PHV Interview Series: Emily Shearer, Poetry Editor of Minerva Rising
Because poetry has value in theory but not so much monetary value in the real world (YET), poets are usually forced to get a job. Or, more specifically, JOBS. Or maybe I’m projecting; I just started yet another summer job this week, teaching writing and rhetoric high school kids from South Central so they’ll be more prepared for the deluge of work and responsibility that is college matriculation. This is my third summer job. During the regular school year, I have five jobs.
So, okay, I love what I’m doing, but I am *busy*. And actually, most of us poets are really, really busy. How that affects our art collectively, it’s hard to say. We have the anecdotal examples that tell us that business doesn’t have to stop us: William Carlos Williams made it work, even while being a doctor. T.S. Eliot hated his clerk job with a passion, but he did it and still managed to write The Wasteland and Prufrock.
So it’s doable, right? But let’s just agree that doing it for free isn’t totally perfect. It’s okay, and we do it, and we’ll probably continue doing it for a while if it means we can get our work out into the world. But, as today’s interviewee--Emily Shearer, poetry editor of Minerva Rising--says below: “Exposure is great for world peace and happiness; not so much for buying a sandwich and a cup of coffee.”
So it’s both sad and heartening to hear Emily (and her magazine’s) insistence on paying writers, and why they do so: “I think the fact that we have to siphon off money from sales of our chapbooks to support women writers who are struggling to feel heard is indicative of the gross need to pay real money for real art out there in the writing world.”
Sad that this is the truth. But heartening that there are people trying to address it, one magazine and one poem at a time.
Read the rest of Emily Shearer’s interview below:
STATS:
Magazine: Minerva Rising
Interviewee, Name + Title: Emily Shearer, Poetry Editor
Payment for Poetry: $35
Submission Fee: $15 for up to five poems
Funding Source(s): submission fees and contest fees, subscriptions, chapbook and journal sales
Advice on Paying Writers: “The right thing to do would be to build payment into the business model from the beginning....Put your big-girl panties on and just do it.”
INTERVIEW:
Your name(s), your journal, your position with the journal, journal website:
Emily Shearer, Minerva Rising, Poetry Editor
Tell us a little bit about your literary journal:
Minerva Rising is an independent literary journal celebrating the creativity and wisdom in every woman. We only publish women’s writing and their artwork and photography. We believe that every woman has a story to tell, and we were founded a little over three years ago with two missions in mind: one) to help women tell those stories and tell them well and two) to help build and foster a literary community where women writers can thrive.
In a world where literary markets don’t often pay poets, why did you decide to do so?
When Kim Brown, our Executive Editor, established Minerva Rising, it never occurred to her not to pay the writers she published. The model was built with that end in mind. She saw a need in the over-saturated, male-dominated, sometimes academically high-brow or hoo-ha market for a place where women’s voices could be honored by putting them in print and by paying them for the hard and honest work that goes into that process.
What are the funding sources for your magazine?
I am quick to say right here, right now, that we receive NO funding sources for our magazine other than readers’ fees, subscriptions, and chapbook/ journal sales. I think we’ve all dipped into our own pockets, no one more than Kim, to “put our money where our mouths are” when it comes to how much we believe in the vision of this journal. We have a small staff and we all work for free. We all pay our own bar tabs, so to speak. Any money we have in the coffers after we pay for paper and ink and our writers’ stipends, we give away to charities that help women in some way. We’re working towards channeling all our charitable giving into places that somehow support women writers specifically, but they’re hard to find. We do have a scholarship program that awards a $500 grant to a woman writer who needs the dough to help further her writing career.
I think the fact that we have to siphon off money from sales of our chapbooks to support women writers who are struggling to feel heard is indicative of the gross need to pay real money for real art out there in the writing world. -- And I know this doesn’t apply just to women, it applies to all artists.
