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GENERAL
THE LONG STORY is the only
literary magazine in America devoted strictly to long stories. We have
a national and international circulation and publish stories of 8,000 -
20,000 words for serious, educated readers. Founded in 1982 and
published once a year, The Long Story
is an independent magazine both in its editorial policy and in its
freedom from institutional backing. We prefer stories about common
folks (as opposed to the rich and powerful) and in general look for a
perspective on current society—one that demonstrates awareness
that, for example, rock ’n’ roll is not the only music,
that capitalism is not the only possible social arrangement, that
self-glorification is not the only way to pursue happiness. Such
distancing comes (though not exclusively) from knowledge gained through
implicit knowledge of the Western humanistic tradition along with
interest in the same themes that engaged the great writers of the past.
_________________________________________________________________
SUBSCRIPTIONS, SAMPLE COPIES, ETC.
Subscriptions to The Long Story are $13 for two issues.
Single copies are $7; back issues
are $6 each. Copies, like subscriptions, may be purchased directly from
us (18 Eaton Street/Lawrence, Massachusetts 01843), or are available in
bookstores around the country and in Canada, particularly in or around
big cities and university towns. The Long Story is distributed by
Ingram Periodicals.
Libraries. Subscriptions can be
obtained through subscription agencies and book jobbers like EBSCO,
Swets and Blackwell, or can be arranged directly with us. Institutional
subscriptions are $14 for two issues and $25 for overseas airmail
service.
Write to: The Long Story
18 Eaton Street
Lawrence, MA 01843
Queries: rpburnham@mac.com
ISSN 0741 - 4242
_________________________________________________________________
Stories
of 8,000 to 20,000 words, with the best length 8,000 -12,000 words.
Although eclectic and open to many styles and genres, we do have very
specific tastes (and therefore recommend familiarity with the
magazine), but in general we look for stories with a human and thematic
core, i.e. stories that display vision where writers, instead of
“writing about what you know” (as the writing programs
emphasize) write about what they can imagine. Another quality we look
for is elusive but extremely important: it can best be described as a
sense of estrangment from the world at the same time involvement with
it; it exhibits a certain recognition of the simultaneous smallness and
greatness of humanity, and demonstrates respect and compassion for all
people and recognizes a peasant’s dream of owning a bicycle is as
important to him as Napoleon’s dream of conquering Europe. This
is a quality that only life can teach one; it cannot be learned in a
writing program.
DO'S AND DON'T'S
No multiple submissions.
no electronic submissions: please submit on paper and include SASE.
No popular forms of fiction like detective, romance, suspense, adventure, etc.
No parts of novels: please note we are a journal devoted to long
stories, a literary form with a beginning, middle, and end.
Self-contained chapters of a novel that read like a short story are
okay.
No unsolicited poetry or nonfiction prose.
Not likely to accept literary experimentation.
Simultaneous submissions: okay
For international submissions we recommend sending a disposable copy
and one IRC sufficient to cover first-class postage (or airmail if
overseas).
