4 DUMB QUESTIONS. 1 SERIOUS ONE. TASTEFULLY DONE.

When I was merely a wee little sprite, I spent a lot of time ogling over the Novel & Short Story Writers Market, perusing the names and titles of all the literary magazines that were surely looking for the hot new thing. (I presumed I was the hot new thing at the time.) I made out a handsome chart in Excel and began submitting short stories to literary journals far and wide (which means I sent all my stuff to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and then tried to suss out the differences between the Black Warrior Review and the Chariton Review and determined that all four were unlikely to want stories I’d ripped off from Richard Ford) and found, after a time, success in the market, to the point now that I regularly get paid for my work and people actually solicit me.

One of the first places to publish my work was Other Voices, an excellent and acclaimed literary journal out of Chicago. When founding editor Lois Hauselman called to inform me that they’d love to publish my story “Simplify” and would that be okay, it was like receiving manna from literary heaven. We spoke for a good ten minutes and it was like we’d been friends for years. My god, I thought, these editors are real people! It doesn’t always seem that way when the generic rejection letters come floating in (damn you ZYZZYVA editor Howard Junker and your persistent demand that I go “Onward!”) or when you get your manuscript back seemingly the same day you sent it out (a pox on the house of the Antioch Review). So, for today’s installment of Four Dumb Questions and One Serious One, we visit with Gina Frangello, editor of Other Voices and an acclaimed and talented writer in her own right, in hopes of humanizing her in the eyes of potential submitters. What is more humanizing, I ask, than knowing that Ms. Frangello likely knows all the words to "Hungry Like The Wolf"?

1. Are you aware that sometimes, when trolling through the Novel & Short Story Writers Market, an aspiring writer will pick a literary journal to submit to because they think the name of the editor sounds friendly? (For instance, I know a writer, we'll call him Ted, who has never submitted to Agni because the name of the founding editor of that magazine kinda scares him.)
I'm aware of this because I used to do it. When I was an undergraduate, the guys in my workshops always liked my stories and the women sometimes didn't--they tended to say my characters were "unsympathetic"--so when I first started submitting to lit mags when I was 21 or 22, I preferred to submit to male editors. If an editor had an Italian surname, I'd get a warm and fuzzy vibe thinking that person would publish my work, even though most of my fiction that portrayed Italian-Americans at ALL didn't tend to feature very "positive" portrayals. I also liked submitting to Midwestern magazines because I grew up in Chicago and studied in Madison, Wisconsin. But it turned out that my first published story, "The Montgomery Party," was published by a feminist magazine in Canada, so neither the male editor nor the Midwest thing proved true--in fact, though I'm not sure why, about 80% of my published work has been accepted by female editors. And the few times I submitted to Italian-American focused journals, they always rejected me. Eventually, I gave up my earlier superstitions and started sending to magazines I liked, or where my friends had been published, which can be just as superstitious but is, in my humble opinion, somewhat more successful.

2. Who was your childhood best friend and what happened that made you stop talking to him/her?

This is a bad question for me because my two best friends from grade school are still my best friends. One I met when I was ten, and even though I left the state for 8 years and we now have so little in common that if we met as adults we probably wouldn't even speak to each other, we've become like sisters and are stuck with one another for life. I actually introduced her to her husband, a friend of mine from grad school, and now that I live in Chicago again we own a building together and our daughters--we each have two--play together almost daily. In fact, we're going away with her family this weekend. Isn't that just so quaint it's almost gross?
My other best friend is also someone I met in elementary school. He's a gay, Venezuelan-born Cuban-Puerto Rican atheist artist from a Baptist family, who makes his living as an options trader and reads philosophy and theology at the speed some people read romance novels. He's one of the weirdest and most fascinating, intelligent people I've ever known and I just adore him, and since our lives are also very dissimilar now that I have children, I also sort of miss him, though we still see each other socially quite a bit--we just don't spend hours daily on the phone like when we were both young and angst-ridden. Our relationship used to be very turbulent, but we've both gotten calmer with age. He recently helped me illustrate a book for my twin girls about their adoption from China.

So, okay, that was just all way too hearts and flowers, when I know you want something cynical and grim, right? So my sad lost-friend story is that one of my closest friends from childhood once raped another one of my closest friends, and that pretty much blew apart the whole circle. I don't want to say any more about that incident, though. I also have some friends who have died, from murder or disease. But I've been extremely lucky in terms of my two most intimate friendships, both of which have now lasted more than 25 years.