We have to ask writers to help us out financially so that we can turn around and sort of Robin Hood that money over to someone else who demonstrates not just a need but an understanding of the ripple effect. If we take the money we make from fees and sales and funnel it into the “care and feeding” of women writers, we all benefit – To carry on with the fairy tale analogies, we’re like Rumpelstilskins over at Minerva Rising, and at a whole bunch of the other presses that have been featured here at PHV. We’re all trying to take the dross [of submission fees] and spin them into a little bit of gold.
We realize that the $35 we pay for poems is barely enough to buy lunch and a latte. Last year when we read applications for the Owl of Minerva Award (our scholarship), the overwhelming request was for money to pay for childcare. $35 can’t buy enough time to write a fuggin’ rough draft of a poem! We hope to increase the amount of our stipends for our poetry and fiction/ essay/ cnf writers in the foreseeable future, but right now it is our hope that the money we can afford to pay them is enough to say to our writers, “We care. We believe in you. We value you.”
What is your acceptance rate for poetry?
Roughly 10% right now.
Do you think that acceptance rate is in any way affected by your pay model?
Yes, realistically it has to be. We are not businesswomen; we are writers, but we do sometimes have to make decisions with the left side of our brains. But one thing that I love about working with this awesome group of women is that sometimes the right sides win out. I, being the least business/ technologically-minded one of the bunch can particularly appreciate this! Especially when we get so excited about a certain idea or a new writer who has come to our attention or an area of growth we want to pursue that we just kind of say damn the torpedoes and charge ahead into the fray, regardless of how it will affect the bottom line. At the end of the day, we will still find a way to stand behind our promise to pay our writers and stroke them and continue to support them long after they’ve been published with us.
Do you think the number of submissions you receive is affected by your pay model?
I think the number of submissions we receive is affected by how long we’ve been in the biz, which is not very long. As we grow in readership and reputation, we receive more and more submissions.
If your journal charges for submission fees, tell us why you chose that route, how it’s worked out and what you think about that system:
Since we are pretty young, we are still establishing our reputation and readership. By charging submission fees now, we’re sort of biding our time until the day comes when we can afford not to. I know there’s a heckuva lot of flak out there right now about this system, but I have to say that in my personal opinion, it’s not as evil as it’s made out to be. If a person believes in her work, she will find the money to make an investment in herself, knowing that this investment also helps other women exactly like herself. I’m a big believer in Karma and Do Unto Others and Paying it forward. But then again, see? I told you I’m no businesswoman!
Many poets say that exposure to their work is a form of compensation, and that can be true, especially for young or emerging writers. How do you feel about exposure as payment?
This is such a tough question, one that I feel I can see both sides of, because I’m an editor, yes, but I’m also a poet with my own writing pursuits to attend to. On the one hand, I think poetry is everywhere and the more we are exposed to it, the more we are attuned to it. I know this sounds crackerjack hokey, but I believe that if we were all more attuned to the poetry of Life, we’d all be happier people!
Poetry was originally given away for free; it’s how stories were spread. Poetry is there for the taking - it is in the music on the radio, in church on Sunday, in advertising pitches, even covertly hidden in the best reporting in leading newspapers (though their own reporters like to proclaim that poetry is dead. Pish.)
If we are to call ourselves poets, we have to recognize that with that title comes an honor and a responsibility to expose the world at large to the kind of works of word-art that only we are capable of making and of sharing.
Personally, I’m fine with claiming that responsibility because the reality of my situation is that I can without debt or strain. I am lucky enough to have money in my paypal account to cover submission fees and help out the journals I support and submit to.
As above, so below. Call me a Poetry Communist that way.
Maybe sub fees could be on a sliding scale, but who would oversee it? How about The Voice for poets? Or, instead of food trucks on city streets, we could have poetry trucks? Maybe the NEA could stand on the corner and swap money for poems? Maybe pigs will fly and unicorns will hatch golden eggs.
