Jun 072013
 

AdamRegnArvidson

Former NC contributor Adam Regn Arvidson makes a return visit with some salutary advice for the beginning essayist (and maybe the not-so-beginning essayist) on where to find submission venues. The advice he gives happens to accord with my own practice in the dark eons before time, the years of my apprenticeship. The  best way to give your story or essay or poem a chance at a life is to submit to magazines that are reviewed by the standard anthologies: Best American/Canadian (Stories, Essays…), Pushcart, O’Henry, etc. While you’re here, check out Adam’s Nature Writing in America series on NC and his short craft essays in the NC Craft Book.

dg

BAE2012BAE2011BAE2010BAE2009

Like it or not, the Best American series has a certain gravity. Whether you feel it actually publishes the best American writing, this annual compendium is eagerly awaited by writers everywhere. It’s a little easier to digest than the Pushcart doorstop, and somehow the overall system—regular editors that winnow down and pass along a selection to a guest editor that makes the final selections—seems to have the right combination of consistency and nuance, populism and expertise.

But this isn’t a review of the Best American vehicle.  This is an analysis.

A while back, when I started thinking maybe, just maybe, a couple of my essays might be “ready,” I asked the essayist Patrick Madden where I should submit them. As always at the ready with sage advice, Patrick told me (and I’m taking some liberties with the quote here): “Most places you publish will doom your essay to an inglorious death: one issue that few people read, and then the trash heap. Sure you can list it in your cover letters, but wouldn’t you like people to actually see your essay. I’d recommend looking at the Best American Essays—especially the back section, the “Other Notable Essays”—and find out which journals are represented there. At least you know that a BA editor is (possibly) reading your stuff.”

So, like a good student (and the data-curious, research-driven writer I am), I went ahead and catalogued a few years of Best American Essays, and Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Travel Writing. Then I went back and did a few previous years, just to flesh out the sample size. Yes, I have a spreadsheet of each journal that has appeared in these three BA series and the number of times it has appeared. Give me a journal and I can tell you exactly how many times it has had included essays and notable essays in any year since 2008.

BASNW2012  BATW2012

I can hear the “holy crap, that guy’s got too much time on his hands” echo through the datasphere. But wait, because I tell you it helps.  First, this is how I find journals. That lesser known annual magazine creeping up in numbers of notable essays: perhaps a good up-and-coming venue for a newer writer. Second, this is how I work some hierarchy into my submissions. Maybe I send something out to one of the more represented journals first, then, upon rejection, work my way downward on the list.

I know this is an imperfect science, but essay (or short story or spiritual writing or poem) submission is inherently imperfect. This gives me a guide.  And it’s kind of fun to know how everybody’s doing. So I’d like to share my data with you.

But first, a few parameters. I’m an essayist—a nature and environment essayist. The data here deal just with the “Essays” and “Science and Nature” volumes of BA.  Next, I make no distinction whatsoever between the “notable” essays in the back of the book and the 20 or so actually printed. The notables are selected by the main editor. The 20-or-so are the result of one annually selected big-name’s own sensibilities. Getting printed is a crap-shoot, in my opinion.

Some of the names in these lists won’t be surprises to any of you (what! The New Yorker dominates the Best American series??!). Some will.  So without further dithering, here we go:

Top 10 Journals: Best American Essays, 2008-2012

1. The New Yorker, 47
2. Harper’s, 42
3. American Scholar, 23
4. Fourth Genre, 23
5. Granta, 20
6. Southwest Review, 20
7. The Sun, 18
8. Missouri Review, 17
9. Michigan Quarterly Review, 16
10. New York Times Magazine, 16

Frankly, I was surprised to see Missouri Review and Michigan Quarterly Review on this list, considering how few essays they publish in each issue. Might be interesting to discover the journal with the best percentage of total essays that appear in BA…  Hmmm.

SciAm2013

Top 10 Journals: Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2008-2012

1. The New Yorker, 48
2. National Geographic, 41
3. Discover, 36
4. Scientific American (with this one’s name, it ought to be here), 32
5. Orion, 22
6. OnEarth (including on-line), 19
7. The Atlantic, 18
8. Outside, 18
9. Harper’s, 17
10. Wired, 17

Ok, so this batch can barely be called literary magazines. There’s not a university journal among the top ten. And frankly (though I hate to be critical of a particular magazine, even if I read it religiously), I wonder if all the pretty pictures are skewing everyone’s opinion of the actual writing in National Geographic

Ecotone_14_CoverLooking down through the top 25, the only literary journals here are Ecotone (#19, 7 inclusions) and Isotope (#23, 5 inclusions), but the latter is defunct. (Oddly, just above Isotope is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, perhaps publishing lively essays on gluons and quarks!)

I have done different methods of totaling these two series, but honestly the Science and Nature tends to dominate and skew the number, since a much smaller set of journals appears in that series. For you generalist essayists, it is probably more useful to dig a little deeper into the BAE rankings.  So here are all the journals that averaged at least two appearances per year (at least 10 appearances total) for the five years I have kept track. These are probably middle-of-the-road submission venues for you. Not the most incredible work, but still credible according to BAE. (Also, plenty of literary magazines here.)

