Closing a window – A Arbor.

In addition to using this website as a sort of personal “web log” (a new phrase which I’ve just invented and decided to shorten to “webl” for convenience) regards my own creative writing endeavours, I thought it might also be helpful to occasionally record progress and challenges in my role as founder and Editor-in-Chief of DEGENERATE ART literary journal.

(My first post about DA can be found here)

The journal was officially launched online in August 2021, opened up to submissons in October 2021, closed to submissions on 10 January 2022 (yesterday as I write), and aims to publish twice a year. Our first issues will be available free and in full in PDF form, at least until such time as we can work out a print-and-purchase model which might occasionally pay for itself.

Our two scheduled submission windows run from 1 April to 10 July and 1 October to 10 January each year.

In theory, having just closed our first-ever submission round, this now allows for the following:

Remainder of January 2022: complete reading and assessing, send out all acceptances/declines
February 2022: finalise overall page layout, suggest edits to authors, and make artwork selections
March 2022: incorporate edit responses from authors, finalise individual page layouts, send full proof to authors for final amends
1 April 2022: LAUNCH DAY and re-open for submissions (is this feasible? who knows??)
April 2022: send authors and other contributors physical copies from a very limited edition print run of the completed journal

(Add six months to all dates to this schedule for our second issue of the year)

I will never go into detail regards specific submissions – or at least not those which were unsuccessful – but some general thoughts on the quantity, quality and types of submissions which we have received during this first window:

We received close to 100 submissions in total (over 100 works when accounting for multiple poems being sent by single authors). That feels extroardinary given that: 1) around 6 months ago we didn’t even exist anywhere in the real world at all, and 2) we have a fairly narrow brief in terms of looking for writing inspired by the visual arts. We don’t how much work (if indeed any) was prompted and written specficially in response to our call – presumably not much – but we’re glad so many talented writers with works that did fit the brief found us. We have no doubt that Duotrope was a big part of that, so kudos to the Duotroopers, who are always a pleasure to deal with as well as providing great service. We know that more established journals have submissions in the many hundreds or thousands, but if the quality remains just as high (see below) this quantity is actually a very manageable number of submissions for a single issue.

We had just a handful of inappropriate submissions. These included a few who clearly didn’t read the brief about our desired writing having to be inspired by art – and if we felt we might have made a mistake on interpreting that, we asked (no one told us we did) – plus a couple that strayed into creepy territory. This is always somewhat subjective, but if work is very sexually explicit and/or depicts an inappropriate relationship, then it’s going to have to be both exceptionally good and exceptionally well-judged to make the cut.

We were blown away by the quality of the submissions. Take out the few outliers mentioned above and almost everything else we received would have been a great fit for our first issue. We therefore had to say no to some brilliant writers, which is a little heartbreaking each time (see below) but we’ve come across some absolutely incredible work which we can’t wait to share with the world.

There was a lot of poetry. Our final breakdown of work received was 26% Fiction, 3% Creative Non-Fiction (CNF), and 71% Poetry! Wowsers. Believe it or not, we were on the fence about whether we should even accept poetry until right at the last minute, but it would have ended up being a much, much shorter magazine without it! The main argument for not accepting poetry was just that we didn’t feel as knowledgeable in assessing it as prose, but thanks to some wonderful Poetry Readers we’ve been able to make some well-informed decisions and found some extroardinary work. We’re so glad we didn’t miss the poetry train as it’s going to be roaring out of the station.

Demographics of submissions: We don’t request any of this info – and we don’t even look at bios until we have already assessed a work – but based on information voluntarily provided by our submitters (and some name guesswork), we estimate that we had approximately 40% men and 60% women and non-binary submitters, which is likely to be broadly reflected in the publication itself. Our submissions were, unsurprisingly, mainly from the Anglophone west/north (the USA, the UK, and Ireland in particular), but we also received submissions from Australia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Portugal, and Spain, which was very heartening indeed.

It’s so satisfying to say yes, and it’s agonising to say no. On every single occasion to date, our finger has hovered over the “ACCEPT” or “DECLINE” button on Duosuma for far too long and we have sometimes second-guessed ourselves a bit too. If you’re reading this having received a “no” from us, please know that rejections were sent with a very heavy heart indeed and we really appreciate you sharing your work with us. On the flip side, it has been wonderful to tell people they have been accepted and we have been really buoyed by so many excited responses to that news. It really does make it all worthwhile.

Word counts matter. I hesitate to write this, as I know my own writing tends towards the longer (my short stories often gravitate towards a 5-7k length for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me), but we’ve found that a 2,000-word short story generally takes up about 3-4 pages in our page templates. We accept submissions of writing up to 8k, so in theory that would be as many as 16 pages of text, more with images. We didn’t reject anyone based on word count for this issue, and we hope that we never have to (another good reason for a PDF publication right now), but it’s also inevitable to ask yourself whether that short story is a better or worse use of the pages than, potentially, 10-20 poems? It’s got to be a really good short story, right? So, this is a note to myself more than future submitters, but… if in doubt, cut. Especially dialogue. If it doesn’t progress the story or evoke something interesting, just remove it. Not always possible, but if you can submit a 2,000-word version of your short story or a 4,000-word version, go for the former. We can only imagine how significant word counts become when you’ve got a major outlay on print runs as well.

And finally… what were we missing?

Well we don’t want any less poetry, not at all, but we would love to see some more prose in our inbox in future, especially CNF. We didn’t receive anything this window that could have been considered a straightforward review or theory piece. We would have really loved to see someone writing about their own experience of making art, for example. Or life at art school, or their experience of working in a gallery or museum or something like that. Or, alternatively, an essay inspired by a single work of art and/or a single artist. Or something political – an ideological/sociological analysis of a notable painting, for example, would be right up our street.

Maybe we’ll seek some of those things more explicitly next time, but we also do not want to be greedy because we had some incredible submissions and we can’t wait to share them with the world.

Look out for ISSUE A of DEGENERATE ART, coming your way on 1 April 2022 (perhaps).

Thanks for reading this webl.

A ARBOR, JANUARY 2022