Over the years, too many important literary journals have been shuttered. Tin House Magazine, North West Review, Black Clock, Open City, Gigantic, Entropy, and countless others have been lost while more, such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review and Sycamore Review, face uncertainty.

In October of 2021, The Believer, founded in 2003, and a twelve-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards, announced that the February/March 2022 issue would be their last. Then in March of this year, Conjunctions, a celebrated publication, went on the cutting block. Thankfully, the persuasive battle cry from Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief of Literary Hub, was heard by Bard College. Next, The Believer, in an oddball scenario likened to an unpredictable, rollicking Quentin Tarantino movie—money, Las Vegas, bathtub scandal, sex toys (nontoxic, of course), philanthropists and high profile names (Zadie Smith, Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby, Anne Carson), buyers, sellers, a Kickstarter campaign and more—was purchased back by its original longtime publisher McSweeney’s.

Digressing back to October 2021. I was a month out from the pub date of my Casey Schwartz interview for The Believer. Niela Orr, my editor, had taken me through countless rounds of revisions. Next, an independent cross-examining fact-checker, followed by Daniel Gumbiner, Managing Editor, kicked the tires. As a writer, the highly engaged process changed me for the best. For the first time, I felt like an insider within a caring literary community. They were seeking to develop my voice and build my confidence. My experience aligned with everything Denne Michele Norris, Electric Lit’s Editor-In-Chief, penned in her article about the future of literary magazines. 

Literary journals are the rigorous proving grounds that early-career writers need; they are the venues that often propel us from early to mid-career. 

On March 18th, 2022, I attended the virtual launching of Mike Meginnis’ Drowning Practice hosted by Exile in Bookville with Matt Bell. It underscored my love for online and print literary magazines, reminding me too, that journals survive when you subscribe and submit to them. Without explicitly stating it, I sensed that Mike and Matt were aware that having their early works published in those places—Hobart, Conjunctions, PANK, The Pinch, Recommended Reading, The Driftwood Review, Juked, Barrelhouse, The Collagist, Gulf Coast, Tin House, Smokelong Quarterly, Salt Hill, Guernica, Monkeybicyle and many more—proved to be foundational to their careers and friendships. The conversation illuminated how they found their voices and stories. 

Submissions, rejections, and ultimately acceptances by literary journals are every writer’s rite of passage. At the time of Meginnis’s virtual book launch, I was still grieving the loss of The Believer. The tussled, brotherly exchange between Mike and Matt had heart and heat. 

Yvonne Conza: In thinking about community, both of you have been published in some of the most widely read lit publications. Talk briefly about how they helped shape or encourage your writing and friendships. Also, beyond subscribing, how can we help lit journals?

Mike Meginnis: I'll start. In grad school, over the course of a few days, I wrote “Navigators,” a short story. When I was done, I was like, is this anything? I almost didn't send it anywhere. I talked to Tracy [Mike’s partner] about it, revised it, worked on it, submitted it around, and got a few rejections. Eventually, Aaron Burch (Hobart founder) accepted it. The changes he made weren't gigantic, but they were so important. I don't remember exactly how it ended before Aaron fixed it, but I know it sucked. I am eternally grateful to him. In 2012, “Navigators” was chosen to be included in Best American Short Stories. Fixing that ending for me gave me so many new opportunities. We talk every now and then, but I've never really been able to communicate that to him and thank him for it fully. I'll keep trying.

Though I haven't been in many lit magazines in recent times because I just haven't written short fiction in a while, through them I was figuring things out. They served as critical targets for me, where my thinking was that if I can get published in this one, or another, then I’ll know that I've achieved something, and that my work is like the work of the people who are in there that I respect, maybe, and that was hugely important for me. 

As far as how you can help lit journals, subscribing is the answer. I'm sure there are other answers, but it's the number one I would give you.

The other thing I would say—and this is not what they want me to tell you, but I will tell you this anyway—[laughs] submit really great fiction. Journals receive poetry, or whatever, and stuff that isn't that great. If you send them something that is really good, in their slush, they'd be thrilled. They need that. Honestly. It's not a popular answer because slush is so overwhelming that adding to it doesn't sound exciting, but they need great work. They really do.

Matt Bell: That's a great answer. I was thinking something similar. One of the best ways to support literary magazines is by sending them your great work and letting it appear in their pages alongside other writers. It's a conversation. As Mike was talking, I was thinking about that conversational aspect of my life in lit mags, especially in places where I had similar editorial experiences where people went out of their way to take my work, and me, seriously. When I was an editor, I tried to do the same for other people. Mike, you did the same thing.

That conversation extended into other directions as well. Mike wrote a review of my first short story collection in Puerto Del Sol, probably 12 years ago? When that review came out, I was writing my first novel. He had clearly seen my goals and the things I was trying to do: there was something in his review linked to the future and aimed at what I might do with those things he described about my work. Fortuitously, I was doing them in the midst of a novel that I was writing, and Mike’s grasp of my work gave me wild encouragement.

