Lit Mag as Seed Bank

For a moment, accept this metaphor: books are gardens, their parts as seeds. Art as a seed in the mind to sprout on the page—some in a private garden, some transplanted carefully to the place it would grow best. The literary magazine, then, becomes a seed bank, its editors and readers storing not only what will be but the potential and beauty of what is, the seed as a whole universe. And with the amount of work available to us both online and in-print, why would we not want to see our whole stores?

The experience of reading curated work from different artists, and that art put into conversation with others, feels different than reading a book by one author. But so many people, even those who submit to journals, don’t tend to read them. Don’t we love to read? Isn’t that why we’re here? There are so many magazines! A huge variety! Traditional, formal, off-the-walls, weird, all about food, themed, quirky! Large and small teams! The lickety~split vs. Ninth Letter vs. our own Swamp Ape Review—all weird in their own fun ways! So why not read them? Because they’re there! And when you know what a magazine wants, it’s easier to figure out which work to send them that will fit their aesthetic. There’s a literary magazine library in the conference room available for all English graduate students to check out and browse through, curated by our own Becka McKay, that would take a person months to get through. There’s a sign-out sheet to the left of the shelf—accept the challenge!

And working for a magazine either as a reader or editor has its own benefits, like learning behind the scenes of how magazines and journals work, what pieces get published and why (and why others don’t) towards use in your own writing and publishing. And the small joys—receiving an excited response after sending an acceptance, or a really kind response after declining work—and references that make you feel like you belong to the community (Julie Marie Wade, who is contributing to our next Swamp Ape Review issue with Denise Duhamel, signs off her emails “Plums,” after William Carlos Williams’ poem). And everything you learn from bios: where people have published, which magazines you want to look into, how they fit into the literary world—and through them, how you do.

Because our work—our poems, our paintings, our prose—has a place, and sometimes that place is a magazine and sometimes that place is a book and sometimes it is, eventually, both. Because a seed bank is strongest when there are many seeds, many banks, a great deal of space to keep safe that which is precious, that which will become more and is, already, everything.

Haley Bell Keane grew up in South Florida and is completing her MFA in poetry at FAU. She currently works as poetry editor for the Swamp Ape Review. Find her @horripilatious on Twitter and Instagram.