Barring that, we still need to figure out an equitable solution. Those singers and preachers and ad-folks and journalists are getting paid, real dollars, and some of us poets are getting paid in contributor copies and freebies at AWP, each other’s books and Facebook congratulations-on-your-digital-publications. Exposure is great for world peace and happiness; not so much for buying a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
What is your journal's readership, as far as you know?
Sales are good, but of course, we’d like them to be better. We just want to get the beautiful work that we publish into the hands of as many readers as possible!
Do you have any advice to give editors who are thinking about switching their journal from a non-paying model to a paying model?
The answer is simple. Put your big-girl panties on and just do it.
What advice would you give to those starting a literary magazine who don’t plan to pay writers?
I’d ask them to examine their motivations, how they feel about this particular question, how they will justify their entry into a very full field. If they’re able to answer those questions in a way they feel good about, then forge ahead.
What about to those starting a literary magazine who do plan to pay writers?
YES! Fist bump and high five. Thank you!
The right thing to do would be to build payment into the business model from the beginning. I think it’s the direction poetry is moving towards, thanks in part to Jessica Piazza and this movement!
More and more people are talking about being unwilling to give their poetry away anymore. I’m not in academia, so I can only speak about my circles of friends and associates, and it seems to me that within these circles a general sense of the worth of Poetry as Art has arisen over the past couple of years that wasn’t there before. But unfortunately there’s a disconnect between that and the taboo that exists against considering poetry in terms of financial compensation. A sea change needs to take place in the minds of both readers (and editors/ publishers/ book buyers) and writers.
What, if anything, do you think could help change the system in place now? Whether as writers, editors, readers or just people: what can we concretely do to work toward a system that compensates poets for their work?
If every person with money to spend went into their local independent bookseller and asked them to put indie journals on their shelves, we’d get somewhere. We start there, then we move onto B&N, Waterstone’s. Just imagine – Target selling Rankine or Forché. Gem-like chapbooks in the bins at Cosco, at the counter at Starbucks!
Would you like to highlight a piece from your journal that you’ve especially loved lately?
Lately I’ve had the distinct privilege to work with three emerging poets who revised tirelessly to get their poems publishable. Julia Wagner’s “Field Work” in our Wilderness Issue, and Donna diCello’s “Ode to an Icelandic Horse” and Noel Canin’s “Slow Swelling Fire,” both in our upcoming Wide Open issue are all sparkling examples of what a poet can achieve when she’s willing to understand that the work that goes into making her words sing, her heart tell its story in a few short, chiseled lines is worth so much more than a check in the mail.
If we are to accept the responsibility that comes with calling ourselves writers, we owe it to the world to be the midwives, the horticulturalists. The world owes us the same respect it pays to the ones who bring forth the babies, the shade of an elm, the expertly cultivated garden. But as long as babies are born and cherry trees bloom in the spring, there will be poetry.
Emily Shearer lives, writes, freelance edits, teaches yoga, and gets lost frequently in Prague, Czech Republic with her husband and three children. Her poetry has been published in melancholy hyperbole, Stirring, ROAR, Quail Bell Press, about place journal, literarymama, writing the whirlwind, Bear the Pall: Stories and Poems about the Loss of a Parent, Twice Upon a Time, and Minerva Rising, where she is the Poetry Editor.
Timothy Green, esteemed editor of the highly successful, Southern-California-based literary journal Rattle, has been pretty open regarding his mixed feelings about the Poetry Has Value project. In one post he’ll call me out for asking people to subscribe to the journals they love, and in another he’ll eloquently explain why taking money from your writers has ethical questions attached to it, at best.
And you know what? I love that he does that.
Tim’s strong, nuanced feelings about this project and about this topic are so representative of why I’m putting this blog together in the first place. The answers to these questions aren’t easy. In some cases they don’t even exist. People are of two (or three or four) minds about poetry and it’s value. None of us wants to undervalue the joy and magic of the poetry they create and read in order to over-privilege the money question. So, it’s a sticky subject. And Timothy Green isn’t afraid to talk about the ambivalence these topics cause.
