Daniel Green recently responded to Ed Champion's musings on what fiction magazines should be like. He writes:
...its hard to argue that with the proliferation of literary magazines, now abetted by the constant appearance of new literary journals online, that there isn't enough short fiction published in this country. Indeed, most of what is published in the existing journals goes largely unread.
True enough, certainly. But,
Publishing magazines "exclusively devoted to fiction" that "the public will buy," as futile as this enterprise would surely turn out to be, could only mean to dumb down the current tenor of literary magazines, to publish more conventional, more "accessible" fiction. I can't see what purpose this would serve. Such fiction would not be "better" for its readers than Desperate Housewives. It would identify fiction as just another entertainment option, a way to pass some time while easing up on the electricity bill. You are not better off reading a bland and undemanding short story than you are watching a bland and undemanding tv show. If just weaning a few people away from visual entertainment back to print is the goal, forget it. Not enough people will convert to make the effort worthwhile.
This seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding of what Ed was trying to say, and moreover it continues the assumption that for something to be accessible to general public it must be dumb or bland, a notion that I've objected to many times. We know that there's intelligent, interesting work that is widely loved; why point to Desperate Housewives when you can point to Lost or Deadwood? Just because something's entertaining doesn't at all mean it's bland and undemanding, and the notion that for something to be of high quality it must somehow not entertain is crazy. However, Green then writes,
What is needed is not more short story publications "exclusively devoted to fiction" that appeal more widely but fewer publications devoted exclusively to fiction (or poetry, for that matter) and more that appeal to the discerning audience for serious fiction that actually exists. What is needed is for editors of literary magazines, both established and up-and-coming, to not just publish fiction shorn of all context and mixed together in an otherwise indigestible stew but to indicate, both through editorial commentary and consistent editorial choices, what they think is important about the fiction they publish. Why have they selected it? What larger vision of the possibilities of short fiction does the selection illustrate? In my opinion, the "miscellany" approach practiced by most literary magazines--by which the "best fiction available" is printed, with little or no indication of what makes it the "best"--makes all too many of them useless; I can only make my way through a few of them, trying to find the "best" in a scattershot fashion, before I put them aside and conclude it just isn't worth my time (and sometimes money) to prospect for fiction in this way.
Which is absolutely right on, and the idea of publishing fiction, criticism and commentary with a very particular context and aesthetic was the guiding idea for this site. It makes me wonder, should we be talking more about what we publish and why we publish it? We've been fortunate enough to publish some pretty great stuff, and maybe we should do more to tell you why, what criteria exactly we're using to judge it.
In fact, one of the things I like about sf magazines and anthologies over literary ones is that they tend to have more of the editor and the author talking about their work, a few paragraphs before or after to help draw you in or give you context. It's also something I like about One Story's interviews with their own authors that give you some background. My fear is that people are seeing the fiction and poetry on this site and ignoring it, even if they like reading the commentary. And, let me tell you, most of the time on this site, the fiction and poetry is where it's at. This is partially because the commentary is mostly written by me, and the fiction and poetry is written by other people, and so I have some critical and editorial distance.