Has Reading Become Passe?

Dad: What are you doin' today, son?
Son: Ehh....being bored.
Dad: Why don't you try reading a book?
Son: Pop, I said I was bored, not desperate.
B.C. comic strip, dated 8/13/09

I was trying to think of a way to tie in the above comic strip with a decent post about reading without having it turn into a major rant about the publishing industry. My first attempt started relatively decent enough, but by the third paragraph it had pretty much dive bombed into a temper tantrum about the publishing industry and the overall IQ of the general public.

So back to the drawing board I went. I was basically shooting blanks for about a week and a half, when I happened to notice one dull morning prior to going to work, a copy of a literary journal called Crazy Horse siting on my dining room table.

Bingo! Inspiration struck with the ferocity of a baseball bat (or for my non-American readers, a cricket bat) to the head. I'm gonna attempt to tie in the following topics: reading and the lack thereof, and literary journals.

If it works, it'll be a great post that will get you to say, "that was a very interesting observational post." If it doesn't, you'll get to witness first hand on how my exacting standards caused me to experience a paradigm shift.

If you ask the average person what they read (if anything), chances are that you'll get answers like: magazines, tabloids, newspapers, and the occasional pop culture book. If you ask the average person if they've read anything heavier, they'll probably say something like: "I read the latest {insert the latest hot author} and it was pretty heavy."

If you press and ask, "Do you read the latest from Glimmer Train?", more often than not you can hear the sounds of crickets emitting from the person's mouth. Which to me is about as normal as an answer that I'm gonna get.

When I was first starting out on this adventure called 'writing', the first thing I did was pick up a book called "The Novel & Short Story Writer's Market." One of the first pieces of advice that they give to aspiring writers is that they should enter writing contests.

Now back in 2006, I was a supremely over-confident writer of really crappy stories (seriously, my stuff was gar-bage), so what I did was enter all of my crappy stories into as many writing contests sponsored by literary journals that I could find (New Letters, Glimmer Train, Boulevard, Black Warriors and Crazy Horse, just to name a few). One particular bonus of the entry fee for a lot of these contests was that you got a few one year subscription to the journal.

To be honest with everyone, until I started writing not a single one of these fine journals was so much as a dust speck on my reading glasses. Why? Basically, I was probably like about 85% of the reading public and had no idea about what kind of story mags/journals were out there.

By early 2007, I had about eight subscriptions going. I really tried my best to read them from cover to cover, but eventually I gave up. Why? Because I felt, right or wrong, that most of the stuff that people were writing and having published was 1} way too literary for my tastes, and 2} felt like they were all formulaic. To me, it seemed like the people being published all had M.F.A.'s (that's Masters of Fine Arts for all you normal folk like myself who don't do educational alphabet soup on any kind of basis) and writing the same way (sort of like method acting).

If it sounds like I'm knocking these writers, I'm not. It's just that in my humble opinion, writing serious literary short fiction for a specialized readership and not trying to gain new admirers, really is an exercise in futility. To me, it seems that a writer, no matter what genre or type of fiction/non-fiction, should always be trying to expand his/her audience as much as possible.

Now, most of these literary journals that I had subscriptions to (and still do unfortunately), had some impressive pedigrees attached to them. Almost every single writer that I read had the following things in common: 1} M.F.A.'s; 2} They taught; 3} They won a slew of prestigious academic oriented writing contests. At least one journal turned out to be a semi-personal vehicle for the publisher. This is all well and good, but the average person is probably not going to be impressed with those kind of credentials. They want to be able to read stories that 1} provide a good escape and 2} will somehow in a small way, stick with them. They don't want to read stories that would require some analytical thinking on their part.

This begs the question: Are they any writers that can have feet in both worlds, the high end literary and the normal general purpose?

Note: I wrote this simply as an observational post on the state of reading today. No disrespect was intended, directly or indirectly, to anyone who is an actual answer to the above the question.