In his discussions of money, poetry and worth online, I’ve read some of the best arguments both for and against thinking about poetry as work and expecting to be compensated accordingly. Sometimes he’ll say something so perfect that it’s hard to argue against, even when my overall opinion isn’t exactly aligned with his. In the interview below, for example, he wrote: “If it were about the money, you'd get a job at Walmart and make more. Money's gravy. And it feels great to be able to pass the gravy, but gravy isn't what sustains us as poets.”
There is no arguing with that. Or is there? That’s the question, perhaps. And in this way, Tim is my exact audience. I’ve often found myself writing these blog posts with him in mind, which has helped me explain more clearly and more precisely my own point of view....which, to be fair, is still developing and always growing. But having someone listen and consider and argue your points is an amazing way to stay on your toes, intellectually. So: thanks, Tim!
Anyway, today we’re featuring Timothy for an entirely different reason. He’s not here today as a supporter or critic of the project but as part of the PHV Editor Interview Series. As I continue to question editors about where they get their money and how/why they pay poets, I hope to build up this section as a resource that all editors can use if they are starting a literary magazine or considering moving to a paying model. As I’ve said before, no one interview contains an answer, but together they offer a glimpse into the ways magazines make money work, and the multitude of suggestions and ideas in here might help editors broaden their possibilities.
If nothing else, these interviews aim to provide transparency into how this world of literary magazines stays afloat. And I’m starting to learn that transparency (or a lack thereof) is one of the main problems we face in business and logistics of poetry.
STATS:
Magazine: Rattle
Interviewee: Timothy Green, Editor
Payment for Poetry: $50 plus a subscription in print. $25 for online poems.
Submission Fee: None
Funding Source: Subscriptions, purchases, donations
Advice On Paying Writers: “Rob a bank? Woo a patron? Invest in cutting-edge battery technologies? Whether you pay writers or not, it takes a lot of time and money to run a literary magazine—and the more successful it becomes, the more time and money it takes.” / “I don't care that much either way about paying poets, but I really don't like charging poets fees and limiting access to just those who can afford it.”
INTERVIEW:
Your name(s), your journal, your position with the journal:
Timothy Green, Rattle, Editor, Rattle
Tell us a little bit about your literary journal:
We're an independent all-poetry journal, founded as an alternative to the academy's literary domination by Alan Fox in the mid-'90s. Alan loved poetry when he was younger, but when he returned to it later in life, after building businesses in law and then real estate, he didn't feel like anyone was publishing poetry for regular people like him—people who weren't English majors, and had unrelated careers, people who couldn't care less about schools and movements and theories, but still wanted to enjoy the emotional power, the human connection, and the natural music of poetry. One of his favorite lines in literature is Rilke's definition of love as "two solitudes touching"—and that's what poetry really is, at its heart, two solitudes, the reader and the writer, touching briefly for that moment of the poem. Rattle tries to keep it as simple as that. We don't solicit work from anyone—we treat all poets equally and openly, regardless of their stature or publishing history. We just look for poems that provide that memorable and moving connection, and give them a good home.
(That's something in this discussion that hasn't come up yet: Is it fair to pay poets, when half or more of what you publish has been solicited? Or does it not matter? That might be a good question to add to this list.)
In a world where literary markets don’t often pay poets, why did you decide to do so?
I assume that every publisher would pay poets like professional athletes if they could afford it. I don't think there's really a decision involved. We can, so we do. Our primary goal is to promote the practice of poetry—that's our mission statement, as a 501(c)3. And honestly I don't think paying poets is necessary to that aim. We received over 70,000 poems per year as submissions even before we started paying—and once we did, there was no change, either in quantity or quality of submissions. It was a nice thing to be able to do, and as we continue to grow I'd like to start paying poets more, as much as we can while keeping the magazine sustainable and on-budget, but money isn't really the motivating factor for poets—poetry is about community, it's about being part of the grand dialogue, sharing your inner voice with others, and that's one of the things that's great about poetry. Buried in consumer culture, as we all are, it's refreshing to be participating in something that doesn't have to be a commodity. Poets are poets because they love poetry, not for other reasons, and that's pretty cool.
