THE LONG STORY
contact: rpburnham@mac.com
or by mail: The Long Story / 18 Eaton Street / Lawrence, Massachusetts 01843
-
• General
-
• Subscriptions, sample copies, etc.
-
• Submission Information
-
• Current Issue
-
• Editorial PRELUDES
-
• Links
GENERAL
THE LONG STORY is the only literary magazine in America devoted strictly to long stories. We have a national and international circulation and publish stories of 8,000 - 20,000 words for serious, educated readers. Founded in 1982 and published once a year, The Long Story is an independent magazine both in its editorial policy and in its freedom from institutional backing. We prefer stories about common folks (as opposed to the rich and powerful) and in general look for a perspective on current society—one that demonstrates awareness that, for example, rock ’n’ roll is not the only music, that capitalism is not the only possible social arrangement, that self-glorification is not the only way to pursue happiness. Such distancing comes (though not exclusively) from knowledge gained through implicit knowledge of the Western humanistic tradition along with interest in the same themes that engaged the great writers of the past.
__________________________________________________________________________
SUBSCRIPTIONS, SAMPLE COPIES, ETC.
Subscriptions to The Long Story are $13 for two issues.
Single copies are $7; back issues are $6 each. Copies, like subscriptions, may be purchased directly from us (18 Eaton Street/Lawrence, Massachusetts 01843), or are available in bookstores around the country and in Canada, particularly in or around big cities and university towns. The Long Story is distributed by Ingram Periodicals.
Libraries. Subscriptions can be obtained through subscription agencies and book jobbers like EBSCO, Swets and Blackwell, or can be arranged directly with us. Institutional subscriptions are $14 for two issues and $25 for overseas airmail service.
Write to: The Long Story
18 Eaton Street
Lawrence, MA 01843
Queries: rpburnham@mac.com
ISSN 0741 - 4242
__________________________________________________________________________
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Stories of 8,000 to 20,000 words, with the best length 8,000 -12,000 words. Although eclectic and open to many styles and genres, we do have very specific tastes (and therefore recommend familiarity with the magazine), but in general we look for stories with a human and thematic core, i.e. stories that display vision where writers, instead of “writing about what you know” (as the writing programs emphasize) write about what they can imagine. Another quality we look for is elusive but extremely important: it can best be described as a sense of estrangment from the world at the same time involvement with it; it exhibits a certain recognition of the simultaneous smallness and greatness of humanity, and demonstrates respect and compassion for all people and recognizes a peasant’s dream of owning a bicycle is as important to him as Napoleon’s dream of conquering Europe. This is a quality that only life can teach one; it cannot be learned in a writing program.
DO'S AND DON'T'S
No multiple submissions.
no electronic submissions: please submit on paper and include SASE.
No popular forms of fiction like detective, romance, suspense, adventure, etc.
No parts of novels: please note we are a journal devoted to long stories, a literary form with a beginning, middle, and end. Self-contained chapters of a novel that read like a short story are okay.
No unsolicited poetry or nonfiction prose.
Not likely to accept literary experimentation.
Simultaneous submissions: okay
For international submissions we recommend sending a disposable copy and one IRC sufficient to cover first-class postage (or airmail if overseas).
