Literary Journals

I just finished reading the Winter/Spring edition of Gulf Coast. To be honest, I didn’t read every word. I’m not huge on poetry, which it publishes a lot of, but the fiction and non-fiction were stunning.

There’s something so immediate about literary journals. Reading them always makes me feel like I’m more a part of the greater writing community of the world, especially when I see a name I recognize. For instance, when I opened this edition and saw that Benjamin Percy had a piece of fiction I flipped right to it. I had just finished writing a blog post about his theories on rhyming action in stories and was curious to see how he used this tool of fiction (he used crows as harbingers of death – effective, even if a touch on the cliché side).

The trick with literary journals is how to know which ones to read. Having worked on the USC literary journal (The Southern California Review) I’m partial to the stories we publish. Other than the SCR and Gulf Coast, I subscribe to One Story and the Santa Clara Review (because they were the first print journal to publish one of my short stories). Does anyone else out there have a journal recommendation? What do you read to keep up on who’s doing what in the literary world? Why does it matter? Would love to hear your thoughts.