Editing: On Caring, Paying, and Cuban Cigars

One of most depressing things I’ve seen on social media lately are posts saying that if literary journals can’t pay, they shouldn’t publish. That not paying is some kind of exploitation. But for my journal there is no choice involved. If my amazing Bellingham Review could only publish when paying authors, we either would give silly amounts of payment—one pumpkin spice latte, anyone?—or we’d pay more and quickly shut down.

I think this idea comes from a sense that journals are more or less some version of Poetry magazine, with a multimillion dollar endowment—or at least a healthy one—but still only small honoraria for authors. Well, no. My journal is required to self-fund with no fundraising support or ability to fundraise, since the people whose job it is to fundraise for us simply refuse to do it (thanks, tenure, for the ability to say that!) We survive on Submittable fees, mostly from our contests. Our annual budget is just enough to scrimpingly, page-countingly, print.

Our Managing Editor gets a stipend that equals a teaching assistant teaching one course. I get one course release, which should represent ten weeks of steady work. Instead I work twelve months a year, often, when we’re in production, the entire day, every day, for weeks. My hardworking and dedicated student readers and editors get a few credits each.

This is offering some real talk, not complaining. I have guest-edited journals from Drunken Boat to Brevity, and editing has been one of the delights of my life. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t do it. When I see authors I’ve published early in their careers go on to win awards, publish books, become a force in the world, the joy is great. When I get work from seasoned writers that offers a new glimpse into their aesthetics and a new spin on their voices, that’s great too.

Which brings me to point two. When I took over the editorship of the Bellingham Review, one of my resolutions was that, since we cannot pay, we would support. From our perspective, our authors make us who we are. Being family is an overused trope, but if you think of being family as having a bunch of people behind you who are unflagging and ongoing in their concern for you, that’s us. Or who we try to be. We follow our authors. We blast their good news, we review their books, we interview them, we showcase them in Contributor Spotlights and in our newsletter. We care.

It is common, and I do it, to consider publication a one-and-done. The journal gets your nice poem, story, essay, hybrid work, and then it appears, and you stick it on your cv, or in front of your nearest and dearest, or whatever. But you shouldn’t stop there. You should message this journal with your news. You should send your book galleys and your award announcements. If they don’t care, they can ignore it. But I think most journals do want to know, and if it’s us, we’ll do everything we can to bring your work attention.

So . . . two messages here. One, please try to understand that your work may be landing into the inboxes of just a couple of tremendously overworked people who are doing this work of literary publishing out of love. And who see far, far more great writing than they can publish, or that they can even respond to with the letters you deserve.

Second, if you do connect with a literary journal, don’t think of it as just a chance to scan a TOC when your work comes out and stick it on Instagram. Think of it as a relationship. We all have too few of those in the literary world, don’t we?

Once, a while back, one of our authors sent us Cuban cigars in a box that had some kind of a cool cover (smuggled, I assume). It was wild. We editors got this big packet that smelt of (delicious) tobacco and opened it up with wonder. We didn’t smoke the cigars because one of us, uh, me, gets really sick. But we stared at them for a long time, sniffed them because they smelled so good, and just totally dug that this person cared enough about us to share some illicit cigars. So stay in touch. Know that just a few caring readers are working very hard but mostly want to work harder for you.