A PANK Submission Reader (Court Merrigan) Speaks

As a reader, I don’t have editorial control at PANK; I can only suggest.  Roxane has accepted a couple pieces now that I wouldn’t have, thus delineating the Land of Editors from the Land of Readers.  However, Roxane has not declined a piece I felt strongly about, so I feel like our tastes mesh to some degree, and that the common knitting is a shared understanding of what constitutes superlative writing.  More simply, I hope it shows I have some taste.

But I wonder: what is the standard?  Do we at PANK seek to have words as good as those in, say, Necessary Fiction or Word Riot or Storyglossia?  Or do we aspire to the university literary magazines – Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Subtropics?  Is the bar yet higher– The Paris Review, say, or that penultimate arbiter of literary tastes, The New Yorker, and writers like Lori Moore and Brad Watson and George Saunders and Chimamanda Adichie?  Do we aim higher still, the standards of the dead, Hemingway and Nabokov and Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver and (here I reveal fully my tastes) Nagai Kafu?  The world already holds stories by these great writers. What does PANK, or any magazine, contribute if it cannot bring equally great work into the world? Does it even make sense to have this hierarchy?  I don’t know, but it seems to me that we have one, whether we like it or not.

I have struggled a lot with this, and I’ve concluded this: if the stylistic fireworks don’t make me shiver, then a story had better tell a damn good story.

There are always more stories to tell.  Even if there are only three or seven or thirty-six plots, we will never run out of stories, nor will we tire of hearing them.  I know this because it’s what my three-year old says to me every night at bedtime–tell me a story, Daddy.

(If I have less to say about poetry, which I also read at PANK, it’s because I feel less confident evaluating it.  What I look for is an emotional punch, something to smack me on the nose, even if kindly.  Lines that are too abstract or too personal to the writer, that emanate from a private universe we can do little more than glimpse, are unlikely to move me.  Give me a handhold in your world and I’ll go along for your ride – and I think readers will, too.  My view of poetry may be intensely naïve, and if any poets would like to disabuse me of my notions in the comments below, I would be very glad to discuss this with you.)