Uncategorized | April 14, 2004

Recently another editor passed me a manuscript she didn’t particularly care for, but felt obligated to pass because it was by a writer who has substantial credentials. Upon reading it I found that it was well-written, but the story seemed to revolve around some ideas that could be called quasi-Freudian at best. The story culminates when the main character masturbates with a childhood relic. From my experience, a decent cross-section of manuscripts we receive deal with and many times glorify sexual deviance. To compound this, many of these pieces do not deal with anything deeper than the immediate action or outcome of these acts. Our poetry editor, Bern Mulvey, says in his web editorial (5 Easy Ways To Lose A Poetry Contest) that the poetry department is not much different in this aspect. Apparently they occasionally get poems from “genitalia poets” that are, as you may have guessed, descriptions of the poets’ genitalia.

In every couple bundles, I read one of these stories, and I find that oftentimes they are written by published authors. However, in reading published TMR stories, I’ve found some that touch on sexual deviant ideas, but none that are based on them. I am far from reading all of TMR’s fiction, so I would like to pose this question to its readers: Do you feel TMR publishes this type of fiction, that people have that perception, or that these writers submit to us on a hit-or-miss basis? I’ll be interested to hear your opinions.