Almost twenty years ago, I was a young assistant editor working on book excerpts, short stories, and essays for Ladies’ Home Journal. The older editors complained that times were tough, that magazines were folding, that editors could hardly make a living. All true — the magazine recession started a year or two before the early-nineties recession.
Still, that was a golden time for fiction. Every month, a short story or novel excerpt showed up in the well or in the back pages of LHJ. And not just icky mass-market types like Danielle Steel. LHJ ran stories from both literary unknowns and big names: Sue Miller, Bobbie Ann Mason, Elizabeth Berg, Marianne Gingher, Anne Tyler, Anne Rivers Siddons, Amy Tan, Allan Gurganus. Sometimes the stories were what we called women’s-mag fiction, shorthand for a story about a woman at a turning point, who goes through or over that turning point or change in a way that surprises her. But not always. Allan Gurganus’ story was about an angel who falls to earth in an old woman’s backyard, and the angel lets her touch him. (I think. Will have to look for that story.) And in my memory, there was a ton of fiction getting published — novels, short-story collections, not to mention the short stories running every month in lots of other big, mainstream magazines.
My kingdom in those days was the slush pile, the mountain of paper-clipped unsolicited stories that I could never get to the bottom of. But those writers (not the crazy ones, who wrote about receiving alien transmissions through their dental fillings) actually had a chance of getting published, and getting paid a lot for a story — I passed along some of those stories every week to higher-ups, with my little reader’s note.
Now mainstream magazines are thin, and laying off people, and disappearing one by one. The conventional wisdom used to be that you could sell an ad against almost anything — health, beauty, food, psych articles — just not fiction, but magazines were still willing to publish fiction, because readers liked to read. Along the way, calculus must have changed to “no one wants to read short stories in magazines anymore; they want short/quick/helpful lists and charts, not long, slow, not particularly helpful short stories.”
I can’t really imagine going back there, to a time before the Internet, when half the editors were frightened of computers. A time when there were far fewer literary mags, writers’ conferences, MFA programs, or online ventures. A time way before Kindle. But even so, I miss those days.