Scroll: Publishing and the Pandemic

More Submissions, Fewer Readers? How India's Literary Magazines are Coping with the Pandemic

First Person Accounts of from the Editors of Lit Mags in English Hindi and Tamil:

Literary magazines have been quiet, stable homes for creative writing, sheltering fiction, poetry, essays from the bluster of the mainstream. So what happens when the world falls apart and everything becomes noise?

 

Literary magazines have been quiet, stable homes for creative writing, sheltering fiction, poetry, essays from the bluster of the mainstream. So what happens when the world falls apart and everything becomes noise? How do the gentle stables of literature cope? As we wait anxiously for the first post-pandemic literary masterpiece, there is curiosity about the kind of submissions literary journals have been receiving; whether isolation, grief, fear, longing are spilling on to the page, and if they are, what form they are taking. If some reports are to be believed, more people are writing now than ever – there’s even a “poetry virus” going around. Just how contagious is it?

When all manner of publishing platforms are bumbling their way through “the new normal”, literary journals must also find ways to survive. And many have – despite hitting pause on print runs, despite disrupted distribution channels, despite running low on time and resources, all the while competing with escapist, clickbait-y material popping up at every turn.

Floating in a pool of doom and gloom as we all are, one could argue, is precisely why we need these little literary islands – to travel the length of a memorable short story, to savour the contours of a poem and, as Out of Print founder Indira Chandrasekhar puts it, to “also find escape from fear of a looming cloud of viral particles or the imagery of fellow citizens dropping dead as they embark on a journey home, the horrors of Indian matchmakers or low brow Scandinavian crime.”

Editors of literary journals from across the country talked to Scroll.in about the highs and lows of working through the uncertainty of the times, the new sense of intensity in the creative writing coming their way, and what the future holds for them.

Indira Chandrasekhar, Founder and Principal Editor, Out of Print

Out of Print has been flooded with submissions, many of them strong and compelling. Not all of the stories emerge directly from the pandemic, many visit and record an earlier time, a time before the world stood still and fought for breath. Many were written before the pandemic. Yet all of our recent submissions are certainly products of this strange time.

Solitude, loneliness, the feeling of being trapped within four walls, either alone or within an intensified family dynamic, inform these stories. At Out of Print, I have been able to immerse myself in the editing of these works with a keen, enhanced attention.

We are a quarterly and have published two issues between March and August featuring works that veer between the jagged and the mesmeric. Even though I am a scientist, it is not the data I am looking at – the online traffic and so on – but, rather, the less tangible responses, like an ever-widening author pool that allows me to speculate that the magazine is being read.

We’ve received letters about the recent issues, including references to individual stories, that indicate that readers are responding to what we’re publishing. Yes, the tensions of the moment must drive people to escapism. I believe, however, that readers can open their minds with a thought-provoking short story and at the same time find escape from fear of a looming cloud of viral particles or the imagery of fellow citizens dropping dead as they embark on a journey home across the stretch of the country, the horrors of Indian matchmakers, or lowbrow Scandinavian crime. The mind needs stimulation even while it indulges itself in mindlessness.

We have been lucky: our primary sponsors are also readers of the magazine, our outlay is not over-demanding, and Out of Print continues to be supported. If things change, I suppose, we will have to adapt.

 https://scroll.in/article/969974/more-submissions-fewer-readers-how-indias-literary-magazines-are-coping-with-the-pandemic

Interviewed in Scroll

Scroll: Are Online Literary Magazines the Future of Literature or A Mere Indulgence for Writers and Ignored by Readers

An interview with Indira Chandrasekhar, founder-editor of the online literary magazine outofprint, offers some answers.

 

By Sathya Saran, June 16, 2015

 

 

On the one hand, the number of literary magazines in print where writers can publish short stories, essays and poetry before they can become full-fledged books is dwindling. As far as English writing in India there haven’t even been any since this form of writing exploded. So, online magazines, where costs are lower and production quite simple, could well be the literary ecosystem that readers and writers both need.

On the other, however, the very ease with which such a magazine can be set up makes it possible for a boom in such digital publications, without adequate gatekeeping when it comes to quality. Moreover, all these magazines in India expect writers to write without being paid, a policy that may not attract the best writing.

Indira Chandrasekhar, who started Out of Print as a platform for writers of short fiction related to the Indian subcontinent, explains where her magazine stands in this scheme of things. Excerpts from an interview:

https://scroll.in/article/734411/are-online-literary-magazines-the-future-of-literature-or-a-mere-indulgence-for-writers-and-ignored-by-readers

 

Interviewed by the Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age

Lovely of the Deccan Chronicle/Asian Age to engage in such a fun interesting discussion on writing, reading, ideas, editing, publishing.

http://www.asianage.com/books/150818/explorations-of-a-diaspora.html

'No Word in Our Language' in Guftugu

No Word in Our Language has been published in Guftugu, the quarterly journal of the Indian Writers’ Forum. The issue is entitled ‘Culture Matters’. I feel proud.

I set the story in a village that is being subsumed by the city; spaces are violated by the encroaching concrete. A group of students from an American University comes to visit. The narrator, a boy, who is at first enamoured of the ‘alien creatures’ ultimately feels exploited and violated by them. The story has remained true to how I first wrote it, but it had much more going on, many more extraneous happenings before the main arc emerged as it has now. 

S Vijayaraghavan's image, Mystic Valley, accompanies the story.