We read all year round, though prefer no submissions in July and August
Note: no phone queries, please
__________________________________________________________________________
CURRENT ISSUE
In “Promise Me” by Courtney Walsh, Cal, a cantankerous WWII veteran stricken with brain cancer and estranged from his gay son, learns something about human solidarity and the need for love when he serendipitously meets a black soldier. • Marsha Lee Berkman’s “In the Time of Dreams” is a story set in a newly founded Jewish village in Siberia in the 1930s. Anna, Avigdor and Dr. Grunwald try to live normal human lives, but even Siberia is not far enough away that the Stalinist government cannot reach into their lives in an attempt to stymie the dream to be free. • Darrin Doyle’s “Happy Turkey Day” relates a sordid event in an alley which, thanks to the brilliant sardonic narrator, becomes an intelligent and intriguing meditation on death, the human condition and names (especially nicknames). • Mark, a hospital technician in “One Little Thing” by Ben Brooks, is probably responsible for mixing up two breast X-rays, one normal, the other cancerous, which results in a horrible mistake and a moral dilemma for him. • Jamie Holmes’s “A Reporter’s Work” features a mother whose academic reputation was made with a book whose thesis was that the human mind was the same everywhere and a daughter who becomes a reporter dedicated to objective truth. When she suffers a severe brain injury in an incident at an abortion clinic, the daughter’s inspired struggle to regain her wholeness and the mother’s pain (both for her daughter and for life in general) is told with honesty and conviction. • On the coast of Down East Maine a seal befriends a man and later kills the minister’s dog, making an enemy; a church is burnt to the ground; a refrigerator out front is regarded as unsightly; slurs against Passamaquoddy Indians are hurled; a church resembling a cargo cult is formed; and the good guys win out in the end—it’s all in Paul Nelson’s “Refrigerator Church.” • In Jeffrey D. Carroll’s “The Draft” a young boy goes to work with his father, a veteran recently returned from war, and in following the relationship of the boy watching the men working together conscientiously and putting everything they had into it, we gain insights that hint at the appeal of war to every generation. • “Sister Nancy and the Shamrock Lady” by Tricia Currans-Sheehan: Sister Nancy, the principal of a parochial school, wants to help a special student whose mother’s association with a bar in town has caused rumors of easy virtue to circulate; powerful men who oppose her are surprised to find themselves dealing with a strong woman. • In Harry Furst’s “The Otherworld Mission” Hawthorne, living in a cold mission run by heartless guards, daily tries mightily to find a job, only to be constantly stymied and disappointed; he finally begins to think that hopelessness is a kind of peaceful relief. At this point the question becomes: will he (and the human spirit) be defeated? • Poems by Jared Carter, Laurel Speer, and Sonja Skarstedt and an editorial Prelude on various topics round out the issue.
__________________________________________________________________________
EDITORIAL PRELUDES
(each issue of the magazine begins with an essay on a literary topic. Here is a sample passage)
Virtually every day we all see in the media or meet in personal life certain types of people: the capitalist who specializes in swallowing up companies and in the name of efficiency firing half the workers, attempting to get rid of any unions and rolling back benefit packages of the remaining workers, all the while threatening them with the specter of foreign workers who toil for a dollar a day; the spurned lover who stalks and murders his former lover because if she cannot belong to him she cannot belong to another; the blustering right-winger who tells a panhandler to get a job and who blames the people in the ghetto for their poverty; the person at work who substitutes power manipulation for relationship, who backstabs and hides his or her self-regard under the guise of duty or the importance of the organization, telling a worker that she cannot attend to her dying mother or sick child until she gets her work done; the athlete who crashes into the sidelines, knocking over spectators and photographers but not bothering to apologize or check to see if anyone is hurt; the pundit on television who blandly discusses the U.S. economic embargo of Iraq in terms of power politics without mentioning that the embargo kills tens of thousands of Iraqi children, old and sick people every year.
What do all these people have in common? They all lack imagination. Being egocentric, solipsistic, self-involved, or whatever term one cares to use, they never think of other people, for other people with their individual needs and desires are not important, not real to them—hence the violation of Kantian ethics (the practical imperative, never to treat another human being as a means to an end but always as a end in him- or herself). They are evil too, for what is evil but this very violation of Kantian ethics? And yet since at its most fundamental level imagination is seeing what isn’t there, they are not totally unimaginative; it is only that they have a warped and perverted imagination that only serves their selfishness and greed. In a brilliant passage in Essay on the Principles of Human Action, the English Romantic writer William Hazlitt makes the connection between self-centeredness and the possibility of wider human sympathy and solidarity when he states that the only way to know the future is by a projection of the imagination. The same mental power, that is to say, that a greedy, selfish man uses to dream up his schemes for getting rich and gaining power is the same faculty of imagination that makes him capable of sympathetic identification with others. I could not love myself, Hazlitt concludes, if I were not capable of loving others.