What are the funding sources for your magazine?
Half the endowment Alan set up, half subscriptions (half of which are from contest entries where the fee is a standard subscription).
What does your journal pay for accepted poems?:
$50 plus a subscription in print. Only $25 for online poems, as we've been experimenting this year with immediate responses to current events, and a few other things—those have been very successful projects, so we'll probably bump that up to be equal with print soon.
What is your acceptance rate for poetry? Do you think that acceptable rate is in any way affected by your pay model? Do you think the number of submissions you receive is affected by your pay model?
We receive 25,000 submission packets per year, and publish about 200 poems, so less than 1%. If you break that down per poem, it's about 0.2%. As I mentioned above, there was literally no perceivable change to the submissions pool after we started paying in dollars. I thought maybe well-known poets would be more likely to submit, knowing now that they'd be paid, but it's all pretty much the same as it always was.
If your journal charges for submission fees, tell us why you chose that route, how it’s worked out and what you think about that system:
We only charge submission fees for our annual contest (which now gives $10,000 to the winning poem)—and the fee is a subscription. The real purpose of the contest is just to get more people subscribing, so that the poets we publish have a larger audience. I don't like reading fees—I understand and appreciate them as a last resort, but for me they would always have to be a last resort. And I advise poets to avoid them, unless they're going to receive something that they actually want in return—a book, a subscription, a sample copy, sure, but paying just to have someone read and return your work? Even with our contest, if you don't want the subscription, don't enter, because the fact is you're probably not going to win ... only one poets does! It goes back to that wonderful way in which poetry (or any art) exists for its own sake. The value is intrinsic. I don't care that much either way about paying poets, but I really don't like charging poets fees and limiting access to just those who can afford it. All the poems that we publish in print end up online and can be read for free, too. I want to receive as many submissions as possible from as many people as possible—the more people we have writing and reading and sharing poems, the better the world—I genuinely believe that. I don't want anything getting in the way of expanding the community.
Do the staff and editors of the journal receive any compensation? If not, how did the decision come about to pay writers and not those who work at the magazine?
I'm full-time on salary. Assistant editor is part-time, hourly. Alan is volunteer. And that's the entire staff.
What advice would you give to those starting a literary magazine who don’t plan to pay writers? What about to those starting a literary magazine who do plan to pay writers?
Rob a bank? Woo a patron? Invest in cutting-edge battery technologies? Whether you pay writers or not, it takes a lot of time and money to run a literary magazine—and the more successful it becomes, the more time and money it takes. It's not like a for-profit business, where growth means more income and a larger budget to work with. I've known many people who have started magazines, and I've started my own side-projects—it's fun for a while, but then it becomes work, and then it folds. That's why so many journals last a few years and then disappear. Believe it or not, writers are doing the fun part—they're creating, and having people read what they've created. Editors are doing all the not-so-fun things that allow it to happen. We're the ones licking stamps on renewal notices, begging for donations, budgeting expenses, coding poems for websites, reading mountains of submissions, and handing out mostly bad news day after day (don't think for a second that editors are sadistic enough to enjoy it; it sucks for everyone). As far as work goes, editing is fun, but as far as fun goes, it really is work. So keep that in mind, while you're planning. Or just say fuck it and have fun while it's fun—that works, too.
The Poetry Has Value project was created to spark conversation about poetry, money and worth, since it seems taboo to consider poetry in terms of financial compensation. Why do you think this taboo exists?
It's taboo for the same reason anything else is taboo: It's a reality most people don't want to face. Our poems aren't worth doodley-squat in the "real world" of capitalism. If they were, we wouldn't be having this discussion: Poets would already be getting paid living wages, and Rattle would be trading on Wall Street. Consumerism has us so brainwashed, even us thoughtful-poet-types, into believing that money equals value, that nothing has intrinsic worth, that everything's for sale, even the little pieces of our souls that are our poems. So talking about the issue results in cognitive dissonance. We know it has value, but it has no value, so let's just avoid talking about it my head hurts.