'Disappearing Act' in Dead Housekeeping

Thrilled to have Disappearing Act in the fine Dead Housekeeping, a journal that looks at loss through the lens of home management. With micro essays. 

Digital drawing by Indira Chandrasekhar

Dead Housekeeping editors include the wonderful Shabnam Nadiya who gave us such a bold and extraordinary piece of writing for the March 2015 issue of Out of Print.

My piece, like many on Dead Housekeeping, blurs, or rather, perforates the boundaries between essay fiction imagination extension.

'The Embryotic' in Cosmonauts Avenus

Rather thrilled that The Embryotic appears in the very cool Cosmonauts Avenue.

This story has been through a bit of an evolution. In a previous incarnation, it was called The Boil and was shortlisted in the 2012 Mslexia short story competition.


Here's a screen shot of the Fiction Page - and in case you are wondering about the photograph, it is taken by my lovely niece, and the sweetest portraitist ever, Devika Raman.

'Polymorphism' in Eclectica

'Polymorphism' appears in the April/May 2014 issue of Eclectica Magazine.

Here's the link. 

'She Can Sing' in Far Enough East

My story, She Can Sing has been published in the October issue of 'Far Enough East'.


Here's the link and here the marvellous art by Ying Yefu that accompanies the Fiction section:

Out of Print 12

Each of the stories in this release of Out of Print has a resonance with an aspect of the cover image by Suki Dhanda, perhaps because it captures something of what the narrator in Gilead (Picador, 2004) by the remarkable Marilynne Robinson says of people: ‘… I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want”, and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.’

Disturbing imagery, disconcerts the reader in Niven Govinden's Grains, which follows a photographer who is recording man taming the wild for his purpose. She is an observer, reconciled to the fact that she has 'no power to stop anything'.

In Word Sanctuary by Meenakshi Chawla, one writer visits another. We discover that their relationship is based in a staggering amorality that the protagonist, despite his fine sensitivity, is compelled to exploit. Shom Biswas' The Other Transgression also tells the story of a character who is driven, this time by loyalty to friend and fraternity, to make a profound and ugly compromise that directly impacts him.

Sathya Saran's, The Lost Note, brings alive the particular and intimate dynamic of orchestral musicians as the flautist awaits his final cue. The imagery has the quality of a dream filled with anxious twists and a yearning for that elusive lost note. Also about finality, Kaushiki Rao's Obituary raises questions of fairness in a situation whose larger structures are outside of ones control. Stylistically, it is an obituary that lays out the life achievements of the dead individual who, in this case, is an insect.

Neeta Deshpande's, The Recounter of Memories leaves us with a sense of resignation and sadness, but also of courage. A woman on the brink of a divorce visits her old home. All that she is leaving behind impresses itself upon her, but at the same time, she examines the levels of breakdown that make it impossible for her to stay. Another story about marriage, Divya A's Bride Barter is all the more brutal for being based on real stories that she encountered as a journalist in rural Haryana. Savitha Devi is torn because her fifteen-year-old daughter is being given in marriage as barter for her son's bride.

In contrast to the inherent cruelties in the previous two stories, Roshna Kapadia's Mrs Aggarwal's Mirror, carries the kind of closure that indents a sense of human grace. Set in the countryside of a changing India, it spans generations and lifestyles, and plays with the inevitable ironies of a complex and multi-layered world. The Love Letter by Madhumita Roy is also based in the great divides that course through the landscape of Indian society; Priyambada Sen, whose view is framed by the English literature she teaches, is full of hope as she contemplates writing a love letter to a man who is barely literate.

Drawing

Drawing

Drawing

It's a Starry Night in Television Land

Pangea listed in The Hindu Books page

Thrilled to report that 'The Hindu' lists Pangea in its feature 'First Look' on the books and literature page on December 2, 2012. It appears online on December 3 and maybe seen if you scroll down the page.

ARTS » BOOKS           December 3, 2012

First Look

December 3, 2012

Pangea: An Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, Edited by Indira Chandrasekhar and Rebecca Lloyd, Thames River Press, price not stated
This anthology of 34 short stories by 25 writers from 13 countries is a reflection of the title. Pangea means “all lands” or “all earth”. The writers include journalists, scientists, a lawyer, a costume designer, a magazine editor, a crofter in the Scottish highlands, a bookseller, and a writer-in-residence at a young offenders’ prison. Their narratives are equally diverse and distinctive —whether about a man’s confrontation and failure on a road in Scotland, the dramatic preparations for a big birthday party in Nigeria, or the moment a young man comes face-to-face with his Bollywood idol — but have an enormous commonality. The conflicts faced and the emotions felt are recognisable, irrespective of the authors’cultural identities or the settings of the stories themselves.

Two of my Stories reprinted in Necessary Fiction

I am very pleased that two of my stories, Abandoned Rooms and Stretch, Open Up, Stretch have been chosen to be reprinted by Stefanie Freele, the October writer in residence at Necessary Fiction. Here is the link.

In introducing Stefanie to Necessary Fiction, editor Steve Himmer suggests that we ‘enjoy the ride this month to whatever compressed universes Stefanie’s going to guide us to’. Stefanie’s perspectives on her theme for the month which is the Earth and the environment, or as she sums it up, ‘Thinking about the planet, the weather, the earth, our stories’, may be found in her article October without a Chill in the Air.

Abandoned Rooms first appeared in Emprise Review and Stretch, Open Up, Stretch has recently been published in Pachinko Magazine.