A New Schedule
Professors and students editing university journals keep to the school year, with some exceptions. In 2022, VQR only read in July. Much like flora in Anchorage, AQR reawakens in spring with pristine 15-day periods per genre. The Georgia Review, reopened Aug 16, and is today’s focus. To keep these posts short, starting next month I’ll be sending you two.
The Georgia Review is a literary-cultural journal founded in 1947 at the University of Georgia, in Athens, as a regional magazine, but it kept refining, and in 1978, began to be more distinctly poetry, fiction, nonfiction, with a colorful cover. It values the “extraordinary ability that a print journal has for community engagement and building, in Athens and across the nation, in classrooms, at festivals, and any other place at which readers can congregate.” They say they publish imaginative work that challenges them to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that their readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.” Gerald Maa is the current director and editor of the journal, Soham Patel is the associate poetry editor and book review editor, and Maggie Su is the associate prose editor.
The summer issue features the winners and runner up to the journal’s first Prose Prize, judged by Jennine Capó Crucet, who chose a finalist in fiction and creative nonfiction, and then one of those as winner. That structure of competition is an interesting comment on how the two genres may share what feels recognizable or true. The winner of the contest was Brian Truong for Fake Handbags, his first published essay from a memoir-in-progress about growing up as working-class Vietnamese refugees in Texas. Definitely take the time to read it.
The runner-up to the winning essay is the character-driven short story, Mother, Marksman, by Ernie Wang, about Yumi, a 49-year old woman obsessed with playing League of Legends on her computer with anonymous teenagers to mitigate the disdain she has for her customers and employers at the Golden Peach nominally Chinese restaurant, in Chicago, and her inability to reach her depressed adult son. Wang is poetic and funny in his expression of Yumi’s attitude, and direct with her dealings with the players of the game. She is required by her boss, Harmony Cho, “a spoiled, nefarious twenty-four-year-old from San Diego with the voice of an accordion” to upsell the appetizers and be humble when serving to improve her job performance, while she can only muster silent death wishes for them all.
The Wedding, by Kosiso Ugwuesi, is another story concentrated on a single character’s navigation of her life—Oby, a studious, 30-year-old pediatrician—and set in and out of the small lesbian scene in Nigeria, specifically a makeshift bar at an older woman’s house. It had taken her weeks to decide whether to go—but once there, she relaxes, accepted by the women. She dances for an hour with a woman in a white dress, a burgeoning relationship. The problem is that she lives closeted with her parents, and while her mother is a reticent ally, her father is a preacher who saw “homosexual demons, goblins, spirits” everywhere he went, and denounced them every Sunday. Ugwuesi has written a story about choices, class and identity. Oby wants to stay in her town in Nigeria, but her friends tell her that she is lucky as a medical doctor, to be able live freely elsewhere. Should she take that offer of marriage to the man in New York City?
Both stories are centered on women who are dissatisfied or burdened with something in their current lives, though Oby is more confident that she can get what she wants. To get a broader view of the fiction editors interests beyond what were chosen by a contest judge, you can read what is linked from the Spring, Winter and Fall issues, or purchase a sample issue or subscription. However, the editors invited Crucet’s perspective, and would have read all the selections she read. It used to be that The Georgia Review had no word limit for fiction, but the one they have now is pretty generous compared to many other literary journals. “We rarely publish something 9,000 words or more.” Send one story only.
There is an enticing table of contents in poetry for the Summer 2023 issue but only one poem can be read on the site (the list poem, “Memo To Self: Ten Reasons For Love”, by Alicia Ostriker), so I’m skipping back to the Winter issue and the results of the Lorraine Williams Poetry Prize, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin, but slush read by the editors. All the winning and finalist poems are linked. I can see why “A Quadriptych: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility”, by Felicia Zamora, won. I want you to read it rather than me summarize it, but when thinking about what Georgia likes, the layering and cataloguing, an expansion of images and ideas, cultural and racial hierarchies, mathematics, science, repetition and refrains, and the flicker of wonder and transformation give a good example.
But then there’s “Rhodopsin”, by Aria Pahari, that has a distinctive shape on the page, as the poet plays with the angle and nearness of the lines in her poem, forming an X between two, having others trample, or dip. The language of this poem is its lens, and intimacy, and yet it’s a little mapping narrative. Rhodopsin is the retinal protein that makes it possible for the rods in our eyes to perceive light.
They say that all manuscripts receive serious, careful attention; each submission is read by a published writer in a salaried position at The Georgia Review. They aim to respond to submissions within eight months. But it’s a paying market: $50 per printed page for prose, $4 per line for poetry, up to $800, and $150 flat rate for a review published in GR2. All contributors get a one-year subscription, and 50% discount on more copies of their issue. They offer First North American Serial Rights. Nowhere do you see those phrases of welcoming a diverse range of writers, including voices and perspectives historically underrepresented in the literary market, yet they are here. The best way to say it is to represent it. Reading what the journals have published is the easiest, most enjoyable way to figure out what to send them. You have a school year of time; Georgia won’t close until May 15th.