Mas on Lit Mags, plus Bulgaria!

Apropos of last week’s posting about little magazines, I just stumbled upon an interesting debate about the journals’ fate on the website of Mother Jones. Ted Genoways, editor of one of my fave lit mags, Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote an essay called The Death of Fiction about the deleterious impact of MFA programs on the industry. Here’s an excerpt:
By the early ’70s—and with the development of inexpensive offset printing—every school seemed to have its own quarterly. Before long, the combined forces of identity politics and cheap desktop publishing gave rise to African American journals, Asian American journals, gay and lesbian journals. Graduates of creative writing programs were multiplying like tribbles. Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves.
Indeed, a number of legendary lit mags have either folded in recent years (Ontario Review) or gone online only (TriQuarterly), and if these trends continue, they might go the way of the newspaper (to use a tragic metaphor) altogether. Seems to me, more MFA programs should follow the example of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and offer classes about the history of little magazines and assign the journals as classroom texts. Before taking such a class with Robin Hemley last semester, I myself was totally anti-lit mag. (Why? I “sold” an essay to one in 1999, and not only did it take two years to be published, more than 20 typos appeared in the span of a single page. I was so appalled, I didn’t even give my mom one of the two copies I received as compensation.) Now, however, I subscribe to Granta, Missouri Review, and (assuming my check clears) the Bellingham Review, in addition to the New Yorker and Poets & Writers. Do I have time to read all these publications? No. Am I contributing to deforestation? Yes. But as a writer in general and a MFA student in particular, I feel morally obligated to do so.
Onward to…. Bulgaria! If you’ve ever wanted to go (and I know you have), here’s your chance. Ten scholarships are currently being offered to attend the Sozopol Fiction Seminars on the Black Sea Coast. Five will go to fiction writers working in English and five to folks working in Bulgarian. Winners will receive tuition, room, board, and most travel expenses, and writers of any nationality are eligible. Submit 10 to 20 pages of your best work, a personal statement, a curriculum vitae, and a letter of reference by March 15 right here. If you get it, I expect a dispatch!