We read all year round, though prefer no submissions in July and August
Note: no phone queries, please
__________________________________________________________________
March, 2006
In this issue…
In “Midnight and the Fleeing Phoenix” by Shawn Hutchens,
Armondo Diego, after serving some years in a Tennessee penitentiary for
a manslaughter he did not commit, in 1974 is handed over to Bobby Lee,
a mountain of a man who uses work-release prisoners to work his various
agricultural businesses. Lee runs his businesses like a medieval
fiefdom. Despite his good-ol’ boy persona, he is a menacing and
dangerous man, as Armondo learns when he begins to contemplate his
escape. Peter Chilson’s
story “Toumani Ogun” is about John Heller, a man scarred by
his years of doing relief work in Africa and who becomes obsessed with
revenge when one day near his home in the U.S. he encounters Toumani
Ogun, a former African soldier whose men killed Heller’s African
driver 20 years before. In Paris Smith’s
“Down Macon Way” Norm, a white man, is married to Phyllis,
a black woman. They both hail from near Macon, Georgia, but when Norm
goes to his dying grandfather’s home, Phyllis, whose own
grandfather was killed by racists, refuses to go with him. While he is
there he learns a terrible secret about the death. “Living on
Paper, Dying on Trust” by Jack Vian is
the gritty story of Kody, a parolee who picks up Brad the day he is
released from prison. Kody lives with a girlfriend, but Brad wants to
renew their jailhouse relationship. Leandro is a black man in
1930’s Louisiana unjustly accused of murder in Norton R. Girault’s
“Leandro.” In jail he is poorly treated, but then a white
man steps forward to defend him, and the whole problem is resolved in a
surprising way. “The Summer She Was Seven” by Paul Johnson
tells the story of a little boy in the 1940’s whose cousin Elsie,
a precocious seven-year-old girl, comes to visit. When they are put to
bed in the same room for the night she—remarkably—teaches
him the art of loving a woman. Estrellita, a Chilean Indian girl whose
gray eyes betray some European heritage in Roberta Kalechofsky’s
“The Enigmatic Power of the Letter ‘J’,” is
abducted by some whites and branded on the forehead with the letter
“J.” Tribal superstition prevents its medical removal, but
when she goes to Santiago and falls into the dark side, the strange
letter has a powerful effect on the men who become her clients. In
“You Only Live Once” by Bruce Douglas Reeves,
Joe is trying to make it on the cold streets of depression-era L.A. He
left home, hoping for something better than the measly ditch-digging
job his brother has; he’s even tried boxing despite his small
size; but the only way he sees to make it big is to get in with Trummy
McGhee’s bootlegging operation. Poems and short pieces by Laurel Speer and Sonja Skarstedt and an editorial PRELUDE that discusses language and transcendence round out the issue.
_________________________________________________________________
(each issue of the magazine begins with an essay on a literary topic. Here is a sample passage)
Virtually
every day we all see in the media or meet in personal life certain
types of people: the capitalist who specializes in swallowing up
companies and in the name of efficiency firing half the workers,
attempting to get rid of any unions and rolling back benefit packages
of the remaining workers, all the while threatening them with the
specter of foreign workers who toil for a dollar a day; the spurned
lover who stalks and murders his former lover because if she cannot
belong to him she cannot belong to another; the blustering right-winger
who tells a panhandler to get a job and who blames the people in the
ghetto for their poverty; the person at work who substitutes power
manipulation for relationship, who backstabs and hides his or her
self-regard under the guise of duty or the importance of the
organization, telling a worker that she cannot attend to her dying
mother or sick child until she gets her work done; the athlete who
crashes into the sidelines, knocking over spectators and photographers
but not bothering to apologize or check to see if anyone is hurt; the
pundit on television who blandly discusses the U.S. economic embargo of
Iraq in terms of power politics without mentioning that the embargo
kills tens of thousands of Iraqi children, old and sick people every
year.
What do
all these people have in common? They all lack imagination. Being
egocentric, solipsistic, self-involved, or whatever term one cares to
use, they never think of other people, for other people with their
individual needs and desires are not important, not real to
them—hence the violation of Kantian ethics (the practical
imperative, never to treat another human being as a means to an end but
always as a end in him- or herself). They are evil too, for what is
evil but this very violation of Kantian ethics? And yet since at its
most fundamental level imagination is seeing what isn’t there,
they are not totally unimaginative; it is only that they have a warped
and perverted imagination that only serves their selfishness and greed.
In a brilliant passage in Essay on the Principles of Human Action, the English Romantic writer William Hazlitt makes the connection between self-centeredness and the possibility
of wider human sympathy and solidarity when he states that the only way
to know the future is by a projection of the imagination. The same
mental power, that is to say, that a greedy, selfish man uses to dream
up his schemes for getting rich and gaining power is the same faculty
of imagination that makes him capable of sympathetic identification with others. I could not love myself, Hazlitt concludes, if I were not capable of loving others.
