Dialogue fiction submissions

A post by Jennifer Quist.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has been changing in 2019, including bringing on a foreigner as the new fiction editor. That’s me. None of the fiction I’ve been curating will appear before Spring 2020 which gives me time to read plenty of submissions. Please send me something. Whatever you’re working on, read it again, sleep on it, and send it in.

I have been delighted by the pile of submissions I inherited from the previous editor, even by work that doesn’t suit the venue and won’t be published in Dialogue. Don’t ever think editors pass on work because they don’t like it. I once read a 110,000 word fan-fiction of an anime I’d never watched because it was written by a beloved teenaged family member, and I liked that. Believe me, I like just about everything. But so far, I’ve accepted for publication just about nothing.

So what are we looking for in our fiction for 2020? Something new and true (but not as in non-fiction, of course). Any genre will do. To save us some awkwardness, allow me to explain a few types of stories we get that are lacking in both newness and true-ness. Here’s hoping these words of caution can be taken as opportunities. Beware when sending us the following kinds of stories:

1)      American man has lost touch with the institutional church since getting home from his mission but his mind and heart are in the right place. He’s wondering if he’s transcended his old religious practice, isn’t sure but thinks he might have outgrown going through the motions. The reader follows him around his daily life to see the ennui in action as he comes to discover that he still doesn’t know. Though there is nothing wrong with this scenario, it’s not new. We’re super-saturated with it. Presented in a fresh, creative way this story might feel new again, but I haven’t seen it yet, so proceed carefully.

2)      American man gets help with a spiritual dilemma from a manic pixie magical minority character—gay, trans, non-Anglophone, etc. Even when the magical character is written with a gritty backstory, they usually don’t have much of an inner life beyond an interest in the man at the centre of the story, and they make doing the heavy lifting in the man’s process of self-discovery look easy, which emotional labour never is. This is delicate terrain ranging over vulnerable populations where the utmost care for their humanity, even as fictional characters, is required. Otherwise, it’s not true. We still see plenty of standard manic pixie dream girls too. I recommend writers ask themselves if the women and minorities they write have any dimension other than as partners for American men, and if not, is it artfully acknowledged, somehow, that these male characters’ shallow concepts of others are insufficient?

3)      All of that said, gender flipping is not a problem in and of itself, especially since women and non-cisgender people have had to write from male points of view in order for their work to be considered non-niche for ages. Hooray for people who attempt to take on someone else’s point of view and write it with a rich and believable inner life. We will continue to enthusiastically read and publish stories written by authors writing from points of view other than their own. Where this goes wrong most often in our submissions is when men write from the woman’s point of view, but she is a woman who is not like other girls. Apart from her, the story’s other women are a bunch of breeder ewes. This is neither realistic nor representative. Be aware of how easy it is for a female point of view which pits her against the rest of her peers of her gender to read as benevolent sexism, which is neither new nor true.

I can say without exaggeration that each and every submission I have read this year has been submitted by a man. I suspect this may be due to Dialogue having to compete for contributors with fine venues like Exponent II and Segullah. Please don’t forget about us, non-man writers. We would love to see your work.

[And please submit your stories, poems, and essays to Irreantum as well!]