives (hundreds or thousands per month), very, very few people will receive personal attention, and while a rejection letter may allow the writer to feel loved, chances are they skimmed your piece, or, at most, had a few editors read it. Second, because rejections are mass produced, the attributes of a "good" rejection letter such as properly cut pages, handwritten signatures, a mention of care, appreciation, and thanks do nothing but fall within a fairly recent discourse of professionalization.
The writer wants to feel that in rejection, the institution has taken as much care with their work as they have in writing it, but that can never be true - you spent hundreds of hours in that story (I hope). Accordingly, the writer receives reasons to alternately feel hopeful or bitter, consoled or inconsolable, instead of taking the rejection for what it is: which could be almost anything. When there's a black hole of information, the rejection slip offers a locus for the rant of not knowing.
What I'd like to suggest, however, is that a rejection slip could provide not just emotional support, but actually useful information. I'm not arguing that each letter be personalized - however, journals can and do have more than one rejection slip which, coupled with either transparency on the side of the journal or a collective sharing of resources, could help both writers and journals become more efficient.
Let me explain what I mean by explaining - this may be especially handy for non-editors - how the electronic submission system, at least the Submission Manager designed by Devin Emke, is set up:
When rejecting a work, I have a choice of four rejection letters which can all be customized with canned text or personalized information. In general, journals can choose to use any or all of these four letters (if they are extremely technically savvy, they can create more than four). Generally speaking, one of the four is reserved for a purely personal note without canned text, and so most journals will use between 1 and 3 rejection slips.
This is also true for Versal. We use two canned text rejections, which differ by their level of encouragement, and one hybrid, which allows us to add customized text to the more encouraging of the two canned notes.
And this is where, with the option of multiple notes, efficiency comes in. While we love the fact that people are writing, and we want to encourage them in their writing practice, we don't, given our workload, necessarily want to encourage every single writer to resubmit to us the year after a rejection. Normally this would be because we don't see enough merit in the work, and we don't see that at this point in time, the writer has potential enough to improve their craft in a year. That is to say, very rarely does a writer go from nothing to everything. (This is, at this point, all about (perceived) quality, and has nothing to do with aesthetic - although of course quality is equally subjective).
In a brutally cruel world, we might write, "Hi, we appreciate the fact that you are writing and submitting to us, but this work is really far away from what we're looking for in terms of quality, so maybe you should just concentrate on your craft for a bit, or consider some less restrictive journals." Or: "Hey, we don't accept 10,000 word stories about robot vampires, but you sent us one anyway, so please don't send another." But that's not very nice, so we write a neutral-toned canned text that offers little encouragement, and we hope that that dissuades people from resubmitting at least for a year or two.
This also, of course, can be of help to the writer, who, it would stand to reason, would want to be told, nicely, that their work has an extremely small chance (far less than the "normal" extremely small chance) of being published by this journal at this time - saving the writer time, money and heartache.
In Versal's case, the canned text rejection that offers encouragement is just that - we don't think this work is good enough, but it has plenty of merit, and we believe that you are capable, next year, of submitting a work that is good enough - so keep trying.
As a writer receiving the rejection letter, you have very little information with which to decipher the letter. Without understanding Versal's process, or having access to all three rejection letters, you don't know if we're just sweet-talking you or if we really want you to resubmit. The problem: if the institution does not make their processes clear, then the writer has no way of knowing what the letter might mean. The writer doesn't know how the letter is produced, what system, how many letters there are, and so forth.
Naturally, a journal wouldn't want to make the letters too hierarchical (i.e. you made it to the second round), because you then encourage people to imagine a linear scale, whereas the complexity of submissions (the quality of the work, the aesthetic, who reads it (and in what mood), how many pieces they are taking, changes in editors) precludes any kind of pathway for a writer to follow. It's completely common for a work to be rejected with some love, and then to have the next work, which might be "better," receive no love at all.
What I envision is a journal that makes public and transparent both their reading process and modes of rejection. It helps the writer, by giving them a focus on whom to submit to, and it helps the journal, who will receive a greater percentage of submissions that correspond to what they want. As complement, I would support a web site (Duotrope?) that stores copies of rejection letters sent by the institution. This would further encourage journals to be up front with their processes.
I'm trying to think of ways in which the public revelation of rejection letters compromises the journal, or forces the journal to spend extra resources on rejection letters. I don't believe that it would. On the other hand, it would give some (not a lot, but some) clarity to the writer on where they, at this moment, with this work, stand.
co-conspiratorially,
Robert
In searching Google, I noticed a number of other sites, including a blog site that rated rejections (http://awritingyear.blogspot.com/). The not-so-surprising thing about the rating of rejections was that the writer (to a large extent, rightfully so) expected that the rejection slip would convey a sense of care and respect. That is to say, an ideal letter, short of including personal information about a person's work (always, always a good sign), succeeded in making the writer feel a combination of hope, admiration, and respect as well as a general support for the act of writing itself.