3. Please list your top 5 all time favorite guilty pleasure pop songs. Let it be known that I own every single Rick Springfield album ever recorded.
I always feel like a big dork when talking to male writers who are into the whole rock and roll thing because the truth is that I'm not that well-versed in popular music. I like jazz and classical, but I'm not that auditory in general: I tend to work in silence and rarely turn on music or television unless someone else prompts me to. So let's see--I was obsessed with "Don't Fear the Reaper" when I was a kid; if it came on the radio I would go all suicidal and blissful at once and zone out to it. When I was in high school I once stayed up all night speeding, listening to Prince's “Purple Rain” album over and over again until the sun came up, and I am still kind of a Prince groupie--I also saw Duran Duran in concert in the late 1990's long past when that should have been acceptable. I was an alternative-music chick in the 80's and I have a lot of memories of screaming the lyrics of "Blister in the Sun" and "I'll Melt With You" at parties in basements or gyrating on pillars in dance clubs to "Cities in Dust." Then back to classic rock, I went through a "Desperado" stage when I was living in London and fancying myself a lone adventurer in my early 20's--the only tape I had with me was by the Eagles--so I particularly loved that Seinfeld episode later on where Elaine dates a freaky guy who won't let her speak when "Desperado" comes on. I wrote my first novel to Tori Amos' Live From the Choirgirl Hotel album, with a sprinkling of Ani DiFranco, and living in Amsterdam, so as you might imagine it has a fair bit of anger in it, but I hope that was tempered by the mellow vibe of the city, ha.

4. What one writer have you met that absolutely made you geek out to the point that you felt like a blubbering moron?
I'm reserving my blubbering moron moment in the hopes that I'll get to meet either Toni Morrison or Milan Kundera someday. I've worshipped Kundera since I was about 18--you could say he's really the writer who turned me on to the fact that I wanted to write and wanted to read more than I wanted to do anything else. I don't like his later work written in French nearly as much, but I think The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality are two of the best novels ever written, ever. I knew this guy who wrote a paper on Kundera and sent it to him and got into a correspondence with him, and the guy claimed that every time Kundera--a younger Kundera, I'm talking about here--bedded a new woman, he bought himself a tie. I've always told myself that if I get to meet him, I'll focus on that as a way of not being too intimidated, but since he's old and lives in another country, I guess my chances are dwindling. Other Voices is publishing an interview with Toni Morrison--conducted by Pam Houston--in Spring 2005, and while it seems far-fetched, I'm letting myself fantasize that this will somehow lead to meeting Morrison. I think she's the greatest living American novelist, and in fact that Beloved read in tandem with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! constitutes the "great American novel" as a kind of multi-generational dialogue. If I ever met Toni Morrison, I'm sure I would stutter and end up mute. Pam Houston wrote a great essay about their interview in which she basically describes her own huge intimidation level at their meeting, but since Pam is one of the most articulate and charming people on the planet, I'm sure my own behavior would be far more indicative of my true anxieties than hers was--she ended up staying at Morrison's house for something like 11 hours!

5. As the editor of a prestigious literary journal, one that has happily lived well beyond the age most journals typically do, how important is it for you day to day to uphold the standards of literary fiction the magazine has set? You've published many writers who have gone on to mainstream success -- Pam Houston, Dan Chaon, Steve Almond and others -- yet unlike some journals who seem to aim for a commercial middle-ground after a blush of success, you've continually published work that is both challenging and patently uncommercial alongside work by known authors. Is this a philosophy or simply a matter of personal taste? And if Dan Brown sends in a short story sequel to The Davinci Code, what would you do?

Okay, I'm not kidding, but the answer to this question would in part be: Who's Dan Brown? Until I read the title of his book after you mentioned his name, the name inspired no recognition in me whatsoever. I didn't read The DaVinci Code, but of course I've heard of it, ha. So the real answer to this question is probably that if Dan Brown, whose name I wouldn't recognize, sent a sequel to The DaVinci Code without my having seen an accompanying cover letter telling us he'd WRITTEN that book, I'd probably write a big ass note across the top of the manuscript saying, "Way with this dude who wants to be like that guy who wrote The DaVinci Code." Then the other editors at Other Voices would all mock me, and that would probably be the end of that.
What I mean is: I doubt we'd publish it. I'm under the impression that book isn't . . . you know . . . GOOD in terms of the writing, though we should all be so lucky as to write books with such riveting plots and make all that money. But several of my friends have told me not to read it and that they don't think I'd like it.

We recently got a submission from the writer who wrote Pay It Forward [Catherine Ryan Hyde] and didn't accept that, though it wasn't bad. It was just more commercial and slick than I tend to be interested in. I didn't recognize that writer's name either until someone else on staff told me.
I fear the upshot of this question is that I'm a total flake who has no idea of the names of writers writing huge books. But what I'm really trying to say here is that Other Voices has no driving desire whatsoever to publish commercial writers, nor to exclude them--we only aim to publish what we love. Believe me, we don't get scads of submissions from "famous" people, since they all know they're not going to make much money--we currently pay $100 but that's an all-time-high for us--so it's not like we're turning blockbuster writers away in droves. But we're just as LIKELY to reject them as we are anyone else if their work doesn't do it for us.

