Fuck Narrative Magazine

I get their emails, so I guess I'm a "subscriber" too, even though I've never read any of their stories. I always seem to see the same old roster of drab and uninspiring writers, and never bother. Asking writers to pay for the "privilege" of being considered (and 99.9% rejected) is rather appalling - I don't care how much they pay for acceptances.

Oh, and if I get one more notification about the "SQ Love Story Contest" I'll go stark raving mad.

You don't like Narrative charging reading fees, so be it, there's an argument for it and against, but all this "fuck you" stuff is just a stupid and irresponsible response. You neglect to mention that they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and award thousands of dollars of prize money every year.

You claim that they have no open submission period, ostensibly because they weren't accepting them when you tried to submit, yet you fail to mention that their submission guidelines state exactly when the open period is: "Narrative accepts open submissions during the first two weeks of April and the first two weeks of August each year. During these periods, you may submit work via the Open Submissions Upload page, which will be linked and accessible here. " That sounds like a month out of the year and if other popular magazines are a guide that means they're open to anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 submission without payment. Maybe you should have waited a few days.

You accused them of being spammers in your other post, linking to a place where they're listed to sell their mailing list, but guess what, you don't mention that they let you opt-out of that when you subscribe. I've been a subscriber for a while and have not gotten any spam through them. So they don't hide the fact they they sell their list and I don't see any difference between that and you riddling your site with Google ads.

You say they the publish "crappy" writing (crappy being the descriptive term that good writers often turn to), but on what basis? It's not hard to see - whatever you think subjectively of one piece or another - that what they're publishing is not "crappy" writing, but writing from a generally accomplished set of writers in a cross-section of form.

You say their subscriber base is not as high as they claim, so I'd love to see the basis for your claim, something you neglected to show.

Whether or not you agree with Narrative's policies, in my opinion they are creating something badly need for writers: prestige in publishing original work online where in the past one had to publish solely in print. This opens doors for writers and publishers, whether or not they charge a fee. This is a cause you are subverting with your childish, thoughtless claims.

That guy is definitely Tom Jenks!

Ha, I couldn't agree more! I'm ashamed to say that I paid to have a submission "considered", but gave up when I realized: 1) interns, not editors, actually read the submissions, 2) interns reject EVERYTHING that doesn't come from a "famous" writer, i.e. Narrative Magazine takes emerging writers' cash but doesn't give them fair consideration, and 3) not only does the fiction kinda suck, but the poetry REALLY sucks!!

Almost every "poem of the week" is from Copper Canyon Press, and these poems have one thing in common. They're bad. Now, I won't just say they're bad and run away. I will now explain WHY they're bad. First, arbitrary line breaks. The biggest difference between poetry and prose is line breaks, which change up the rhythm, allow for alternate interpretations and double meanings, etc. Yet I read through almost all the poems in the archives and could not find more than a couple examples of poets who knew what a line break was.

Second, and perhaps most important, these are LANGUAGE poems, not NARRATIVE poems! Hmmm... what's the name of the magazine again?

People can like whatever they want to like, but the fact is, language poems and narrative poems are on absolutely opposite ends of the spectrum! Likewise, these aren't even good language poems either. Most are tone-deaf, devoid of image, and childishly melodramatic. Case in point:
Formless Stanza by Stephen Berg. A friend showed me that one a few weeks ago and I'm still feeling sick to my stomach. I won't paste the poem here since I don't know if that's a copyright violation, but I encourage you to check it out--just to see how bad it is!

Calling this crap a poem is like calling a faith healer a surgeon, then claiming it's all just a matter of opinion. Childish lack of punctuation, bad line breaks, VERY poor rhythm, no attention paid to syllable/stress/unstress count, weak lines, arbitrary word choice, vague metaphysical ramblings reminiscent of somebody's pretentious diary, etc., all characterize this "poem". Sadly, though, the other poems at Narrative are just as bad (if not worse).

Bottom line: magazines can publish whatever they like, but soliciting reading fees means they're ethically obligated to give submitters a fair reading. Even laying aside the issue of quality, the near-total lack of "new" or "emerging" writers in the archives means this is basically just a pyramid scheme.

I'm fairly new to submissions. Thanks for the post.

Is it an unusual practice to charge a reading fee for contests? I was looking at one that charges $20.

I've been looking at different contests, and it seems a number of them -- Glimmer Train, for example -- do level entry fees. I was wondering if the fee is used to cut down on entries, cover prize money, whatever.