The Molecular Level

Reading Tiny Lit Journals

I'm all for reading literary journals to experience the writing and then to figure out from these selections what the editors seem to want. Sometimes, the specific focus of an editor and the structural limit of the journal makes that latter task seem much easier to do. Such is the case with journals publishing very short poems and flash fiction.

There are several journals interested in the short poem, and their editors have word and/or line limits, such as Right Hand Pointing (16 lines or fewer, and fewer than 75 words, ideally), Tiny Wren Lit (15 lines or under, with no more than 25 characters+spaces in each line), and Shot Glass (16 lines or less). You’d think that you’d know if you had anything to send to these journals, that these limits might be enough to help you decide what to send. It’s a good gamble, but I have found more distinctions among these purveyors of little lyrics, beyond even their further stated guidelines. Right Hand Pointing editors don’t want nature poems, but I’ve noticed that elements of the natural world may be used in poems. Similarly, there are fine tunings of difference among journals publishing “flash fiction”, a catchall term that used to be reserved for one segment of very short fiction beside “sudden”, “micro” and “hint”, and is now accepted as 1,000 words or fewer. However, Flash Fiction wants stories between 300 and 1,000 words, Club Plum wants no more than 800 words, and Fractured Lit wants their micro fiction to be 400 words or fewer and their flash to be 401 to 1,000 words. Everything I’ve listed thus far is an online journal. You can also send “your best approximately 50-word stories” to the print journal Blink-Ink, whose editors send subscribers a very small, nearly square format, quarterly journal with blink of an ink writings on brightly colored pages.

But with this post I’d like to narrow your focus to, and look deeply at, parts of two similarly named online literary journals: Molecule — A Tiny Lit Mag and Tiny Molecules. The editors at each of these journals have fun in their guidelines with the chemical compound that inspired them (TM:“we love saying something big in a small space. We are every part of you written down.”; M: per their 24-word bio requirement: “There are 24 atoms in a molecule of coffee.”)

Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag publishes poetry, in addition to prose, plays, interviews, reviews and artworks of tiny things twice a year; all writing must be 50 words or less, including titles and interview questions. Kevin Carey and M.P. are the "miCrO-founders & mini editors”. They read for their Spring Issue December 1 to January 15, and report by February 15. You need to download their free issues to read them; I’m referencing the Fall 2022.

I thought about taking pieces out of poems of mine that never found their purchase on any ground, and reworking them as Molecule poems, because I read a variety of approaches to the super short poem in this issue that were satisfying and inspiring. However, I wasn’t so deft, and they still don’t go anywhere. You might succeed, or already have brief poems to send. In the Fall issue, I read mood shifts, surreal and real subjects, expressions of curiosity and certainty, sensory diction, close observations and slight removes, in a few haiku and mostly lyrics. However, the editors do accept poems that I put under a kind of mapping/cataloguing distinction, forming tiny lists in their unfolding, and that has a kind of narrative movement. Two examples of this kind of poem are “Strange Neighbors,” by Jerry Dennis, and “Bones,” by Sara Eddy. As you might guess from their presentation overall, Molecule editors accommodate humor, but even the poems that pun have a greater point. Since the title is a part of the word count, there’s a tendency by some contributors to make it work very hard to set a poem up, but Kathleen Aponick is seamless with hers: “After Reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X at Twenty-four

As when light streams into corners of the darkest/alleys,/or onto canyon walls early evening—/transforming.” (I put this here in case you can’t immediately link to it in the issue.)

I’m only reading the poetry in this journal, and skipping over to the next molecule for the stories.

Tiny Molecules publishes flash and observations, their terms for fiction and essays, respectively. They say they like experimental. The flash fiction is in the numbered issues, and the essays are elsewhere on the site. This purveyor of pocket-sized prose makes a one word difference between genre limits—flash must be under 1,000 words, but their observations can be 1,000 words, or fewer. The current editors are Connor Harrison, Cameron Finch, Amy Zimmerman, and Jessica Vance. Flash fiction submissions are open. I’m looking at issue fourteen, Autumn 2022.

Read opening excerpts of stories and compare them across the journal to determine editorial interests, and if there is a match in style, keep reading, and if not, don’t. (Unless you want to read it anyway.) There isn’t much space and time to develop character and plot in flash, and so the elements that stand out the most in the opening are theme and language, such as Kevin Brennan’s “Blood Brothers,” where the opening story’s monologue voice reveals character through attitude and ways of speech. There are stories in this issue that use simile and metaphor in the sentences, a less represented prose style in journals, such as “In Terror” by Elizabeth Kirschner, which opens with “It began in an ER. A cubicle, like a pie slice with a curtain drawn around the front. A gray curtain the color of worn stones, a morgue.” A few stories are told through lists or a sense of cataloguing, such as “Beneath the Undergarden” by Joel Hans and “In Vitro” by Tim Craig, each of which also is rich in place or setting. Flash was once considered an experimental form but it’s now accepted, and while I read odd stories here, I didn’t read any that I’d necessarily flag as experimental. Maybe you’ll have one to send them.

What do you see when you read these poems and stories?

If you are interested in continuing to get my views on what journal editors are interested in, next month’s issue will begin the paid content, and cost $7.