Track & Field

Works that catalogue, map, represent

This is not about sports, although I will one day center a newsletter on the sports literary field. Today I’m looking at journals that like writing that tracks, catalogues, maps, labels and represents: South 85 Journal in Spartanburg, South Carolina and DIAGRAM in Tucson, Arizona. I do often mention, with regard to poems, a “mapping/cataloguing” approach; it’s a term I settled on to describe what I’ve been reading so often, whether in its natural environment of narratives, or occasionally, in lyrics. Some might say meandering, or all over the place, but I see it as gathering, bringing to a point. Similarly, and in other approaches, tracking or listing is also employed in creative nonfiction and fiction.

Strong voice and sense of place are what most draw the interests of the editors at South 85 Journal. Run by the low-residency MFA program at Converse University, with Leslie Pietrzyk as editor, it is a semi-annual online journal publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews and bl…