If you are of a literary bent

Which I’m not.

I mean, I like to read. A lot. An unnatural and unhealthy amount.

But literary? No.

Nerdy. Bookish. Dorky.

Something more like that.

Which is why it’s no big surprise that I’ve never read a literary journal. Until now.

The feature article in this month’s Main Street Rag, a literary magazine out of my native NC, sums it up nicely – if you want to succeed as a writer, it helps to help other writers. Or, in more cliched terms, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Social networking, rubbing elbows. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Put your money where you mouth is.

Which is why I subscribed to my first literary journal. If I want to be included in such publications, I should read them.

The good thing about a collection of poems and short stories is that if you don’t like the one you’re reading, there will be another coming up in a few pages you’ll like better. Kind of like phases in young children: the throwing-food phase replaced by the showing-food phase. It’s always changing.

As it applies to this literary journal, it was all the good-table-manners phase (please, let that be a phase).

My favorite poem was Absence Makes the Heart Grow by Jeanne Julian, about the things you do when your significant other leaves and you have the house ALL TO YOURSELF.

The best of the prose, if you ask me, is Robert Perchan’s pieces on run-ins with the law. I’d read whatever else he feels like writing. And it’s his quote that titles this blog post, “…if you are of a literary bent.” Are you?

by Jessi Waugh