StorySouth: Difference between revisions
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*[http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/c_wright/c_wright.htm Charles Wright at Modern American Poetry website] |
*[http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/c_wright/c_wright.htm Charles Wright at Modern American Poetry website] |
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*[http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/gander.htm Forrest Gander's Brown University webpage] |
*[http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/gander.htm Forrest Gander's Brown University webpage] |
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[[Category:Literature]] |
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[[Category:Magazines]] |
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[[Category:Literary magazines|*]] |
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Revision as of 22:41, 24 October 2005
storySouth is an online quarterly American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, photography and visual artwork, with a focus on the American South.
History
storySouth (the initial lower-case s is a deliberate device) is an online literary journal, founded in the autumn of 2001 by fiction writer Jason Sanford [1], its Chief Editor. In its pages it has published pieces on such writers as Loren Eiseley, and historical figures like George Wallace, and tackled topics ranging from the trivial to the sociological. It has also featured prominent authors such as Forrest Gander and Charles Wright, while attempting to expose the newest generation of writers from the South. Stories, essays, and poetry published in storySouth have been honored by the Chronicle of Higher Education's Arts and Letters Daily and selected for an anthology of best web-published fiction. storySouth also runs the annual Million Writers Award, started in 2003, which honors the best online fiction of the year and was named a Hot Site by USA Today. The Million Writers Award has become one of the premier online awards. Several of the writers first featured in storySouth have gone on to get book deals with major publishers. The magazine's Poetry editor is Jake Adam York [2]. While storySouth's fiction has been responsible for its considerable online influence, it is the poetry section which has drawn the most critical accolades.
Mission
The magazine also seeks to bring the Internet into the mainstream of publishing. It's online mission states:
- "storySouth's most important mission is to showcase the best fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that writers from the new south have to offer. Special emphasis is given to finding and promoting the works of promising new writers.
- In addition, storySouth aims to prove that the internet is not just a medium of flash and style; that excellent writing can attract attention without programming gimmicks and hard-to-read fonts. To this end, storySouth practices clean, simple web design."
Influence
storySouth's growing influence in the publishing world was evidenced by a feature interview of Sanford in the 2004 Fiction Writer's Market in which the role of the Internet and the influence of the Million Writers Award was featured.
Part of the growing influence of storySouth has been the sometimes combative nature of its founder. An essay of Sanford's that was published in several online venues, called "Who Wears Short Shorts? Micro Stories and MFA Disgust" [3], sent repercussions through the online literary community, as it ripped away at the claimed incestuous nature of MFA programs and creative writing workshops. In one passage, Sanford shocked the sensibilities of the normally staid literary set with this charge: "That MFA programs have created a standard, bland style of writing shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. After all, no matter how many new MFA programs open up in this country, they remain a rather incestuous, similar lot. The average MFA professor is white, upper-middle class, and unacquainted with anything other than their little academic life. It is through their particular worldview lens that all MFA students pass through and hone their skills. Students who don't match these professors' ideas of life and writing either don't get into the programs or get their writings gutted from the inside out. In genetics, this type of phenomenon is called the Bottleneck Effect. That's where a small group of animals is cut off from the rest of their viable population and only breeds among themselves. This inevitably results in animals having less genetic diversity than their relatives who didn't get isolated in the first place."
Yet, such controversies as this, and those associated with such online websites as Foetry, which has outed the cronyism rife in college and small press publishing, which has led to the dismissal of faculty members and the closing of online poetry websites, have enabled storySouth to establish its niche alongside such longstanding print journals devoted to Southern literature as the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review.