Modern Authors Guide

the MAG zine - A Modern Authors Guide

National Poetry Month Canceled

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Current poet laureate Charles Simic announced today in verse that the National Poetry Month has been canceled due to a general lack of interest.

Although relished by poets as a month to be proud of who they are and their right to exist as citizens of the United States, a general disagreement with this notion by everybody else motivated President Bush to order National Poetry Month canceled.

While introducing Simic to the media, Bush indicated he had hoped to cancel the month of April altogether, but his advisors notified him that wouldn’t be possible.

Simic spoke eloquently of poetic rights and the struggle poets have long endured in America, although his words were basically ignored as they were delivered in a sonnet, which most members of the American media assumed was Canadian English.

Although all National Poetry Month events in April have been canceled, Simic encourage poets to “keep writing, even if other poets in your creative writing class are the only ones who will ever read your writing.”

His words were met by enthusiastic snaps from the mostly melancholy crowd.

The cancellation of National Poetry Month is a sad day for poets, and to cheer themselves up, President Bush suggested they go see a movie and support the economy in Hollywood.

In the end, it was an exciting day for poets, who admit they are used to being ignored, and all of the attention created by canceling their month was quite exhilarating.

The United Poetry Front, a rogue poetry militia group on permanent writing retreat, threatened a poet strike that could cripple the greeting card industry, but Hallmark insiders indicated monkeys had actually taken over writing greeting cards long ago.

President Bush was delighted by the news of the monkeys and threatened to veto any attempts to cancel National Monkey Month.

Enjoy April Fools’ Day from The MAG Zine.

5 Essential Poetry Magazine Subscriptions

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Every poet should subscribe to as many poetry magazines as possible to read current poets and be involved in the poetry community, not to mention supporting the magazines that may one day publish your poetry.

The more poetry magazines you subscribe to and the more poetry you read, the more you’ll learn and your own writing will improve.

A good rule to follow is to read more than you write, and write a lot.

It’s not always easy to take time in the chaos of the day, but having poetry magazines scattered around the house will make it easier, plus it will serve as a constant reminder that you are a poet, and not whatever everybody else wants you to be at any given moment.

This is a list of the best poetry magazines that are essential for poets of any stature, whether you pick one up at your local book store or subscribe for home delivery.

Poetry

Poetry magazine has been published in Chicago since 1912, and it is one of the leading monthly poetry magazines in the English-speaking world.

They receive about 90,000 submissions a year and print roughly 300 poems with a circulation of about 30,000.

American Poetry Review

The American Poetry Review is an American poetry magazine published every other month.

It was founded in 1972 and has a circulation of 17,000.

International Poetry Review

The International Poetry Review is an international poetry magazine founded in 1975 that seeks to make the world a better place by crossing the language barrier to publish the poetry of foreign languages.

They publish poems from contemporary writers of all languages with facing English translations, and a portion of every issue is dedicated to poems originally written in English.

Poetry Northwest

Poetry Northwest was founded in 1959 and publishes some of the best contemporary poetry in America today.

They have published poetry by Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Jorie Graham, Anne Sexton, and many other great poets.

Poets & Writers Magazine

Poets & Writers Magazine is great resource for poetry and fiction writers, and it is an essential magazine for modern authors.

These are 5 of the best poetry magazines, and they are all excellent resources for poets.

There are many other Literary Magazines available for all types of creative writers, so make sure you pick one that fits your particular tastes.

The most important feature of any poetry magazine is that it inspires your own craft, so review various magazines and subscribe to ones that publish writing you love.

However, with these 5 essential poetry magazines, you can’t go wrong.

The Daily Poet – Poem 1 – March 30, 2008

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This is the first poem in The Daily Poet, a column dedicated to modern poetry having an influence on the cultural expression of our society.

The Daily Poet publishes poems that attempt to reflect our personal experiences within the perspective of their greater cultural meaning as influenced by the constant changes of our modern times.

This first poem takes a more personal approach to look at one aspect of this experience.