We do not
often see such thinking in modern-day America; instead we see glorified
the capitalist who swallows up companies and the athlete who scores the
touchdown at any price. The self-involved, unimaginative man, however,
is like a black hole. His soul has shriveled into a tiny dense point
that gives off no light and which distorts everyone who comes into
contact with him. He is not to whom Hamlet was referring when he
exclaimed, “What a piece of work is a man!” Capitalistic
societies, as always innately hostile to any visions of oneness and
solidarity, stimulate the imagination that everyone possesses in
selfish ways, trying to make people not see the unity and oneness of
humanity by deflecting this most human attribute into dreams of getting
rich, having money and power, big cars and stuff, always stuff. It
feeds not the spiritual hunger for peace and unity but the selfish,
materialistic, grasping desire to have things so that (the ads make us
hope) we will be loved and admired. As a result it produces in
abundance dreadful, miserable excuses for human beings.
The polar
opposite of the human being as black hole is the person with empathic
imagination. He or she can see all people on their own terms, as beings
imbued with personalities, histories, wants and desires, fears and
phobias. Such imagination allows us to participate more fully in
humanity, to experience life at a wider and deeper level. Imagination
is also the most human attribute we have. Every other human
characteristic is shared in some degree with our fellow mammals and
other creatures, but the ability to imagine worlds that don’t
exist in reality or to see life from another’s eyes is uniquely
human. The fullest realization of our human nature, then, is found in
those with the most imagination. Exercising it is liberating; it widens
one’s view of the world so that one sees unity and similarity
instead of atomistic individuals and hierarchies.
The fact
that all human beings have imagination and are at least potentially
capable of entering into the life of another person is what makes
literature innately moral and ethical. One antidote to the sickeningly
self-regarding culture that inundates us, then, is literature, or it
should be. Literature opens minds, stimulates the empathic/sympathetic
imagination by allowing readers to see the world through other eyes
than their own. Just as a workout in a gym strengthens muscles, a
workout with a poem or story strengthens the imagination. But the
dominant literary movements of our day, modernism and postmodernism,
perversely parallel capitalistic values in their ethos. Modernism has
so distorted the cultural heritage of the west that it has made
artistic duty nothing more than to exalt the self, and it does this at
the expense of imagination, the one thing that all human beings have
(and writers should have in abundance) that leads to human solidarity.
The characteristic emphasis of modernism is to see the writer as
special, as a being above the ordinary human realm. Even in works where
this attitude is not explicit, the reader can still sense the repellent
sense of superiority. The writer is regarded as one who is not subject
to the same human duties and limitations as mere citizens, and disdain
for bourgeois values widens into contempt for working people. Such
writers, in short, ally themselves with capitalistic values and
carefully observe hierarchies of worth. The only use for a poor
bedraggled beggar is that he might make an aesthetically pleasing
subject for a painting, but his presence in a poem by Pound or Eliot or
in a Bloomsbury novel is only an occasion for superiority and contempt.
With its emphasis on form and experimentation, its inspiration not from
life but from other literary works, the spirit of modernism is
essentially critical, not creative, not imaginative. There are of
course exceptions where life wins out over theory (Joyce’s Ulyssesbeing the best example, but even some of the passages in The Waste Land),
but essentially modernism smells of the lamp. Instead of being an
imaginative and creative response to life, its practitioners show in
their works (Pound’s poetry, for example) that they are more
interested in playing the role
of a writer or a poet than in being a human being responding to the
multitudinous wonder of the world and being a writer. Coming up with a
new form is never imaginative unless the new form is the only way to
express a new way of seeing the world such as Walt Whitman did in Leaves of Grass, but what insight does the long rant of the Cantos offer?
(from issue No.
