Promising new Northwest literary magazine Moss launched earlier this year, and they’re back again with a new issue featuring Oregon writers Miriam Cook and Steven Moore. Here’s what’s great about Moss: (1) THEY PAY THEIR WRITERS. In cold, hard cash, not “author copies” or whatever the fuck. This is something many, many literary journals do not do. (2) When I called them out on their first issue’s lack of female writers, editors Alex Davis-Lawrence and Connor Guy committed to doing better, and they delivered: This time around, Moss‘ bylines have a much more equitable gender breakdown. This is something many, many literary journals do not do. (3) Moss only publishes Pacific Northwest writers, and this new issue discusses the Northwest lineage of poet Denise Levertov, whose praises we should be singing right alongside Northwest icons like Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo, but don’t often, probably because Levertov is singularly underappreciated—unless you’ve done time at an extra-wacky MFA program, you’ve likely never heard of her. Go fix that. Go read Moss here.
Have you ever wanted Erika Moen to draw you into one of her dirty comics? If you have $400, now you can!
Hey, writers! Did you just get a bad review from a stranger on Goodreads? Don’t do what this guy did! After his book received a one-star review on Goodreads (you know, that juggernaut arbiter of taste Facebook for book-people), this indie author WENT TO TOWN trying to convince said reviewer to rescind her opinion, resorting to internet go-to insults like, “Do you have empathy? Do you know what it’s like to make something for a living? Are you human?”
The whole exchange is here, and it’s amazing. I mean that literally. It amazed me.
Gentle PSA to authors everywhere: I know getting a negative review must be unpleasant. I’ve seen writer acquaintances do things not too terribly different from what our Goodreads buddy did over an unexpected bad review. But if you want to be a writer in the world, you have just GOT to have thicker skin than that. Reviewers, whether on Goodreads or in the New York Times, are, at the very least, making an effort to engage meaningfully with your work. Unless something offends me on some fundamental level, I don’t particularly enjoy writing negative reviews, but if I did not write a bad review when a bad review was called for, I WOULD BE LYING. No one has time for effusive lies about books. It just isn’t worth it.