In Midwinter

In midwinter we purchased multicolor-splashed canvasses
To dull the white walls of our rental home from reflecting the snow.

We hung them all together in the living room facing each other
Where we would see them the most as we sat on our separate couches.

They made our old framed posters look dreary and outdated
But we kept them hanging around to fill the empty spaces.

The plush couches we had bought new a few weeks before
When the comfort of our previous hand-me-downs had worn out.

Yours stretched far enough for three but you were perfectly comfortable alone
And I could sleep from head to toe on those nights when we wanted space.

We made our home picturesque and when the landlord held open houses
We were the perfect model couple to show potential buyers.

Young, a little artsy, modern, everything that influences unusually hip college graduates,
They asked if we were married yet and if hardwood floors were beneath the carpet.

The snow came in record numbers that winter as we watched it on TV
We observed it come down out the window and shoveled it away the next day.

In summer, our lease would end or maybe the house would sell
And we’d move on to find some as of yet unknown rental home.

The Daily Poet column welcomes submissions for consideration for publication in The Daily Poet and elsewhere on The MAG Zine. Please review our Submission Guidelines for details on submitting your writing.

The Daily Poet

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The Daily Poet is a regular column dedicated to the poetry of life as it occurs on the timeline of living.

The Daily Poet column publishes a poem a day, or as many days as possible, which reflects our moods and feelings through the observance of the ever-changing world around us as related to our personal lives, the natural order, or the broader scope of society.

These poems are not necessarily about current events, although they could reflect them, but they do hope to capture some essence of a moment of time that is lost forever when observed in the annals of our memory.

The poems for The Daily Poet are plucked from various sources and can be written by anyone, published or unknown, as they are not as much a work of the artists as they are a representation of a reality once lived.

They can be humorous, reflective, melancholy, or desperate, but will probably be most poignant when they are all of the above.

Please feel free to Submit Your Poetry for consideration for publication in The Daily Poet column or elsewhere on The MAG Zine.

The MAG Zine – a Modern Authors Guide

As We Are – A Collection of Real Life Short Stories from 1920s American Life

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As We Are was waiting in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store on Williamson Street in Madison, Wisconsin, which claims to have one of the biggest used book collections anywhere in the country.

I found it amongst the tailored book shelves that march in strict rows like those you’d expect to find in a community college library, but not in the usually disheveled disorder of second hand stores, where no librarian is available to oversee their arrangement.

The dull black hardcover looked more like a reference guide and immediately signaled it was from a bygone era when book covers were more a design of protection then adorned with pictures of somber authors and graphic images that hope to grab the attention of coffee grind browsers.

It was small and stout, the size of a zine, the perfect size for a book, easily held in your hands on a bus seat or when you slide into your couch, something that could be stuck into your trench coat pocket while moving through the city.

The book I slid off the shelf was a first edition published in 1923 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc, printed by The Quinn and Boden Company of Rahway, NJ.

I immediately thought of how many grimy hands had turned these pages in the dirty streets of New York City and how it made its journey to the Midwest like so many immigrants coming through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century.

As We Are, a collection of short stories by Walter B. Pitkin, are stories about the way life was and the way people lived at that time, written expressly for the purpose of introducing realism into the conscience of our American nation and to avoid falling into the illusory pitfall of fiction.

As Walter B. Pitkin puts it, “They have not been written to entertain, still less to please the smug or the lazy-minded.”

They are real pictures of American life, based on real characters and true to the values of those characters.

All of the stories in As We Are except two were written expressly for this book and represent a first attempt by the authors to draw scenes from one particular passage of the American journey.

These stories include:

Shif’less by James Boyd
Railroad Tracks by Emanie N. Sachs
Natural Selection by Elizabeth Irons Folsom
Excelsior by Arthur Collard
Mirage by Elaine Sterne
Masters of Ourselves and Ours by Walter B. Pitkin
The Harp and the Triphammer by Paul Rand
“It’s Me, O Lord!” by Alma and Paul Ellerbe
Berghita and the Americans by Rolla Prideaux
“Colonel, Meet My Mother” by Alma and Paul Ellerbe
The Mask by Worth Tuttle
The Monument by Vara M. Jones
The Case of Doctor Ford by Clement Wood

Walter B. Pitkin also writes an introduction to the book that touches on literary realism and the state of the modern writer, which rings even truer today then it did it the early 1920s.