Gettysburg Review, 15
Massachusetts Review, 15
Orion, 15 (ooh, they can do S&N AND Essays!)
Salmagundi, 15

The Atlantic, 14
Ecotone, 14
Georgia Review, 14
New York Review of Books, 14
Southern Review,14
Iowa Review, 13

Alaska Quarterly Review, 12
Boulevard, 12
Harvard Review, 12
Kenyon Review (and KR Online), 12
Ninth Letter, 12

Colorado Review, 11
Image, 11
New Letters, 11
Oxford American, 11
River Teeth, 11
Washington Post Magazine, 11

Creative Nonfiction, 10
Hotel Amerika, 10
New Republic, 10
Sewanee Review, 10
Under the Sun, 10
Vanity Fair, 10

CNF2013

Of course, how you use this data is up to you. If you’re curious about a particular magazine, or want to know all those with a certain total number, just comment here. At the very least, think about subscribing to some of these. They are consistently publishing excellent essays.  Support them so they can perhaps some day support you.

— Adam Regn Arvidson

—————————–

AdamAdam Regn Arvidson is an essayist, editor, and landscape architect based in Minneapolis. His work, including his Nature Writing in America series, has appeared previously in Numéro Cinq, as well as in Creative Nonfiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, flyway, and Briar Cliff Review. He is a recent MFA graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Jan 262012
 

 

Adam Regn Arvidson has completed his epic (nearly a year) exploration of nature writing in America, including essays on Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch and Loren Eiseley plus a special craft essay/digression on imagery and invective (in the work of Edward Hoagland). Adam also explores the profound political and cultural effect this particular kind of nonfiction prose has had—these nature writers have altered the way with think about the land we live in (we are talking about the invention of Green). In the last year, Adam also had a new son and completed a nonfiction book on landscaping and the environment that will be published by W. W. Norton this fall. —dg

 

Contents

Introduction

Loren Eiseley’s Two Cultures

Edward Abbey’s Access to Wildness

The Enigmatic Edward Hoagland

Criticism Through Imagery

The Power of Rachel Carson

Joseph Wood Krutch’s Natural Personality

The Place of Wendell Berry

 

Adam Regn Arvidson

is a landscape architect and writer in Minneapolis. He has published numerous articles on design, planning, and landscape in a variety of magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Planning, and Metropolis. He is founder of Treeline, a design/writing consultancy that assists public and private clients in telling the story of their land through landscape architecture and writing deeply rooted in place. In 2009 Adam won the Bradford Williams Medal, the nation’s highest award for landscape architectural writing, and he has a book forthcoming on environmental practices in the nursery and landscaping industry (W.W. Norton, 2012). This fall, Adam will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Dec 142010
 

Capture

 Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colors are not.  They are psychological spaces; red, for example, presupposing a hearth releasing heat.  All colors bring forth specific associative ideas, tangible or psychological, while blue suggests, at most, the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual nature what is most abstract. — Yves Klein

.

Winter

You meet a girl.  A local girl.  They all seem to be local girls.  You trudge through the snow between her apartment and yours in the middle of the street, because the sidewalks are unreliable—some already cleared by ambitious homeowners with powerful snowblowers, many still buried in the drifts.  You don’t think it strange anymore when the first snowfall of the year happens in October.  The public radio station devotes a whole hour to discussing the impending event, and listeners call in to ask when the earliest measurable snowfall occurred or what was the most snow the city ever got in October.  You learn that talk about the weather isn’t just small talk here; it is a well-researched discussion, full of personal opinion, documented theses, and bold predictions.  You surprise yourself by enjoying that October snowfall, the way it hangs in the trees still spangled with the yellow and orange of autumn, the way it lays on pumpkin patches like a blanket on a bed of marbles, the way the people immediately commandeer it for their own fun: the making of six-foot snowmen, the strapping on of actual skis to replace the versions with wheels that the die-hards have been training on for weeks, the dangerous racing on sleds down the park hills toward the not-yet-frozen creek.  You marry the girl. You snowshoe with her under the gnarled bur oaks in the park near the house you bought together.  She pauses, smiles, her winter coat bulging at the middle with your first-born. You drive past the lake near your house on the way to pick up the new storm windows you ordered, and you are struck by the blackness of the water—a bottomless void in the white world.

