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When I finally got Coastal Shelf the literary magazine rolling in November of 2019 Australia had been on fire for months and it seemed like the weird chapter of history that had been, well, the previous few years to be honest, was ready to wind down. Skip a few… man. Skip a lot. There’s limited space—or, attention span. Let’s just say I hope we’re moving toward a world where we all (moreso) try to fulfill ourselves while treating our neighbors with love and respect. I was expecting hundreds of submissions—maybe even a thousand by the time I closed my submissions on June 1st—I thought that was wishful thinking, but it was that sort of exciting time. Eyes forward for 2020, right?
Then with at very least hundreds of thousands of writers forced inside, the wonderful people at Author’s Publish featured our submission call and the skies opened up. They have over 170k subscribers to their newsletter! Let’s just say that my hopeful estimate of 1000 pieces far, far, far undercut what we ended up receiving. But I’d promised feedback on every submission and dadgummit, I was going to give it. It has been a long, long summer and fall, and I know a lot of editors say this via rejection letter, but we really did have to turn down a whole lot of really good pieces of writing. If we hadn’t we’d be publishing 200+ pieces and I had set the absolute ceiling of 15 pieces to really allow each piece to shine. But that was simply impossible, just like getting enough of a handle on the submission situation to publish in July as originally planned.
It’s a year of improvising, making do and overcoming. So we have this first double issue, Summer/Fall, and it’s pretty amazing if I do say so myself. Though I have no part in the creation of the writing, I’m a curator—a DJ making a badass mixtape that will last forever. So with that in mind, of course it won’t have every single awesome song possible on it, that’s no way to make a mixtape. Each piece must be excellent on its own but the collective has to feel congruous and like a single experience—though maybe I think too much about being an editor… and making my music mixes. But I won’t stop.
An interesting thing happened on the way to this forum of ideas… as pieces were accepted and moved along to the tiers of consideration, the issue began to pretty quickly take a shape of its own. Maybe it’s the human nature of looking for patterns and design in everything, but the issue really fell into place, I’m not sure how I would break this up into two individual issues. Additionally I realized that were I to submit 100 pieces of my own writing to Coastal Shelf, I’d likely have rejected all of them. Which is a weird feeling, but the magazine really did have a ‘feel’ to it which is hard to explain before the issue begins bubbling into existence. The ekphrastic feature came to us as just two poems with no images and I had a feeling I’d lucked onto something special so I messaged the author to see more of the project and boom. I’d gone from sure that I’d only be accepting one piece per author to accepting a feature of 5 poems and 5 photos, then when I received the photographer’s bio I looked at his portfolio and friggan loved his work too so boom again, we have a perfect first cover image which synergizes with the content and it literally looks like a shelf on the coast—cue The Red Wheelbarrow in my head. Then we have “Dreaming to Updated Mountain Songs” which received such a vivid defense in our ‘final round’ of considerations that I wanted to include some of the editor’s notes along with the poem because I felt it enhanced my appreciation of the poem. Big shout out to the Coastal Shelf Editorial Staff. While ye be few, ye are mighty!
But there we go, I say there’s limited space then I ramble on and on and on—and I could keep going about this issue—from the medlodious collage of voices in Nikolai B.’s “Got to Get Back” to the wonderfully melancholy “My lover has left and everything is worse now” which conjured in my mind the Richard Brautigan gem of a poem “I feel terrible she doesn’t”. I had it in my head that while I do love minimalist poetry, it didn’t seem to be right for Coastal Shelf—but then Anne Marie Wells’ “Spring Flurry” hit me with the subterranean title and resonant images that I couldn’t shake despite being only 6 lines. Jefferson Carter’s “SOUTHERN FRIED” was paratactic in all the right ways, and Mary O’Melveny’s light touch on the pandemic in “MOURNING THE DEAD” hit just the right tenor where many Covid pieces tend to lose the forest for the trees. When replies were dragging and I wanted to keep everyone up to date I sent out a message of our backlog woes and offered a ‘fast track option’ for folks that were willing to forego overly-thorough feedback to get a quicker response and wouldn’t you know it, of the dozens that opted to hop the line we found multiple new pieces that fit into this debut absolutely perfect and I gave up hope of making individual separate issues. It was a single large unit, and it’s here.
However—there is no rest for the literate, so while you all dive into the wonderful pieces in this issue, I’m about to dive head-first back into my Submittable account and give feedback like a madman. Yes, feedback on all submissions has really killed me this year, but receiving the thank you’s from grateful submitters who had received that feedback was quite rejuvenating—and while I didn’t hear again from most people, I did hear that at least one person has since had a piece accepted for publication at one of the journals I suggested that they try which feels pretty rad. I gave so much feedback over the year I feel like I’ve taught a dozen workshops—and the notes really helped keep me crackin’ with the meaningful feedback and lit mag recommendations. I haven’t even promoted my The Submission Wizard lit mag recommendation service because the backlog needs to take precedent. I’ve made anonymous a number of the notes and included them here because, well because I can. They make me happy.
There is finally less than 1000 pieces left to read. We had enough fine folks “Pay it Forward” in their submissions that we were able to pay our authors 150% of what we’d initially set out to and in the new year we will have multiple contests and micro-submission calls in addition to our new reading window schedule so stay tuned. It is an exciting time. Read on.
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