20)
back to top
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LS 1 - LS 24
Abel, Robert, Demons Come Between Us and The Light I, 106
Aitken, Brian, Blackie XXI, 90
Appachana, Anjana, Sharmaji VII, 11
Ballantine, Poe, The Power of Knowledge X, 25
______, Eskimo XIII, 105
Barragan, Nina, Five White Shirts II, 186
Beane, Jim, Maris Stella XX, 33
Beardsley, Joe, The Hole VII, 93
Ben-Yaacov, Miriam, My Brother's Keeper VIII, 68
Blake, James Carlos, Perdition Road IX, 75
Bobo, Stephanie, The Wickedest Child IX, 53
Bouman, Stephen Paul, The Prodigal Father X, 79
Brackett, Judy, Star Jasmine XI, 61
Brien, Pat, One of the Boys, XXII, 28
Bright, Nancy, The End of the Azalea Trail V, 122
Brooks, Ben, A Family, a Laundromat, a House, a Tree IV, 126
______, Moon over Seagull X, 131
______, Boys XV, 107
Buchanan, Jeffrey, Intifada IX, 93
Burnham, R. P., Pilgrim of Eternity I, 86
______, Dionysus Unbound II, 82
______, The Visitations VI, 109
______, One Night in Danny's Life VIII, 86
Burns, James, The Beauty of Barbed Wire XVII, 79
Cariello, Matthew, Glorious Angels XIX, 113
Carpenter, S.S., Journey Inland, XXIII, 13
Carter, Jared, The Shoat III, 96
Chandler, Sherry, Home Fires VI, 136
Chilson, Peter, Toumani Ogun, XXIV, 31
Coates, Lawrence, Cherry Rain XIII, 123
______, Eye of the Mountain XXI, 120
Cody, Tom, Rendezvous II, 162
Collier, Diana G., The Secret III, 53
Condon, Phil, River Street X, 105
______, Broken-Promise Land XIII, 134
Conlon, Christopher, The Face of History XIV, 77
______, Map of the World XV, 14
______, Loving Anne XVII, 11
______, Whisper XVIII, 42
Copeland, Ann, Will II, 11
Corso, Paola, Saint Odo's Curse XVII, 25
Culwell, David, The Last Entry of Józef Kamienski, XXIII, 39
Currans-Sheehan, Tricia, The Chicken Plant, XXII, 124
Dame, Edith, My Friend, the Indian VII, 28
Daniels, Jim, No Pets XII, 137
Darr, James, Foreign Relations II, 105
Davey, William, Survivors VI, 29
______, The Thanksgiving of Antichrist VII, 43
______, Lil Sister VIII, 12
______, The Angry Dust X, 13
______, Prisoners of the Wind XII, 45
______, Maniac with the Paving Stone XVI, 34
______, The Volleyball XVII, 100
______, Remembrance of Chauffeurs Past XX, 71
______, Two Prisoners, XXII, 46
Denniston, Keith, The Whip VIII, 102
Dickinson, Stephanie, A Lynching in Stereoscope XXI, 11
Dixon, Rebecca Taylor, From Between the Clouds XIV ,9
Drabble, Margaret, Stepping Westward XVIII, 31
Emerson, John L., The Cave, XXIII, 28
Erichsen, P. O ., The Last Rebellion XIV, 50
Evans, Walter, Peter and the Wolf V, 11
Fabiano, Mark, Wooden Spoon, XXII, 58
Falco, Raphael, Night Manager, XXIII, 117
Foster, Sesshu, Tovar's Daughter XI, 112
Fox, Hugh, Class Struggle III, 164
Fuoco, Joe, Killer on the Floor of the Forest II, 37
Gargano, Elizabeth, The Blue Waitress XII, 30
________. Red Dog XX,14
Garrett, Greg, Bridges XVII, 12
Gauffreau, Elizabeth, You Can't Shut Your Eyes
Against the Light VII, 112
Gentile, Catherine, Seduction, XXII, 90
Girault, Norton, Leandro, XXIV, 90