I'm not saying that journals should be cold, callous, or unprofessional. I'm saying that even a good rejection slip (again, short of a personalized letter) is presenting the illusion of personal attention, and we might be better off if we understood that.
Why? First, the cold truth of quantity. Given the number of submissions a journal receives (hundreds or thousands per month), very, very few people will receive personal attention, and while a rejection letter may allow the writer to feel loved, chances are they skimmed your piece, or, at most, had a few editors read it. Second, because rejections are mass produced, the attributes of a "good" rejection letter such as properly cut pages, handwritten signatures, a mention of care, appreciation, and thanks do nothing but fall within a fairly recent discourse of professionalization.
The writer wants to feel that in rejection, the institution has taken as much care with their work as they have in writing it, but that can never be true - you spent hundreds of hours in that story (I hope). Accordingly, the writer receives reasons to alternately feel hopeful or bitter, consoled or inconsolable, instead of taking the rejection for what it is: which could be almost anything. When there's a black hole of information, the rejection slip offers a locus for the rant of not knowing.
What I'd like to suggest, however, is that a rejection slip could provide not just emotional support, but actually useful information. I'm not arguing that each letter be personalized - however, journals can and do have more than one rejection slip which, coupled with either transparency on the side of the journal or a collective sharing of resources, could help both writers and journals become more efficient.
Let me explain what I mean by explaining - this may be especially handy for non-editors - how the electronic submission system, at least the Submission Manager designed by Devin Emke, is set up:
When rejecting a work, I have a choice of four rejection letters which can all be customized with canned text or personalized information. In general, journals can choose to use any or all of these four letters (if they are extremely technically savvy, they can create more than four). Generally speaking, one of the four is reserved for a purely personal note without canned text, and so most journals will use between 1 and 3 rejection slips.
This is also true for Versal. We use two canned text rejections, which differ by their level of encouragement, and one hybrid, which allows us to add customized text to the more encouraging of the two canned notes.
And this is where, with the option of multiple notes, efficiency comes in. While we love the fact that people are writing, and we want to encourage them in their writing practice, we don't, given our workload, necessarily want to encourage every single writer to resubmit to us the year after a rejection. Normally this would be because we don't see enough merit in the work, and we don't see that at this point in time, the writer has potential enough to improve their craft in a year. That is to say, very rarely does a writer go from nothing to everything. (This is, at this point, all about (perceived) quality, and has nothing to do with aesthetic - although of course quality is equally subjective).
In a brutally cruel world, we might write, "Hi, we appreciate the fact that you are writing and submitting to us, but this work is really far away from what we're looking for in terms of quality, so maybe you should just concentrate on your craft for a bit, or consider some less restrictive journals." Or: "Hey, we don't accept 10,000 word stories about robot vampires, but you sent us one anyway, so please don't send another." But that's not very nice, so we write a neutral-toned canned text that offers little encouragement, and we hope that that dissuades people from resubmitting at least for a year or two.
This also, of course, can be of help to the writer, who, it would stand to reason, would want to be told, nicely, that their work has an extremely small chance (far less than the "normal" extremely small chance) of being published by this journal at this time - saving the writer time, money and heartache.
In Versal's case, the canned text rejection that offers encouragement is just that - we don't think this work is good enough, but it has plenty of merit, and we believe that you are capable, next year, of submitting a work that is good enough - so keep trying.
As a writer receiving the rejection letter, you have very little information with which to decipher the letter. Without understanding Versal's process, or having access to all three rejection letters, you don't know if we're just sweet-talking you or if we really want you to resubmit. The problem: if the institution does not make their processes clear, then the writer has no way of knowing what the letter might mean. The writer doesn't know how the letter is produced, what system, how many letters there are, and so forth.
Naturally, a journal wouldn't want to make the letters too hierarchical (i.e. you made it to the second round), because you then encourage people to imagine a linear scale, whereas the complexity of submissions (the quality of the work, the aesthetic, who reads it (and in what mood), how many pieces they are taking, changes in editors) precludes any kind of pathway for a writer to follow. It's completely common for a work to be rejected with some love, and then to have the next work, which might be "better," receive no love at all.
What I envision is a journal that makes public and transparent both their reading process and modes of rejection. It helps the writer, by giving them a focus on whom to submit to, and it helps the journal, who will receive a greater percentage of submissions that correspond to what they want. As complement, I would support a web site (Duotrope?) that stores copies of rejection letters sent by the institution. This would further encourage journals to be up front with their processes.
I'm trying to think of ways in which the public revelation of rejection letters compromises the journal, or forces the journal to spend extra resources on rejection letters. I don't believe that it would. On the other hand, it would give some (not a lot, but some) clarity to the writer on where they, at this moment, with this work, stand.
co-conspiratorially,
Robert
October 21, 2009
Horizon Review
I've been reading the third issue of Salt Publishing's online literary journal Horizon Review and came across a review of the British Oystercatcher Press, a Norfolk-based publisher of poetry pamphlets, which won the inaugural Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in June this year. The review includes glowing coverage of Versal 7 contributor Rufo Quintavalle's pamphlet Make Nothing Happen. Read it here.
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