Guest Post: On Being One Space Among Many, Ranylt Richildis

To start things off here at The Wicked Writing Corner, we asked Ranylt Richildis, editor of the wonderful Lackington's Magazine, to talk to us about what it means to run a magazine and what it meant to her to create Lackington's. If you want to support the magazine, go here. Be sure to read some of their stories and admire the artwork that accompanies these strange and wondrous tales. The zine is named after James Lackington. The next Lackington's Issue, Cocktails, is scheduled for release in May/June.

UPDATE: Ranylt blogged about blogging here, so if you like a reading experience that's just a tiny bit meta, we got you covered.

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On Being One Space Among Many

By Ranylt Richildis

James Lackington (Wikimedia Commons)

Scroll through SFF Twitter and it’s all there: the challenges of publishing in an overcrowded and underfunded field. Editors, agents, and writers reliably dole out advice, often with fantastic and heartbreaking wit. Attend any SFF conference panel related to publishing, and you’ll get more of the same. So there’s no wisdom left for me to unearth about launching a short fiction magazine or putting together an issue of SFF tales. It’s been said, and likely said better than I could.

This is the thing about publishing—and writing. We like to believe our words or ideas are fresh, but of course they rarely are. Back in the day, the value of art didn’t rest on originality but on execution (Google “Amleth,” one of the most famous examples of this in the English-speaking world). But we’re still clinging to the column of Romanticism in 2020, and its idolized individual, and that can compromise our vision at times. Make us think we’re unique when we aren’t. Make us boastful.

When I launched Lackington’s in 2013, I dearly wanted to claim a unique vision. I vaunted a space where experimental, challenging, and prose-poetry tales got the welcome-mat rather than the side-eye. I understood those kinds of stories were being published elsewhere—that other SFF mags did run experimental and poetic pieces that were harder to place in more commercial venues. And yet that individualistic surge half-convinced me Lackington’s was different. I wonder if, in proclaiming the magazine’s mission, my words may have come off like an effacement of existing publications? I don’t want to glance back at that initial marketing push, because they probably did. The work our own magazine has done over the last 6 years has been effaced by the mission statements of newer venues, so that’s my comeuppance, I suppose.

If you’re lucky, as a writer, you’ve found a network of support among your peers. If you’re lucky as an editor or publisher, you’ve also found the same: each venue recognizing the good that others have done, and sharing in the progress (any damn progress) that publishing makes. Communitarianism is a finer goal than some elusive difference, and what you do is worth a hundred times anything you might tweet. Am I being a bit of a scold? I think I am. Am I preaching something novel? Not in the least, and other publishers know it. If there’s one truth about running an SFF magazine, it’s that lessons will be learned and humility acquired.

All of this to say: While Lackington’s isn’t the only market that welcomes off-template prose and structures, that reserves space for neglected voices from around the world, and that does its best to shield contributors from this sometimes-unkind industry, it’s always been our focus and it’s blazoned in our record (all this talk about the fallacy of difference, too, from an editor who hungers for the odd). As a reader, I enjoy transparent prose that gallops a plot from A to Z, but I love stylized prose and departures from the 20^th-century, three-act, hook-em-at-line-one model. Stories are more fascinating to me, and amaze me with their deftness, when they can grab a reader despite breaking those workshop rules. So to every iconoclast with a keyboard or cherished fountain pen, keep sending your untraditional tales our way (and to other magazines that feel the same). They stand a very good chance of being noticed.

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Ranylt Richildis is a Canadian writer, editor, and teacher. Her fiction has appeared in PodCastle, The Future Fire, and Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, among other SFF magazines and anthologies. Ranylt is the founding editor of Lackington’s Magazine, an online SFF venue devoted to stories told in unusual or poetic language. She tweets @ranylt.