We do not often see such thinking in modern-day America; instead we see glorified the capitalist who swallows up companies and the athlete who scores the touchdown at any price. The self-involved, unimaginative man, however, is like a black hole. His soul has shriveled into a tiny dense point that gives off no light and which distorts everyone who comes into contact with him. He is not to whom Hamlet was referring when he exclaimed, “What a piece of work is a man!” Capitalistic societies, as always innately hostile to any visions of oneness and solidarity, stimulate the imagination that everyone possesses in selfish ways, trying to make people not see the unity and oneness of humanity by deflecting this most human attribute into dreams of getting rich, having money and power, big cars and stuff, always stuff. It feeds not the spiritual hunger for peace and unity but the selfish, materialistic, grasping desire to have things so that (the ads make us hope) we will be loved and admired. As a result it produces in abundance dreadful, miserable excuses for human beings.
The polar opposite of the human being as black hole is the person with empathic imagination. He or she can see all people on their own terms, as beings imbued with personalities, histories, wants and desires, fears and phobias. Such imagination allows us to participate more fully in humanity, to experience life at a wider and deeper level. Imagination is also the most human attribute we have. Every other human characteristic is shared in some degree with our fellow mammals and other creatures, but the ability to imagine worlds that don’t exist in reality or to see life from another’s eyes is uniquely human. The fullest realization of our human nature, then, is found in those with the most imagination. Exercising it is liberating; it widens one’s view of the world so that one sees unity and similarity instead of atomistic individuals and hierarchies.
The fact that all human beings have imagination and are at least potentially capable of entering into the life of another person is what makes literature innately moral and ethical. One antidote to the sickeningly self-regarding culture that inundates us, then, is literature, or it should be. Literature opens minds, stimulates the empathic/sympathetic imagination by allowing readers to see the world through other eyes than their own. Just as a workout in a gym strengthens muscles, a workout with a poem or story strengthens the imagination. But the dominant literary movements of our day, modernism and postmodernism, perversely parallel capitalistic values in their ethos. Modernism has so distorted the cultural heritage of the west that it has made artistic duty nothing more than to exalt the self, and it does this at the expense of imagination, the one thing that all human beings have (and writers should have in abundance) that leads to human solidarity. The characteristic emphasis of modernism is to see the writer as special, as a being above the ordinary human realm. Even in works where this attitude is not explicit, the reader can still sense the repellent sense of superiority. The writer is regarded as one who is not subject to the same human duties and limitations as mere citizens, and disdain for bourgeois values widens into contempt for working people. Such writers, in short, ally themselves with capitalistic values and carefully observe hierarchies of worth. The only use for a poor bedraggled beggar is that he might make an aesthetically pleasing subject for a painting, but his presence in a poem by Pound or Eliot or in a Bloomsbury novel is only an occasion for superiority and contempt. With its emphasis on form and experimentation, its inspiration not from life but from other literary works, the spirit of modernism is essentially critical, not creative, not imaginative. There are of course exceptions where life wins out over theory (Joyce’s Ulysses being the best example, but even some of the passages in The Waste Land), but essentially modernism smells of the lamp. Instead of being an imaginative and creative response to life, its practitioners show in their works (Pound’s poetry, for example) that they are more interested in playing the role of a writer or a poet than in being a human being responding to the multitudinous wonder of the world and being a writer. Coming up with a new form is never imaginative unless the new form is the only way to express a new way of seeing the world such as Walt Whitman did in Leaves of Grass, but what insight does the long rant of the Cantos offer?
(from issue No. 20)
__________________________________________________________________________
LINKS (within this site)
__________________________________________________________________________
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST
[progressive book publishing, including fiction by Long Story writers (as well as the editor)—Brian Backstrand, R. P. Burnham, William Davey, Paul Johnson, and Sandra Shwayder Sanchez]
[William Davey, writer and poet]
[Jared Carter, poet]
http://www.thepatbrienreader.thebreakingnews.co.uk/
[Pat Brien, writer]
[Chris Conlon, fiction writer and poet]
[Council of Literary Magazines and Presses]
http://www.newpages.com/default.htm
[Review of LS 22 and LS 23]
[Review of Long Story 24]
http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/2005/11/rp-burnham-and-long-story.html
[Grumply Old Bookman blog-discusses the editorial preludes & LS 23]
[Sonja Skarstedt & Geof Isherwood]