Spring

This is called the City of Lakes.  Minneapolis.  The Lakota word for water; the Greek word for city.  There is hardly any private waterfront here.  Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, Nokomis, Harriet, Hiawatha, Minnehaha Creek, the Mississippi River: The big houses stare at these waters across public swaths of green through which meander slow parkways, bicycle trails, walking paths, and lush plantings of trees and shrubs, lovingly maintained by the parks department.  You move here for a job.  You are a young landscape architect and there is a deep legacy here.  In 1890 H.W.S. Cleveland laid out these 40 miles of waterside parkways.  In 1930 came Theodore Wirth, the parks-builder, who made the nation’s northernmost public rose garden, wild bird sanctuaries, sledding hills, swimming beaches.  His son Conrad, who grew up in a house in a park near Lake Calhoun, became director of the National Park Service in the 1960s and went on a building spree himself: visitor centers, trails, scenic overlooks: all you expect from National Parks today.  Conrad’s son Ted, who visited his grandfather often in Minneapolis, built his own firm in Montana and designed park systems for the world: Riyadh, Kuwait, Nigeria.  You are new here, and an anomaly.  Everyone is from here and few leave.  You walk the trails around Lake Harriet in 45 degrees in shorts and a tee-shirt.

Summer

You fall for a girl.  A blue-eyed Norwegian redhead.  A girl with a family who have lived here all their lives and have a cabin up north.  The natives all have cabins and have left the urban lakes for other lakes.  Minnesota.  Land of 10,000 Lakes.  10,000 shards of summer sky reflected on the ground.  Lakota for sky-tinted waters.  The lakes become grass-tinted as the temperature rises, choked with algae feeding on the phosphorous you pour on your cabin’s lawn.  You mow to the shoreline and dump sand for your beach on the reeds and arrowheads growing out in the water.  You break the silence once broken only by loon calls with the scream of Jet-Skis.  You campaign for a Constitutional amendment to forever protect your right to hunt, fish, and trap.  You sue the government to let you shoot wolves.  You marry the girl.  And the family.  You sit in traffic on Sunday afternoon on Highway 169 heading back to the city from Brainerd, your little boy, facing backward, unhappy, his lake-blue eyes squinched tight and soaking wet.  Then you sit in traffic on Monday morning and make plans for another weekend at the cabin in just five workdays.

Autumn

The summer construction season is ending and you attend grand openings.  The Walker Art Center, lightning rod for anti-NEA conservatives, is featuring Eiko and Koma: a Japanese couple lying naked in a gallery in a bed of feathers – for a month.  You sit politely and watch them move at glacial pace, then file out without a word.  You wander the halls of this giant steel cube, designed by Swiss architects Herzog and deMeuron to resemble a folded bit of paper cut through paper-snowflake style.  You watch the videos of how Yves Klein made his artworks: naked women bathing in International Klein Blue paint, then pressing themselves on canvases leaving the blue outlines of hips, breasts.  You stare into his untitled blue squares and are pulled inward.  Across town is the Guthrie Theatre, another grand opening, designed by Klein’s countryman Jean Nouvel.  It sits above the river, a cobalt hulk at the scale of the hundred-year old General Mills and Pillsbury grain silos that stored the flour that built this city.  You walk out on the skybridge, a cantilever stretching out toward the Mississippi River.  You think it an unnecessary extravagance but that it offers an incredible view.  The river rushes hundreds of feet below you, hemmed in by locks-and-dams and the ruins of original sawmill and flourmill races.  To your left the water slides down St. Anthony Falls, once the most quickly eroding waterfall in the world, now a concrete flume.  To your right the river curves from view through the gorge, the only place it is limited so tightly.  Mississippi.  Ojibwe for Great River.  The leaves are changing.  You are pretty far north, exactly half-way from the equator to the pole, and the summer light at 10 PM will soon give way to winter darkness at 4:30.  You flee the city one last time to take the dock out of the water, pick Honeycrisp apples, navigate a corn maze.

Winter

You marry a girl.  A girl with eyelashes long enough to catch snowflakes.  A girl who stays fashionable in winter: sweater, scarf, long coat, tights, chunky Sorel snowboots. You buy a 1200 square foot bungalow near a lake in the city and you don’t meet your neighbors until spring.  You move your car from one side of the street to the other and back, over three successive days, every time it snows, to let the plows clear the streets.  Every storm is compared to the “Great Halloween Blizzard of 1991.”  Your two-and-a-half year old son thinks a big lizard came to town last night.  The city around you is dark but alive, grumbling about the slush, the chill, but reveling in the new possibilities of skiing on the creeks, cuddling up near the heat of coffee shop hearths.  White Christmases are guaranteed.  Your father-in-law takes you ice fishing, something you always thought pointless and boring, and you find there’s a certain Zen-like peace to it.  The augur drills down into the lake to reveal a cylinder of blue, into which you drop your hooked minnow, weights, bobber, and you wait.  After hours interspersed by sips of whisky, handfuls of canned mixed nuts, bites of sandwich warmed in foil on the propane heater, your bobber plunges downward.  Your rod spins and you raise a crappie, speckled like a lake full of augur holes, cold and firm.  You kill it with a blow to its head and hold it in bare hands like a chunk of ice, then toss it out of the shack to freeze.  You learn that crappies taste better through the ice.  You notice that the heavens and earth have reversed.  The blue lakes of spring have iced and gone white.  The hazy hot cloudy sky of summer has gone crystalline blue.  Even married into this place, ice-caught crappie in hand, you will never be from here.  But you will find it hard to leave.

—Adam Regn Arvidson