Goodman, Henry, Mary Thorne I, 130
Gottlieb, Andrew C., Security, XXIII, 61
Greenside, Mark, The Dreamer of Dreams V, 106
Gridley, Sam, A Plain, Ordinary Picture XIX, 57
Halley, Anne, Change of Life I, 57
Hanson, Nels, Sleeping Child Lake XI, 13
Hart, Frank, The Dog VI, 124
Hill, Jane, Seeking Refuge IX, 11
Himmelspach, Donald, Darby's Blues XIV, 92
Holsaert, Faith S., A Liberal Education VI, 66
Huber, Dorothy, You Couldn't Call It Murder IV, 9
Hutchens, Shawn, Midnight and the Fleeing Phoenix, XXIV, 12
Irving, Donn, Ozark Scrub IV, 77
______, Skinners VI, 53
______, Potato Famine VIII, 53
______, Aunt Sabetha and Doctor Sabin XI, 135
Irwin, Ivor S., A Matter of Semantics VI, 13
______, Zebra Crossing VIII, 29
______, Blue Christmas XII, 118
Jensen, Kim, Night of the Mijwiz XVIII, 84
Johnson, Margaret Hunter, The Nineveh Road XVIII, 67
Johnson, Natalie, For You, They Will Be XVIII, 113
Johnson, Paul, The Summer She was Seven, XXIV, 122
Judson, John, Hole Notes XI, 34
Kalechofsky, The Enigmatic Power of the Letter "J," XXIV, 108
Kitterman, Barry, Union Wages X, 61
Kraft, Eugene, Make Her Tell Us More, Pa XX, 83
Kuby, Lolette, Poison XVI, 131
Kulamer, Betsy, The Guardian of Her Solitude XVI, 67
Larson, David, Brothers XX, 57
Lauer, Craig, Of a Girl in a House by a River XVI, 13
Lida, David, Acapulco Gold XVII, 47
Logan, Malcolm David, Black Dust, XXIII, 91
Lohre, Michael, Once a Gypsy Girl XIX, 27
Majumdar, Saikat, Red-earth, Homeward XXI, 69
Maloney, Judith A., White Sands VII, 76
Mandell, Richard, Reusable Dreams I, 153
Manilla, Marie, Get Ready, XXIII, 137
Manley,Michael S., Long Way from Aurora XV, 77
Marcus, Stanley, No Country for Old Men XII, 14
May, Dan, Special Delivery XIX, 43
Mayfield, Steven, The Next One XIII, 38
Meixell, Steve, The Rubble XI, 72
Montgomery, Ellis, A Doubtful Case VI, 83
Moore, Laura Rogerson, Silver Stars XVII,130
Moore, Jack B., Sick Room VII, 123
Moore, Paula Ruth, The Hoof IX, 107
Murphy, Roberta, Belladonna, XXIII, 80
Opler, Daniel J., Hope Springs XIX,134
Overmyer, Janet, The Summer of My Beginning XI, 87
Pachuta, Andrew, Sanctuary, XXII, 12
Peavy, Linda, What Went On XIII, 59
Phillips, Louis, A Dream of Countries Where
No One Dare Live VIII, 123
______, The Old Woman Who Remained Inside IX, 30
Pomfret, Scott D., The Solace-Root XVII, 59
Power, Victor, The Ragged Rascal Ran I, 12
Raleigh, Michael, Lardner's Driver III, 128
Reeves, Bruce Douglas, You Only Live Once, XXIV, 136
Rhine, Barbara, The Lowest Form of Animal Life XII, 69
Rheinheimer, Kurt, Rain I, 40
______, The B & W XX,106
Rhine, Barbara, The Lowest Form of Animal Life XII, 69
Ricketts, Wendell, The Mysterious Decampment of
Rydel Wents XIX, 70
Robbins, Thomas G., The Walls of St. Rasa & DeTabula III, 81
Robinson, Heather, Awakening X, 49
Sadiq, P. A., Midsummer II, 61
Sable, Barbara Kinsey, Green Hair XV, 57
Sanchez, Sandra, Give Me a Poster of an Old Rodeo XV, 91
_______, The Vast Darkness XIX, 84
_______, Danny and Joe, a Friendship XXI, 52
Schmidt, Margaret Ann, The Lake Effect XII, 103
