Eric,
Although I'm no longer officially a part of Irreantum (I had to step down a couple of months ago, simply because I've been so busy with raising my four kids and writing and teaching that something had to give--and unfortunately, that something was my post as fiction editor), I probably still know enough to answer most of your questions. Since neither Valerie nor Scott have signed on the discussion board yet, I'll take a stab at it.
First off, let me say how much I love Irreantum and how important I think it is, for two main reasons. One, it's a vehicle for new writers. It allows some of our most promising talent a place to publish and get noticed. Two, it's a place to celebrate our more established writers and enjoy some of the best poetry and short fiction and essays written by Mormons today. Although Dialogue and Sunstone both serve important purposes, I think that Irreantum is unique, and even though our circulation numbers still aren't very high, Irreantum's health and success is vital to the overall health and success of the AML. Also, my experience with the most recent Irreantum fiction contest, where we had 130 or so entries--and many of them were very good--reinforced my belief that Irreantum is filling an important need. There's a lot of talent out there to be encouraged and a lot of writers who deserve to be read.
So onto your questions:
Subscription-related:
1. I've heard the issues are behind schedule. How is this coming? I ask, not because I'm a member/subscriber, but because Irreantum is the most obvious benefit of membership and I'm leery about taking the plunge until I have faith in its health.
Answer: Valerie and Scott are doing their best to catch up and get Irreantum back on schedule. We published the poetry issue in early 2007 and the theater issue in mid-2007, and another issue is almost finished and should be out the door soon. Although I don't have a lot of details and specifics, I know that getting the magazine caught up and more reliably in subscribers' hands is a very important goal that the editors of Irreantum and the AML board are working toward. Although there are still some challenges ahead in getting the magazine on schedule, Irreantum needs subscribers like you--hopefully the next issue will convince you to subscribe.
Submission-related:
1. I was just looking at the website and I noticed the call for Readers Write and the necessity of them being on-topic. But I could find no topics.
Answer: There's a small chance that I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty certain that Valerie and Scott decided to do away with Readers Write. I think that had been the consensus--but they could have changed their minds. So I'm not sure about that one. But please send any submissions of poetry or fiction or essays to
editor@amlpubs.org. Also, the new address for the Irreantum website is
http://www.mormonletters.org/irreantum. (And I'm just wondering, too--the winners of the 2006 fiction contest are still on the home page, and the winners of the 2007 fiction contest are on the fiction contest page. I don't know who's in charge of the website, but the 2006 winners need to be taken down so as not to be confusing.)
2. This is a question broader than Irreantum, but of course you can only speak for yourself: I'm using Office 2007. For publishers I save copies of my work in 2003, but I wonder, do you take the new format? Any idea how other publishers are on this? It's not an urgent concern by any means--I'm just curious.
I can't answer that one. Sorry!
Editing-related:
1. I haven't been a subscriber for a few years now, but one reason I let my membership lapse was that I had wanted more fiction (and such) and less criticism. Was the balance based on what was actually submitted or was it purely an editorial decision? The poetry, as I recall, was excellent--on par with any other magazine I read regularly. I'm also curious what the balance between literature and the criticism thereof is like now, in more recent issues. The reason I feel this way is that I have much less difficulty finding criticism than I do in finding quality work in the first place--particularly short work.
Answer: Under Laraine, the magazine took a more academic turn. She was very interested in raising the magazine's profile as a place where top quality critical work was published. Although I respected that, personally I've always been more interested in Irreantum as a place to showcase creative work, particularly since we have many places where critical essays by/for/about Mormons are already published, but there aren't many (any?) LDS magazines beyond student lit mags at BYU and such where publishing top quality literary work is the primary mission. Although Dialogue and Sunstone do publish fiction and poetry, and I'm very glad for that, critical essays and nonfiction remain the focus. I would love to see Irreantum functioning as a true "literary magazine"--but then again, I'm a writer and not an academic. I'm sure there are academics in the AML who disagree with me and would like to see the magazine function as an academic journal, one with enough clout someday to be a place where academics can publish and be proud to put the credit on a vita. I, however, just like reading really good stories and poetry. There were a number of stories from the latest contest that were good enough to be published, and I hope that, going forward, Valerie and Scott trend more toward publishing fiction and poetry than academic articles. I think they are more interested in trending that way than Laraine had been--but I can't speak for anyone on editorial policy. This whole preceding paragraph is just my opinion, and one that doesn't carry much weight since I'm not on the editorial board anymore!
As far as submissions go, to be frank, Irreantum doesn't receive many submissions in the academic vein. Almost everything academic we've published in the last few years (that I'm aware of) has been solicited. We receive a lot more poetry and fiction--and the vast majority of the fiction we receive is in response to the annual contest. To be perfectly frank (again), the magazine had a difficult time recovering after Laraine's passing. Even before she passed, she had been planning on stepping down and there were a large number of submissions that hadn't received a response--many of them for a very long period of time. We tried our best to get things up to speed, but I'm sure there were writers who had submitted and never heard anything. Personally, I absolutely hated feeling like submissions were falling through the cracks, and I hope that, going forward, submissions will be responded to in a timely manner. I know it's one of the goals of the new Irreantum editorial team to be prompt and timely with submission responses.
So, to summarize, I am not an official mouthpiece of Irreantum magazine. I love it and loved working on it and struggled with my decision to step away from it--but I had to, primarily for the sake of my own writing (which I had very little time to do) and because I needed more time to dedicate to my kids. I respected Laraine and her vision a great deal, even when I disagreed with it, and I still miss her. I respect Scott and Valerie, too, as the new editors of the magazine today. I think that there is so much great work out there for the magazine to be publishing and I hope to see Irreantum succeed and flourish. So subscribe to Irreantum! Submit! Have faith in it!
(That just sounded like I was bearing my testimony of Irreantum. Maybe I was. So amen!)
