Good Luck, Crab Orchard Review!

Time Spent: 2 hours.

I spent most of my day today researching journals. I heard back from Allison Joseph at Crab Orchard Review, and they are too busy right now to let me visit them. That's fine; they're getting ready to put a new edition of COR out, so that trumps my visit, obviously. I wish her and the rest of the staff the best of luck!

But that means I'm back to square one for site visits, which is a bit frustrating. Thus, researching journals. Found a couple of neat ones in the STL area. Natural Bridge, the lit journal from UM-STL, which has won some nice awards and looks to be very well put together. Then River Styx, which seems to be an indie journal that has a pretty decent following. They even do readings once a month at Duff's in STL, which Joanna (my Field Advisor) assures me is some good stuff. I think she approves of heading down to STL for a visit. So my goal is call those two places on Wednesday and see if either can accommodate us. The other one I'll call is The Ninth Letter, the journal at UI Urbana. They've also won some awards, and maybe they'll help me because I'm a UI student.

Sadly, researching journals was as exciting as my day got. The great thing about it though is that I got to read a couple of really great stories (to get a feel for what the journal likes, pretty important if I'm going to submit to it). Like any job, this is a process. I think the most important thing I learned today was to expand my horizons. I've mentioned before that I'm pretty limited in what I read. Well, most of the journals I've looked at don't necessarily accept genre work, so I'm reading about a lot of "real life" type stories. It's definitely helped me learn to explore outside my comfort zone as far as reading goes.