Here’s a passage from Railroad Tracks by Emanie N. Sachs:

He came forward, a trifle timidly. Linda laughed again, a note which caught and flatted. He followed as she turned back towards the railroad tracks. She glanced over her shoulder and her eyelids went through the motions of a long, slow smile. Her eyes had magic when she wanted to turn it on, and she would turn it on, frequently. She wouldn’t, couldn’t be always alone. He kept on following, as she had known he would. And Linda stumbled slightly on the tracks, so that he stepped up quickly and took hold of her arms. She had stumbled because she wasn’t looking ahead. She wasn’t and she never would again, for it didn’t pay to look ahead.

End passage.

In a time when the idealized themes of the Victorian-era novelists and poets were still widely considered to be the canons of polite society, As We Are sought to tell the truth about who America was then, and with that historical clarity, succeeds at speaking the truth about who we are now.

Is the English Language Lazy?

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Multiple meaning words spread throughout the English language reeking havoc on the substance of sentences.

Homographs, or words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, may or may not have different pronunciations, which adds even more madness to the mayhem.

Are English speakers just too lazy to invent new words, and if not, why do we settle on saying the same thing for different purposes?

Actually, we haven’t stopped inventing new words, and it is estimated that about 25,000 words are added to the language each year.

In fact, the English language may have more words than any other language. Putting an exact number on the amount of words is difficult, but the Oxford English Dictionary includes over 600,000 definitions.

Not including the various parts of speech and other variations, there are about 175,000 words in current use and about 50,000 obsolete words.

Words with multiple meanings are also not just an English phenomenon, as all languages have multiple meaning words, and many of the tonal languages such as Thai use multiple meaning words extensively by varying the meaning of the word through the tone of the pronunciation.

However, you’d think with all of the new words being invented each year and the vast vocabulary of the English language that we would eliminate some of these multiple meaning words.

I don’t mean to be mean, but let’s consider the irony of some homographs.

Hippies long to wear long overalls and burn incense, but problems never incense their overall mood.

Living in the present is no minute present after you die, but rolling the die each minute is easy when you’re young and not worried about making a living.

It’s easy to spot the point of this article, but difficult to point to the spot where the point was made.

With so much confusion caused by these forged double meaning words, it’s time we forged ahead with inventing some new words for the English language.

If we can’t agree on new words to replace the most common homographs, let’s just eliminate using either of their meanings altogether.

For instance, I propose that we eliminate the word console by putting our electronic equipment on a shelf and comforting our loved ones in times of crisis.

In addition, instead of desert, I suggest we simply abandon our dreams and ambitions and refer to an endless beach with no surf, where you obviously won’t be able to surf, but at least you’ll know where you stand.

Homographs may have their place in the English language, but that place seems to be molded by deceit and confusion, and it’s time to disregard the laziness of our English-speaking predecessors.

Double meaning words, homographs, or indolent sloths, whatever you choose to call words with double meanings, can only cause confusion in a world that is becoming ever more specific in its communications while at the same time less detailed in its meaning.

Originally published by The MAG Zine.

5 Magazines to Submit Science Fiction Stories

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Science fiction writers have a variety of publishing opportunities, and there seems to be an ever-revolving door at the sci-fi conventions bringing in new readers.

If you’ve been polishing up your science fiction manuscript until it’s as fierce as The Sword of Kahless, then it’s time to submit your story to these science fiction magazines.

These sci-fi magazines accept new authors, but they have also published some of the best science fiction writers working today, so submit your best writing and edit it to the bone.

