PDR Blog

The literary world has a long way to go in terms of gender representation. There is little balance in publications between men and women, let alone people who reside elsewhere on the gender spectrum. In August 2009, poets Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; then, in 2010, they began “the Count.” The Count, published so far for 2010, 2011, and 2012, looks at several prominent publications and measures the proportion of men and women book reviewers and authors reviewed, or, in some cases, the overall representation of men and women in those publications.

The numbers are startling. Although the focus is, significantly, on book review, the inclusion of Granta, Poetry, Tin House, the Paris Review, and The Threepenny Review in the Count gives some picture of what’s going on in the world of literary magazines, at least at the top.

One person who has been inspired to action by the VIDA count is poet, editor, and educator Laura E. Davis of Weave Magazine. As an editor herself, she knew that there was some truth to the idea that fewer women were being published because fewer women were submitting in the first place. What if, she thought, a group of female-identified people submitted work en masse? If there were more equal representation in submission, editors would have to take responsibility for the gender imbalance in publishing.

Laura began her non-profit Submission Bombers in May 2012. Rather than blasting indiscriminately into the void, Submission Bombers works with interested editors to promote parity in their publications. So far, several literary journals (including PDR ) have volunteered to be “bombed” by women contributors.

We recently had the opportunity to talk with Laura about the project. Here’s what she had to say.

PDR: How did you decide to start Submission Bombers? (Was there an inciting incident, did you start off as an activist in other fields, did you work from statistics, anecdotally, from your gut, etc.)

Laura Davis: When the VIDA Count first came out, many editors responded by saying that they got fewer submissions from women, so that must be why there was such an imbalance. That response really frustrated me – they were shirking all responsibility. I did, however, understand that they were right to some degree. I’m the founding editor of Weave Magazine, and our first few reading periods were dominated by submissions from men. It wasn’t until we made it clear we wanted to hear from women, and eventually other marginalized voices, that we saw more diversity in our submissions pool. While I couldn’t force these editors to see how they were affecting their submissions, I could rally a lot of writers. I eventually shared the idea in a post on Facebook mid–2012, and there was enough initial interest and support that I decided to create a group.

PDR: When you approach editors about doing a submission bombing, how do they react? Have editors been more or less responsive than you expected?

LD: For the most part, editors have been very responsive and willing to get involved. Some editors simply respond with their submission guidelines and encourage the group to submit. Others want to be more involved, join the group, answer questions that arise during the submission bombing. When we first began, I was stunned by how many editors wanted to get involved. But many of them saw it as a way to get publicity, which is true. We’re also an audience. We have a public group in which we share our successes, so the journals gain a lot of readers by participating in a bombing. In the beginning we had a lot of new journals.

PDR: What have you accomplished so far? What are your future goals?

LD: Accomplishments include lots of publications for group members. Besides sharing successes in the public group, people message me with stories, [or] to say thank you, which is such a joy. One woman submitted an essay to a publication’s contest, won the contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She later told me that she never would have gotten the courage to submit without the group. That’s our biggest accomplishment, and it’s one I didn’t predict. We took a lonely, isolated process and made it communal. There’s so much support in the group, a lot of resources being shared, calls for submissions, questions about how to approach different situations with editors or publications. Our collective knowledge is really powerful, especially for new writers.

As far as future goals, I’m just happy to continue the group. I’d like to see similar groups popping up here and there. I think that a group can only get so big before people feel lost, and we miss that community-driven experience. There’s no reason why we can’t have lots groups that do this kind of work. Writers have to do their part in the process so that editors can do theirs.

This Thanksgiving, we at PDR are particularly grateful for our wonderful Fall 2013 contributors. Have you been reading our current issue? We’re also grateful for all of the submissions we’ve been receiving. Won’t you submit, too? We publish fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and visual art; our reading period for the Spring 2014 issue runs until January 1. 

Stay tuned in December for an interview with Laura Davis, creator and head of the Submission Bombers, a group that seeks to increase diversity in literary publishing by organizing group submissions to literary journals by writers of genders, races, ethnicities, sexual identities, and class positions that aren’t always well represented.

In the Fall 2013 issue, we will be featuring work by Keith Francis. Although Francis’s work reaches across media, from gauge cold-rolled steel sculpture to oil and mixed-media paintings, it is unified by its focus on the power of nature—specifically, the transformative forces at work when the ocean meets the land.

The paintings in The Pacific Series, made with a variety of tools in oil paint on canvas, plaster of paris, gesso, and glue binders, capture, in Francis’s words,

the greatest meeting of land and water in the world, powerful forces of nature, raging seas, distorted rock formations, land slide deposits, quartz dikes, kelp and vein filled converge at the Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, Carmel, California.

Francis’s wall-mounted, cold-rolled steel plate sculptures are based on his photographs and observations of Venice, Italy. These hand-formed, extremely labor-intensive pieces show “the beauty of Venice against a backdrop of decay and rebuilding, in a never-ending struggle to survive against Mother Nature, time and the ocean forces.”

Keith Francis is a 1989 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth based in New Bedford, MA. His current recent solo exhibitions have been at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), University Museum, Oxford, MS (2013–2014), and at the Colo Colo Gallery, New Bedford, MA, Congruence(2013). Current and recent group exhibitions include Giornata del Contemporaneo, The Present Art Space – Milan Art& Events, November 16 – December 2, 2013, Milan, Italy (2013), New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA, New Bedford Harbor in a New Light (2013), and University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, New Bedford, MA, New Bedford Harbor in a New Light (2013).

Hundreds of bookish Bostonians lined Boylston and Dartmouth Streets Friday night, waiting to open the fifth annual Boston Book Festival with a keynote presentation from Sir Salman Rushdie, in conversation with Harvard’s Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Homi Bhabha.

After an introduction by Boston Book Festival founder Deborah Porter, Bhabha began by speaking of two kinds of authors - those who bring the past to life, and those who dwell in the afterlife of the past. The first writers have the ability to ground us firmly in the world of the past; the second, to show us the echoes of the past in the present. Two writers who exemplify the latter category, said Bhabha, are Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, from whom we get Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s assumed name in the years when he lived under threat of execution, and the name of his memoir, around which the conversation was centered. 

Taking the memoir as their starting point, the two old friends discussed topics ranging from the craft of the book itself, which is written in the third person, as a non-fiction novel, to religion, writing in the afterlife of the past, and living in an age of surveillance. Among Rushdie’s bons mots was the statement, in response to his critics, that the nice thing about books is that, “if you don’t like them, you can shut them.”

The Boston Book Festival takes place in and around Copley Square in Boston and lasts through the evening of Saturday, October 19^th. It features a wide range of writers and thinkers on a great variety of topics. In addition to the presentations, there will be tents run by bookstores, universities, publishers, small presses, and other stakeholders in the concern of the written word. For more information, visit http://www.bostonbookfest.org/.