Lit Mag From Louisiana Exhibits Worldliness and High-Quality Writing
Having lived in New Orleans for over three years I have a hard time praising Baton Rouge and what comes out of it, but The Southern Review is an exception. This journal comes from Louisiana State University four times a year. Despite its name the art, essays, poems, and stories found within are more worldly than southern. Not to say that southerners aren’t worldly, just that the work in this issue doesn’t seem stereotypically southern at all. No cicadas, no Spanish moss, no sazeracs or gin fizzes, just good writing that drips of experience and discipline.
This is not meant to imply that other contemporary journals do not display discipline and experience, but that the work in The Southern Review does this exceptionally well. It seems that writers featured in the issue submitted the best of their best work – if someone were to try to whittle away at a poem or story they’d have a hard time finding extraneous words or descriptions to chip off. Writers published in the journal are paid for their work, $25 per printed page (with a max of $200 for prose and $125 for poetry) and they receive two copies of the issue their published in as well as a one-year subscription. This is quite a nice payment package as far as literary magazines go, which I imagine results in a ton of submissions for editors to weed through.
When a collection of writing is this solid it is challenging to highlight a few pieces that shine brighter than the rest. To do so I had to read through the journal a few times, eventually deciding that the nonfiction essay “The Skelleton of This Monster on the Sand” by Megan Snyder-Camp is the apple of my eye. This essay revolves around a family retracing Lewis and Clark’s arrival on the Pacific coast. It is delivered in a dated journal fashion, with prose that is poignant and heartfelt. Lines of poetry appear in the essay as well, making the journey through the story full of surprising twists and turns.
The issue as a whole is mostly poems. There are four fiction pieces and two nonfiction pieces, and then there is poetry from twenty two poets (a few of whom have multiple poems). I love it when poetry takes center stage in a journal, especially when it is so well crafted. There are lots of familiar names in this issue - Stephen Dunn, Bob Hicok, and Shara McCallum, and their work is impressive, as expected. The poems tend to be free verse, though a few formal poems appear. Perhaps my favorite poem in this issue is Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s “Ode to Clichés,” which is a clever sonnet that praises what we all know and what writers at some point have all written about. A close runner-up to that is “Some math, some words” by Bob Hicok. This poem is composed of three-line stanzas and appears very contained, but it sprawls about and makes unexpected leaps that keep me excited the whole way through--which isn’t that easy to do.
I tend to get more excited by emerging writers in journals; I’m a huge fan of prose poems and experimental stuff, but I greatly enjoyed the work in this issue. While poring over this magazine I didn’t find myself longing for the crazier work I normally am drawn to. Perhaps I’m getting old and beginning to appreciate the more formal, academic, and organized approach to writing and publishing. Or perhaps the writing in this issue is just really that good.
The latter is probably true, as this Summer 2013 issue is volume 49:3 of The Southern Review, which was started nearly eighty years ago and has published continuously since its founding. At close to two hundred pages long it’s not a journal you can read quickly in one sitting. It is more the sort of journal you can toss in your bag to read on your lunch break or during your commute in order to show strangers how well read you are. There is a wide array of voices and styles to enjoy in the issue, and it provides an interesting but dense read.
If you’re interested in submitting to this journal be warned that they accept submissions by snail-mail only and take up to six months to respond. Unsolicited fiction and nonfiction is accepted from September 1 through December 1 while unsolicited poetry manuscripts can be sent in between September 1 and February 1. Only a small percentage of what is submitted makes it to print, but if you’re one of the lucky few you’ll get to brag for a while about how your work made into one of the South’s finest literary journals, which is probably worth the cost of postage.