I think the major thing that distinguishes OV from a lot of comparable mags is that we do absolutely no solicitation work whatsoever (other than interviews, of course, since most of these are done by our staff.) We publish the best of what is SENT to us, by whatever writers send it. Most such writers are, by definition, emerging or unknown. Usually to get a big name writer in a nonprofit lit mag, you have to write a letter and ask for the work, unless there's a prior relationship. I recently guest-edited an anthology for another press, Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters, and I solicited for that and it was fun. I got to write a lot of my favorite writers and ask to see work, and unbelievably even ended up turning down stories by some writers I'd have generally thought I'd get heart palpitations just from considering, but also publishing some work by people I completely dig and read for pleasure. Soliciting is a way to get very predictably good results and to have name power to increase selling potential. I'm not against that on principle so much as it's just not what I'm interested in with OV. We don't want to be The New Yorker, or even the Paris Review. We want to introduce new writers, further the careers of emerging writers who often are discovered by agents or even editors because of appearing in the lit mags, and we want to publish, perhaps, some edgier, riskier work by writers who are thought of as commercial but who probably got their starts in the lit mags. I mean, Aimee Bender, Dan Chaon, Steve Almond--these are people who are very literary writers, who happened, against the odds probably, to achieve commercial success. They aren't formula writers; they aren't "easy." We've published plenty of commercial writers early in their careers--even Terry McMillian, believe it or not--because we thought they had something to say, and sometimes a relationship is formed and we keep publishing them later on, neither because of nor despite their success, but because of who they are as writers. We've published Steve maybe four times--he's on our Board too. But I'm sure he'd be the first to tell you that we've also rejected about 50% of what he's sent us, too. Nobody should ever have an "automatic in" or a journal becomes very dull very quickly. I think most writers agree with that. We've never had anyone get pissy about it, ever.

We've also launched our new book imprint, OV Books, to "uphold literary standards," so to speak. I hope that doesn't mean anything as dry as it sounds--for me, it means keeping short fiction alive despite the corporate publishing industry's increasing marginalization of collections. It means creating another needed venue for challenging, innovative work that takes risk with form and content. And mainly it means publishing stories a reader can return to again and again and always come away with something more and something new. There should never be a "punch line." If a story isn't layered, it probably isn't for us. It doesn't have to be complicated--we publish plenty of accessible, traditional fiction--but it has to be complex.

Comments

[Jimmy Beck]

Kick ass interview--way to go, Tod. For the record, AGNI founding editor Askold Melnyczuk is the loveliest guy you'll ever meet.

[Dan Wickett]

Excellent job Tod, and Gina. OV is an awesome journal - glad to see it get some pub.

Enjoy,

[Margot Van Sluytman]

Dance With Words: A new Writers Portal for the experienced and the amateur writer
By Margot Van Sluytman

Are you a writer looking for a great place to share stories, poetry, experiences? To communicate with other creative souls? An individual who wishes to meet new and interesting people? If so, you will love your visit to www.dance-with-words.com

A diverse culture of writers with a wide range of experience and savvy participate in this group. Unlike other writing groups, www.dance-with-words.com is a free writers community, where you can find affordable resources for self-publishing, printing, and on-line courses that can inspire you to tap into your creative spirit.

Description of the Group:
In this Group we will speak about the love we have for language and how using words motivates us to write poetry, meditations, stories, dialogues, journal entries, novels, novellas, all genres and styles, in order to both create and find joy and meaning. We will share the work of those poets and writers who have inspired and do inspire and teach.

I am Margot Van Sluytman, Published Poet and Writer, Administrator of www.dance-with-words.com, and I am holding the First International Dance-With-Words Poetry Contest. I am a Professional Member of the Canadian Author’s Association, Peterborough Chair of the Federation of Canadian Poets. Lover of language.

I have a wonderful dream of dancing around the world with language, with words, sharing within communities and groups who value how the process of using words inspires richness, springing from soul, even souls that have been hurt – finding and creating joy. www.dance-with-words.com was created to have a place to go to talk with respect and passion, to write poetry and prose, to listen to the words of others. To dance. To dance. To dance.

It is my other dream to promote artists who would otherwise not be able to promote themselves – to create a site for the work of individuals whose work must be known. Must be shared.

The First International Dance With Words Poetry Contest, which has already drawn television and newspaper coverage, offers an opportunity to showcase your work.

Let me introduce those involved with: “First International Dance With Words Poetry Contest”

**the individual who offered $175.00 for the contest prizes, and who wishes to remain anonymous;

**Rick McKenna www.rpm-computing.com who has donated all of his time to www.dance-with-words web design and marketing and who has committed to creating the web site for the artists we will promote.

**Joan E.Cadham, National President of the Canadian Author’s Association, who believes deeply along with our members in the motto, Writers Helping Writers. www.canauthors.org She is a judge on the panel.

**Lesley Parrott, well known public speaker and media interviewee. She is particularly noted for delivering uplifting and inspiring messages, based on life experiences. She runs a successful Toronto-based consulting firm. www.lesleyparrott.ca She is a judge on the panel.

**Gerry McCarthy, publisher of the highly successful, incredibly well written e-Zine, with mind-blowing content www.thesocialedge.com He is a judge on the panel.

For more information contact: info@margotvansluytman.com or visit: www.dance-with-words.com

I look forward to sharing this amazing dance with you all, Margot.