My novel In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods came out three years after I read that review, but already I had felt the kind of writing I was trying to do in it had been seen by his reading of my earlier book. I'll never forget Mike’s Puerto del Sol review and how it was important to me and in support of the work I was doing. 

To really help print and online journals, the best thing to do is share the work that appears in them with other people. The hardest part about publishing lit magazines is silence that occurs after something is published. It is way bigger than the silence that happens when you publish a book, which is also real. 

If you read something that you love in a print journal, share it on the internet. Tell people about it. Teach it in your classes as that really is how you extend the life of those things. Many issues come out and vanish. That's tough on magazines, on their editors and on their contributors. 

Mike: Can I say what a wild move it was on my part to use review time to speculate about what YOU were going to do in the future? I'm glad you appreciate it. I don't know what the hell I was thinking.

Matt: Print magazines come out every six months or so. It was a while after my book launched so it was a nice time for your review to appear. And it was before you and I knew each other in person, but already we were in conversation with each other because of those publications. 

Literary magazines also helped me develop my first internet writing groups with writers like Blake Butler and Ryan Call, which was super important to me. I met them because three of us appeared in the same tiny experimental online magazines. I kept seeing these people in the same places as me and thought, maybe I'll reach out. There's probably a version of that in how Mike and I know each other.

Yvonne: What were your submission strategies with lit journals? Any tips to offer?

Matt: I don’t think there’s anything too special about my submission tactics. I submitted to the magazines I loved reading and, the ones that published work I liked, assuming that the feeling might be mutual. I mined the acknowledgments pages of collections I loved for lists of magazines I hadn’t heard of, then read them and submitted to them. I started editing around the same time I started submitting work, and so I knew that editors appreciated correspondence that was direct, polite, and thankful. Then when things were accepted, I did my best to be publicly excited and to spread the word about the issue. That’s honestly probably about it.

Mike: My strategy was pretty much the same, down to the fact that I was also editing for a magazine (Puerto del Sol) around the same time I started seriously trying to get my work out there. My biggest challenge was that I tend to write long fiction, like longer than any magazine wants. But I would go ahead and submit it anyway, because my experience as an editor taught me that my own journal’s submission guidelines didn’t matter if I liked a story enough. If the work is great and you love it, then you find room for it. And my goal is to write great fiction. It probably annoyed some folks that I didn’t fully honor all of the submission guidelines, but on the other hand, my fiction did get published. Otherwise, I was always very polite, like Matt. Or tried to be.

Yvonne: Matt, share your favorite acceptance story and why you think the piece was chosen?

Matt: When I was in grad school, I sent a story to Willow Springs, and Samuel Ligon, the editor there, wrote me an email asking me if he could call me. On the phone, he rejected the story, then talked to me for an hour about it before telling me to submit again. Months later—maybe even a year—I sent him another story, and once again he called me, again talking to me for an hour about how the story could be even better. This time he accepted it, but told me that it was the first piece accepted for the issue so I could have a couple of months to make the story the best it could be. “Take your time and send it to me when you think it’s great, and then we’ll do one more round of edits.” I was so grateful for that much time and attention, and I know it made me a better writer not just for that one story in Willow Springs, but for much of what I did after.

Yvonne: Mike, is there a story that was published in a journal, now shuttered, that you’d like to see reprinted? Or, revised and rehomed? 

Mike: There are things in print journals I would like to see collected somewhere. My story “A Eulogy for Bull Rose” is one that I liked pretty well when I wrote it, and which Hayden’s Ferry Review kindly published. I also have a story called “Powder, Sugar, Tap” that was published in The Pinch that I might like to see again. But honestly I’m not a huge fan of my own short fiction for the most part these days, so when a journal disappears and takes a story with it, I take that as a sign from the universe and let the story stay dead.

Yvonne: What’s an online or print story everyone should read and share?

Matt: I’m constantly banging the drum for Mike’s “Navigators” at Hobart, which I finally bullied Aaron Burch into reprinting, so I’ll say that one first. Another piece I feel like I’m constantly sharing the link to is Charles Yu’s “Standard Loneliness Package,” which was published online at Lightspeed Magazine.

Mike: Gosh, questions like this are always a struggle for me, I have an issue where I can’t choose favorite anythings without a lot of deliberation and frustration, and then recommending things to other folks is really fraught in its own way. I’m just being weird. Anyway, it’s not available online to my knowledge, but Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover” is the short story that I think about most often, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Exile in Bookville, an independent bookstore in Chicago, and its founder Javier Ramierez, who hosted Mike Meginnis’ virtual Drowning Practice book launch with Matt Bell. The interview was lightly edited for clarity and additional questions.