Review this Manuscript Preparation Guide to make sure you’re formatting your manuscript professionally and also review the submission guidelines for each magazine closely, as nothing will get your writing tossed in the trash quicker than ignoring the editor’s requirements.

If you haven’t written in the science fiction genre before, then you should definitely consider taking an adventure, as it’s not all alien battalions and laser beams.

Many science fiction magazines are looking for character-driven stories that have some element of science fiction to them, so it’s a great way for literary writers who hope to touch on the human experience to expand their arsenal, and good science fiction authors can always find a market, which isn’t necessarily true in other genres.

It’s also a good idea to subscribe to these magazines or to at least purchase one or two issues to see the type of writing they tend to publish.

Analog

Analog Submission Guidelines

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Fantasy & Science Fiction Submission Guidelines

Asimov’s Science Fiction

Asimov’s Science Fiction Submission Guidelines

Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest

Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest Submission Guidelines

Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine

Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine Submission Guidelines

Publish your science fiction stories in these magazines, and the fans will follow.

Just be careful of the characters you create, as they may come back to haunt you, literally.

Are Modern Writers Smart Enough?

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In today’s highly-educated society, it’s impossible for modern fiction authors to know more about any one subject than all of their readers, and this has resulted in the decline of realism in modern literature.

It’s no secret that modern mankind is able to comprehend at levels far beyond any other time in history, as the spread of education has reached further in our times than ever before throughout history.

Aristotle is unarguably one of the greatest minds the world has ever known, but there are at least a million people living today who know as much about the universe and mankind than he ever did.

This is not to say that any living person has his capacity to calculate and comprehend the natural and human world around him, but as far as his actual knowledge base, there are many people living today that know as much about the world we live in as Aristotle did.

As a result of these advancements in education, the modern reader of fiction knows as much, if not more, than the modern author they are reading and the subjects they write about.

This closing of the education gap results in a virtual chasm between the actual facts of life and a convincing level of realism in modern writing, and this is truer now than it has ever been before.

In the pursuit of realism, authors must depend on the factual details of everyday life to create characters and situations that reflect what they write about.

For instance, a novel about the insanity of a serial killer may draw upon the scientific details of psychological disorders.

However, in today’s society, a thousand psychologists and criminal investigators know more about the mental make-up of a serial killer than any author could hope to achieve, let alone having the years of experience dealing with such characters that would be needed to portray their nuances convincingly.

Sure, an author may still convincingly write a murder story that will entertain the reader and satisfy the needs of the story, but any number of readers could point out various flaws and improbabilities based on the facts they know to be true as a result of their experience and education.

This begs the question of whether it is necessary to accurately reflect the scientific facts of life in fiction, as it is after all a creative endeavor, but if the job of literary realism is to suspend the readers within the illusion of reality just enough to transcend that reality, then it is absolutely necessary that the writer not allow the details of the story to distract the reader from the events they portray.

It could just be that the pursuit of realism in fiction is a dying cause, given the blaring presence of multimedia on society and the decline of fiction in general as a commercially viable social medium, which is slowly merging into literary journalism and eventually may be known only as news.

However, the final sanctuary for the “uneducated” fiction writer may be emotional realism, which corresponds with an age-old adage of writing – write about what you know – even if you don’t know what you’re writing about.

Even when the facts of human existence aren’t universally known, the human experience is often universal, and that human experience may be the last lifeboat in the literary ocean for the modern author.

The modern author may not know everything, but if they write about what they feel, then even the most educated of readers will pretend to understand.

Article originally published by The MAG Zine

Author Interviews

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Author Interviews is a regular column where The MAG Zine interviews authors and working writers.

The Modern Authors Guide interviews authors to get insights into the writing life and the minds of writers, to find out how they think and what it takes to do what they do.

We interview poets, fiction writers, and professional writers of all varieties, and print their thoughts in their own words.

Bookstore Treasures

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Bookstore Treasures highlights some of the hidden gems found among the racks of books at thrift stores and used bookstores.

We scour the shelves of local bookstores and report on some of the books and authors we find.