Spring 2015
AN INVITATION TO NEW WRITERS
I
don’t know if you know what a Catch 22
is, but in case you don’t, it’s about an idea which
defeats its own purpose. As applied to new
writers, it means you can’t get into print without
having a publication record, and you can’t get a
publication record without getting into print, so
that initial break through is an absolute necessity.
Otherwise, you are what the more genteel would
call ‘stymied’ and what the earthier would
characterise as something involving an F.
It’s frustrating at any time for writers, who
are in the main sensitive people, or why would
they be doing it in the first place, to find
themselves something involving an F, but it’s even
more so when they’re trying to take the first
tentative steps on what will probably be a difficult
road anyway.
Le Chat Noir by Théophile Steinlen
And many magazines, to be honest, don’t
help a lot. You might be Alice Munro or Seamus
Heaney mark twos, but if the editor looks your
bio up and down and thinks who the something
involving an F is this, your immortal gem might
find itself in the nearest bin anyway. Names, guys,
names is what we want. Names which keep the
cognoscenti filling in the sub forms. Names which
prove the journal has its fingers on the pulse of
whatever currently rocks the literary boat.
LW is going to put itself amongst the enlightened. LW isn’t just making vague noises about encouraging
new talent; it’s asking anyone out there with either nothing or next to nothing in the ‘collected works’
list to send us fiction up to 2000 words or poems up to 40 lines, the pieces aimed at being your own
personal starter guns. (The word limits are about making sure we can get contributions into the space
available, not about making pronouncements on ideal word lengths).
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