Call for diversity leads to blowback for litmag

An editor requests submissions from diverse writers and the public loses its mind.

This happened last week when my friend Anthony Frame posted a call for submissions to the journal he edits, Glass.

Brace yourself, but here is the highly controversial post:

Glass: A Journal of Poetry remains open for fee free poetry submissions. Any subject, any style, any length.

During our first month of reading, we hit our Submittable limit of 300 submissions and hope to do so again in June.

I also noticed that the majority of submissions (at least 60%) came from straight, gender-conforming, white men. Glass would very much love to hear from under-represented voices.

I look forward to reading your work.

If you read this note and saw hatred of straight white men, you’re not alone. On the social media site where Frame posted his call, the response was both quick and heated.

The first commenter jumped in to note that good poetry speaks for itself, and sex and skin color are irrelevant.

Soon after, another commenter attempted to make a case for blind submissions that allow work to be judged on its own merits, since Glass is a literary journal instead of a political one.

Next up came a male with an Anglo name who eeyored about his work not being desirable. And then came the doubters—how would Frame even know gender or race without asking? And isn’t Frame censoring these unfortunate straight white men, whose pale skin, at the very suggestion of not being in the majority, breaks out into vivid pink hives?

I asked Frame why this issue is worth the fight. He replied that he wants any and all working writers to feel free to send. He stated, “I know why, and understand why, many writers do not feel comfortable submitting to some journals, journals that seem uninterested in under-represented voices or, worse, are hostile to those voices. I also think it is important to encourage those voices because I see so much that discourages them.” Frame specifically mentioned the recent transphobic essay in the Antioch Review, Calvin Trillin’s problematic poem about Asian food in The New Yorker, and Michael Derrick Hudson’s yellowface Best American Poetry entry.

Frame noted, “There are poets writing great poems who come from all kinds of backgrounds and their voices matter and deserve to be heard. But if they are constantly bombarded by these micro-aggressions, then they might not be heard, and that is a tremendous loss for American poetry and society.” He added, “The best way I know to counter that as an editor is to make it clear that I am eager to read submissions from any and all voices and I will give any and all voices a fair read.”

We live in a trollish culture, where damning voices quickly lay siege to an open attitude toward otherness. It’s part of the answer to the question I can’t shake, which is how the United States became a country where the racist Donald Trump can become a serious contender for the presidency.

A friend of mine, Colette Arrand, recently told me that she would no longer be submitting work to university literary journals—a move that surprised me, because, as a former editor of such a publication, Mid-American Review, I had an idea of them as accepting places. I know myself to be an accepting person, and I had a lot of editor friends I considered to be very decent and inclusive people.

But the Antioch Review situation is a reminder that safe-seeming spaces for majority populations can be minefields for minority ones. A journal founded in 1941 and based at a liberal arts college with a distinguished history of social justice should be a safe space … shouldn’t it? Presuming that makes the decision to publish a transphobic screed all the more devastating.

Arrand explained, “The Antioch Review only exposed a problem that exists in a lot of established literary magazines. While a Mid-American Review is pushed forward through its editors’ frequent engagement with the ever-evolving literary scene and a turnover of assistant editors due to the MFA that frequently supports it, many university magazines and established litmags are run by people who have been at the helm for decades and remain active the same way Dracula does, which is to say that they exclusively stalk the corridors of their own crypt-like institutions and refuse to evolve.”

She continued, “As a trans writer and a progressive feminist, it is hard for me to trust these entrenched literary publications because even if they are accepting of a trans woman's work, POC work, etc., there is no way for me to know if they simultaneously won't be fooled by a Daniel Harris or a Calvin Trillum or a Michael Derrick Hudson. For me, the potential that I might eventually be embarrassed to appear in the same journal that publishes a poem like ‘My White Feminism’ far outweighs the obvious benefit to my career that appearing in the Boston Review would be.”

Concluded Arrand, “It's easy to look at what I'm doing as a form of self-sabotage, I suppose, but at the same time I'm ensuring myself to the best of my ability that I will love the publications that I'm in, and that I won't be a novelty within those pages.”

While universities are thought of as progressive places, in practice, they are rather conservative institutions. Though they offer classes in gender and ethnic studies, they remain populated with white males in uppermost positions and women in the lowest-paid and least powerful ones. Arrand’s concerns start to make sense when this reality is factored in.

Glass is not a university journal, and Frame notes that he is a working-class poet instead of an academic one. And his request for submissions yielded a very large response in a short time, so he knows that many more writers are appreciative of his welcoming attitude than otherwise. Frame noted that when he posted his modest request to hear more from under-represented voices, he pretty much expected blowback.

“Honestly, I'm a little numb to it,” Frame said. “I expected it. I've seen it happen at least once a month, usually the same few people doing the yelling. It is disheartening that we can't make a simple encouraging note without getting trolled - but it's also important to remember that these are just a few people yelling.”

It’s probably a mistake to regard any space as safe. But it’s never a mistake for a journal to announce its intention to be welcoming to all kinds of voices. More editors should take a page out of Anthony Frame’s playbook.