What, if anything, do you think could help change the system in place now? Whether as writers, editors, readers or just people: what can we concretely do to work toward a system that compensates poets for their work?
Nothing. The trouble with paying poets is that we're all poets. I'm a poet; Jessica's a poet; you, whoever you are reading this, you are a poet, too. Only poets read poetry, which always sounds like criticism of poetry, but it comes from a great place: Reading poetry is so enlivening, and it's so accessible an art, that makes you want to write it. You can't read it without wanting to participate, and everyone has a unique voice inside and a story to share. For every new from-the-masses reader of poetry we can convert, we'll also be welcoming in a new poet, so there will always be only as many readers of poetry as there are poets. Exceptions exist, of course, but they wash out—it's effectively 1:1, and will always be 1:1. So by its very nature, poetry is a closed economic system. We're a community that imports nothing and exports nothing. We're bound by the first law of thermodynamics: In an isolated system, energy can be transformed, but can't be created or destroyed. If you get paid, as a poet, another poet footed the bill. And then maybe you pay it forward and buy a book, and some other poet gets paid, and pays another poet who pays another poet, and it all adds up to nothing because we're only shuffling cards. At best it's a zero-sum game; at worst it's a pyramid scheme. We could build it up so that a few at the top get paid more at the expense of all the rest, but do we really want that?
The only solution is to find ways to bring in money from external sources. A Poets' Union could lobby for more public funds, maybe. Maybe attract and encourage more wealthy patrons like Alan Fox and Ruth Lilly and Win McCormack. Maybe write poems that appeal to mass-audiences—but can anyone even envision a "blockbuster" poem? What would Michael Bay write? Would that even be poetry anymore? We could always have a cultural paradigm shift, and build a world in which everyone appreciates the arts, where poetry readings can compete with monster truck rallies at the auditorium … let's whip up a quick massive paradigm shift, what do you say?
Reality is what it is. The real currency for poetry is attention; poets get to have a voice in the din, they get to move people, change the thinking, explore ideas and feelings, create images that were never there before—and we have a pretty large group of poetry lovers to appreciate it. It's an art that costs extraordinarily little to pursue, is open to anyone, is encouraging of unique voices and perspectives. It's not a career, but not everything has to be. We know poetry has immense value, so let's value that. If some magazines are able to pay, that's great—if others aren't, it's great that the magazines exist at all. Some people say there are too many literary magazines, but a 0.8% acceptance rate begs to differ. There are never enough magazines, and never too many poets.
Many poets say that exposure to their work is a form of compensation, and that seems true, especially for young or emerging writers. How do you feel about exposure as payment?
It is, and not just for young and emerging writers. As I said, exposure is a poet's currency, for better or worse. It's a seat at the great table where you're talking to Shakespeare and Dickinson and Ginsberg. That's what has value. If it were about the money, you'd get a job at Walmart and make more. Money's gravy. And it feels great to be able to pass the gravy, but gravy isn't what sustains us as poets. It's not even the meat. (It's the company we keep.)
What is your journal's readership, as far as you know?
Rattle's circulation is almost 6,000. We have 3,000 unique visitors and 20,000 page views every day on our website. And then another 5,000 subscribers to our daily poem email and 4,000 to our RSS feed. This is going to sound a little ad-pitchy, but those are just numbers ... what I really love is how often our poets will tell me that they received their first real fan mail after publishing a poem with us. That's what it's all about.
Would you like to highlight a piece from your journal that you’ve especially loved lately?
I can't pick just one, but if you go to www.rattle.com any day, there's a great poem right on the front page that wasn't available yesterday.
Timothy Green has worked as editor of Rattle since 2004. His book of poems, American Fractal, is available from Red Hen Press. He lives in the mountains near Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
