Birds of Tokyo – Lanterns
Like Mumford and Sons or Of Monsters and Men? Rising Australian alt-rock band Birds of Tokyo is for you. Single “Lanterns”.
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6 Literary Journal Lists/Resources (Or, How to Get Your Poetry Published)
It’s a hard cold world as a poet out there. Just kidding. Kind of.
In all seriousness however, it’s easy to feel lost in the world of literary journals, there seem to be simultaneously too many and too few. Here is a quick tip I recommend from the last year or so of actively hunting down and submitting work to literary journals: the first and most important thing about any journal is whether or not they publish work similar to yours. I used to naively assume that as long as you wrote good stuff you could get published: this is not the case.
Journals publish according to their tastes and generally have a particular aesthetic, and whether or not your work matches with that aesthetic is the most important factor to getting published. (Though you do, of course, need to write decent stuff). I’ve spent a lot of time sorting through lists of literary journals and filtering out dozens of good, active ones simply because my work didn’t fit their style. Honing in on the journals that take poetry like mine has really assisted me in getting published.
Having said, here are six lists to help you get up and running. I recommend slowly going through these and pulling out a list of targeted ones that match your work in some way, then applying to those. Filter out the rest as noise.
1. The CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines and Presses) has the second-largest and most reputable database online and allows you to filter for your genre. Fantastic.
2. Litline, a website for the independent literary community, has a list of 240 literary journals
3. Redactions has a list of 344 literary journals, choosing only literary journals with “Review” in their title. Fair warning; a percentage of these links are no longer active. However, I’ve found it a good resource, particularly because the journals that style themselves as “reviews” often take their work and their contributors’ work more seriously. I recommend parsing through it alphabetically.
4. Duotrope’s Digest lists 5000 literary publications. Two downsides: access costs $5/month (they used to be free but recently switched), and I have found the selection to be a huge mishmash with more misses than hits. Still, definitely a good option if you run out of resources from the previous lists.
5. Newpages offers a PDF guide to literary magazines (updated yearly) and a list of reviews of literary journals
6. John Selby has a large list of experimental poetry/art magazines all over the world
It takes work to get published. It can and should take you a lot of time to look through some of these lists and find journals that you love to read and which might like your work. But the payoff? Priceless 🙂 Go forth and conquer.
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RSA Shorts – How Cooking Can Change Your Life
Brilliant 2-minute video about food.
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Sonogram
Little just-begun, dough rising,
sparrow northward, kicker south.
Lentil to grapefruit, you sleep-step sidewise,
turnover, pop-up, tongue in the mouth.
-Rachel Richardson, Cellpoems
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The Mother, HIMYM
by AliceXZ
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If you fall, I fall with you/If you hurt, I feel it too, even if my heart turns black and blue
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Quotidian
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Caffeinated Links: Black Widow/Captain America Relationship, Colin Firth, Mindy Lahiri
Captain America: Winter Soldier was one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while, and easily one of the best superhero movies. I’m particularly loving this article from EW about the Black Widow/Cap relationship. “Which is why it feels weird to take up “Who Will Black Widow Hook Up With?” as a talking point. The answer could totally be “no one,” and that’s fine. But I don’t think I’m the only one who felt the Cap-Widow chemistry in Winter Soldier. There’s a nice bit of mutual dislocation in their characters: He’s a man out of time; she’s a woman without a past. (She’s from Russia, question mark?) He’s pure pre-’60s sincerity, she’s pure post-’90s cynicism. (Evans and Johansson even have an onscreen past: Friends in The Perfect Score, dating in The Nanny Diaries.)” RT
Colin Firth gives a very funny and endearing appearance on The Tonight Show in which he talks about learning to do a somersault. RT
Bill Morris at The Millions writes eloquently about the rise of second novels. “Of course, second novels don’t always flop — or drive their creators away from fiction-writing.  Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and John Updike’s Rabbit, Run are just a few of the many second novels that were warmly received upon publication and have enjoyed a long shelf life. But until about a year ago, I regarded such stalwarts as the exceptions that proved the rule. Then a curious thing happened. I came upon a newly published second novel that knocked me out. Then another. And another. In all of these cases, the second novel was not merely a respectable step up from a promising debut. The debuts themselves were highly accomplished, critically acclaimed books; the second novels were even more ambitious, capacious, and assured.” RT
TWC Central on The Mindy Project. “Ms. Kaling may have been something of an annoying caricature on The Office, but on The Mindy Project she has written herself a plum role – and become a role model. Her Dr. Mindy Lahiri is based on her late mother, who was also a doctor, and like her mother is a smart, well-educated professional. She is both self-conscious of her weight and other body issues, but also remains proud of her curves, her color and her culture. Her character, like the woman herself, is not the cookie-cutter cuddly cutie pie so often found on sitcoms. She is smart, yet makes many bad decisions, mostly by following her heart rather than her head, and that is just another reason why so many viewers love Dr. Lahiri – and Ms. Kaling herself.”RT
Coffee and Irony 
