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Iron Horse Literary Review – 2003

First Frost

Volume 5

2003

Weston Cutter

I go back and forth about the debate regarding whether or not there are simply too many literary magazines. There’s the statistic that the majority of amateur authors spend more money per year on sending work out than they do on the literary magazines they’re so desperately trying to garner an acceptance from, and there’s the notion, to me anyway (an admitted elitist), that if there’s eventually a venue for every piece of writing, what does that do to writing overall?

I go back and forth about the debate regarding whether or not there are simply too many literary magazines. There’s the statistic that the majority of amateur authors spend more money per year on sending work out than they do on the literary magazines they’re so desperately trying to garner an acceptance from, and there’s the notion, to me anyway (an admitted elitist), that if there’s eventually a venue for every piece of writing, what does that do to writing overall? Iron Horse Literary Review is exactly the type of magazine that acts as soothing antidote to the insta-headache above. I’ve never seen the magazine before, I recognize just a few of the names in the issue, I haven’t the slightest who the editors are, but the magazine is coherent and well organized and neat and good, and it passes the pick-up-and-flip test better than many: I literally picked it up ten or so times, flipped open to a random page, and was hooked, if not by one page than the opposite or, sometimes, both. No style is outlandishly favored in terms of quality or page space, and the best feeling is that strange sort of trust a magazine or book exacts as it does the job well: you don’t know what’s next, but you know it’ll be worth it. [Iron Horse Literary Review, Texas Tech University, Department of English, Box 43091, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $6. http://www.english.ttu.edu/IH/] – WC

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