Sharratt, Mary, Story of Geese XV,125
_______, Maiden of the Mill XVIII, 100
Shepherd, Josh, The View Across Mexico Road XVI, 116
Shwayder, Sandy, Connections V, 59
Smith, Paris, Payday XIX,11
_______, Miss Crown Jewel, XXII, 72
_______, Down Macon Way, XXIV, 52
Snee, Tom, The Right Thing XXI, 24
Stanciu, Brett Ann, Earthly Needs XIII, 92
Stern, Steve, The Stolen Child III, 15
Stites, Clara, Fish of a Feather XXI, 38
Svendsen, Sharon E., Learning to Sleep XVIII, 13
Swisher, Robert K., Ned V, 79
Thorman, Richard, The Hired Man V, 22
Torre, Andrew, Run Nigger! IV, 43
Urrea, Luis, First Light IV, 147
Vian, Jack, Jr., Living on Paper, Dying on Trust, XXIV, 73
Wahl, Edward, Anywhere XX, 136
Wallace, Robert, Tell Me a Story, XXII, 106
Walton, Michael Eugene, Brothers in Arms XVI, 50
Warner, Sharon Oard, Strangers V, 42
______, Winter Storms IX, 130
Weaver, Gordon, Learst's Last Stand XVI, 91
Weinberg, D. L., The Rent XIII, 74
Weyhing, Ed, Speaking from the Heart XIII, 11
Whitty, Frank, Madame Queen XIV, 37
Wright, Barbara, Earth's Gifts IV, 57
Wroblewski, David, Candy and Wheeler XIV, 113
Yori, Tom, The Cave-In XX, 120
Zelitch, Simone, Lucille XV, 27
Zhang, Quan, Boomerang XVIII, 130
POETS
Brian Backstrand, 1, 2, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21 & 23; Peter Brett, 3; Linda Burggraf, 2; Everl Butterworth, 2; Jared Carter, 9, 10, 14, 16, 20, and 22; Richard Davignon, 4; William Davey, 9, 11, 14, 16, 19, & 21; Frank Finale, 2; Kathy Fitzgerald, 1, 10, 14, & 17; Stuart Friebert, 4; Beatrix Gates, 3; Geraldine Greig, 1; Anne Halley, 4; John Judson, 13 and 18; Lolette Kuby, 20; Philip Kienholz, 3; Mindy H. Kronenberg, 2; Lolette Kuby, 18; Cleveland Latham, 2; Lyn Lifshin, 3 & 4; Edward C. Lynskey, 4; Danaë Papastratou, 15 & 21; Carlos Pineda, 3; Joseph Powell, 2; Lee Puckett, 2; Napoleon St. Cyr, 11; Sonja A. Skarstedt, 10, 12, 17, 19, 22, and 24; Joanne Seltzer, 1; Nan Sherman, 3; Laurel Speer, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22 and 24; M. K. Sprinkle, 2; William J. Vernon, 4; Jan Williams, 2.
________________________________________________________________
http://www.wessexcollective.com
[progressive
book publishing, including fiction by Long Story writers (as well as
the editor)—Brian Backstrand, R. P. Burnham, William Davey, and
Sandra Shwayder Sanchez]
[William Davey]
http://www.jaredcarter.com
[Jared Carter]
http://www.progression.net/~prmal1753/
[Sonja Skarstedt & Geof Isherwood]
http://www.clmp.org
[Council of Literary Magazines and Presses]
http://homepage.mac.com/rpburnham/PhotoAlbum7.html
[Long Story photos]
[Chris Conlon, fiction and poetry]
http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/reviews_index.htm
[Review of LS 22 and LS 23]
http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/2005/11/rp-burnham-and-long-story.html
[Grumply Old Bookman blog-discusses the editorial preludes & LS 23]
http://www.piczo.com/thepatbrienreader?g=22577839&cr=1
[Pat Brien]