Miner, Valerie. "The Book in the World." and ... Henry, DeWitt. "Literary Magazines and the Writing Workshop." Creative Writing in America.

I wanted to merge my comments on these two chapters because I think one has much to do with the other.

Miner states: "In the late 1980s, I find myself back at Berkeley as a teacher. Much has changed. Much hasn't. Fiction, for instance, is still usually confine to two contexts -- the veneration of dead authors in survey courses and the ventilation of hopeful authors in creative writing seminars. So it is with some personal evangelism that I want my students to appreciate how fiction is published, to consider context influencing content, to acknowledge the social value ofliterary contribution, to understand how our individual writing ambitions are affected by the publishing profession and the book industry" (228).

To counter, or perhaps to add to, Miner's statement, Henry states: "Any writing workshop or curriculum should include an analysis of some lively, living literary magazines for the practical reason, ifnon other, that these are nearly the only outlet for poets, the pirmary one for literary fiction, and the most likely place for discover -- publication for hte previously unpublished. In addition to Ploughshares, which I have codirected and edited since 1971, and which grew out of my own workshop experiences as a student and later as a teacher with and without walls, there are about 30 literary journals of national significance. Beyond these 30 may be another 300 of regional, factional, or personal significance, offering publication to almost any writer of talent and persistence" (237).

I've published a handful of short stories and poems. Some of these were influenced by work, contemporary or otherwise, that I read. Some weren't. None of them were published in literary magazines that Henry would probably call "of national significance," although one was published by another literary magazine that comes out of the same college where he publishes: Emerson.

Do I feel I am a successful writer? Somewhat. I've published, and in more than one genre. I don't enjoy a national reputation and don't really want one. My voice and style are never going to attract the likes of the literary Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. And that's OK.

I've had friends that have published in high-end magazines, such as Georgia Review and StoryQuarterly. Another friend helps edit Ploughshares. Are they more successful than me? Nope. In fact, I think a couple of them are struggling more than I am to find a place in the working world. Publishing or working with them hadn't proved to be too helpful at all (although I hear one did get a couple of calls from literary agents, which ultimately led nowhere.)

Where am I going with this? Well, I think to study the tastes of a certain canon, or even that of a literary magazine's ideal of what constitues good writing, can be misleading. Students might want to emulate a certain writer or style just in the hopes of becoming published, without concentrating on developing their own voice and finding an audience for it, if they do the latter at all. Writing is a creative process, and while we hope it will be successful in that readers can understand and appreciate it, we can't cater to one magazine's tastes in order to find our own paths.

I do think Henry has a point that we can look to what's good and what we don't care for in a literary magazine's published work in order to refine our own craft, and what and what does not work for us. But our writers might become humorists not of the "literary" persuasion, or writers of a certain genre, or even commercial, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as they are practicing their craft the best way they know how, and continue to strive to improve.