A really old, professor-y guy up at Hugo House looked it over in October and right away said, "Why haven't you been published?"
Then he told me about this sea of (mostly) college-based literary anthologies floating on the edge of the fiction publishing world. This ain't literature you would find in the airport gift shop. But since I am PRO-art/writing and since I am PRO-independent anything, I'm plowing through a few of these, even if they don't pick my story to print.
The most prestigious of the lot is McSweeney's, which was founded by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which sat on the New York Times best seller list for quite a while.
The others are:
Hayden's Ferry Review, which I'm reading right now. Not to brag, but the competition in this one just doesn't look that intimidating. Do these writers really all have PhDs in literature?
This one's based out of Purdue University. You can tell by the very serious font.
This one's out of a Texas university. Note the southwestern motif.
This one's out of Boise State U. I didn't know the literacy rate was high enough in the Potato State to support a college English department, let alone an annual literary anthology. I always thought Idaho was full of meth labs, Mormons, people missing too many teeth, pickups and neo-Nazis. Now, if they'd just build a really big fence around it ...
This one's out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which makes more sense. They have lots of time to read in Alaska.
So in six months, hopefully, the SASEs containing rejection letters will began to flow in. Yeah, that was 40 bucks in shipping an' copies well spent.
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