A literary magazine is a periodical that publishes new creative writing — mostly poems, short stories, and essays — by many different writers in each issue. Some also run photography, art, interviews, or reviews. Most are small. A typical issue might carry work from thirty or forty contributors, chosen out of thousands of submissions, and reach an audience of a few hundred readers. That ratio sounds bleak, but this is how nearly every working poet and fiction writer gets started, and it is how new writing has circulated for the past two centuries.
This site is a useful specimen to poke at. Dual Coast Magazine was a general literary journal published by Prolific Press. It ran poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography, released its issues in print, posted the individual pieces online, and eventually closed to submissions. The archive stayed up: a few hundred pieces, 160 of them poems, all free to read. So the examples below are not hypothetical. You can click through and read them.
What literary magazines publish
The staples are poetry and short fiction, from flash pieces of a few hundred words up to stories of five or six thousand. Creative nonfiction is the third leg: personal essays and memoir written with a storyteller’s tools rather than a reporter’s. Many magazines also publish photography or visual art, and some make room for oddities. Dual Coast printed a humor section and, at least twice, a recipe.
What they generally do not publish: novels, journalism, how-to articles, or anything written to sell something. The unit of a literary magazine is the short, self-contained piece, and each issue is an anthology of them by people who mostly have never met.
Journal or magazine?
Writers use “literary magazine,” “literary journal,” “lit mag,” and “review” almost interchangeably, and you will save yourself confusion by treating them as synonyms. To the extent there is a difference, “journal” leans academic (publications housed at universities tend to prefer it), while “magazine” sounds more general-audience, and “review” is simply a traditional name that stuck (The Paris Review publishes far more fiction and poetry than reviews). The names on the mastheads never sorted into tidy categories. Dual Coast called itself a magazine and behaved like a journal, and nobody minded.
Print, online, or both
For most of their history, literary magazines were print objects: perfect-bound paperbacks or stapled chapbooks, sold by subscription and passed around. Print still carries a certain weight with writers. But print runs are small and expensive, so the last two decades pushed most magazines toward one of three models: print only, online only, or a hybrid.
Dual Coast was a hybrid. Issues came out as paperbacks through its publisher, and the individual pieces were posted here one at a time. The hybrid model has a quiet advantage that this site demonstrates: the work stays findable. A print run ends up on a few hundred shelves. A posted poem can be read by anyone, years later, for nothing. That is why the archive still gets readers long after the magazine stopped producing issues.
How submissions and reading periods work
Since half the people who look up literary magazines are writers wondering how to get into one, here is the general shape of it. Magazines open a reading period, often a few months out of the year, and accept work through a submissions manager or an email address. The convention is three to five poems or one story per submission. Response times run from a few weeks to the better part of a year. Most magazines allow simultaneous submissions, meaning you may send the same poem elsewhere at the same time, provided you withdraw it if it gets taken. Payment is usually a contributor copy or a small honorarium; a minority pay more. Rejection is the default outcome for everyone, including writers with long publication records, and editors mean it when they say it is not personal. An issue has thirty slots and three thousand candidates.
None of this applies here anymore: Dual Coast is closed to submissions and is not reopening, so nothing on this site is asking you to send work. Writers looking for open markets can check current listings in directories like Duotrope or the Poets & Writers database.
What happens when a magazine goes quiet
Most literary magazines live fast. Funding dries up, editors graduate or burn out, and the average lifespan is short. When a magazine ends, its published work faces one of three fates: the site vanishes and the work with it, the domain lapses into limbo, or the archive is kept online on purpose. The third option is the least common and the most useful.
Dual Coast took the third path. Every piece the magazine published remains readable, and every writer keeps a working publication credit: the contributor index lists all 205 of them, each with a page collecting their work. For readers, an archive like this is a free shelf: several hundred poems and stories with no paywall and no ads for miracle supplements between the stanzas.
The fastest way to understand what a literary magazine is, though, is to read some of one. Skip the definitions and start with our shortlist, poems worth reading from the Dual Coast archives, or open the poetry section and pick a title you like. That is the whole trick. These magazines only ever existed to put a stranger’s poem in front of you.
This page and the poem shortlist above are two of the guides collected on the guides page.
