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storySouth is an online quarterly literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, and visual artwork, with a focus on the Southern United States. The journal also runs the annual Million Writers Award to select the best short stories published each year in online magazines or journals. Online means being connected to the Internet or another similar electronic network, like a bulletin board system. ...
Quarterly means once a quarter (i. ...
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. ...
Fiction (from the Latin fingere, to form, create) is storytelling of imagined events and stands in contrast to non-fiction, which makes factual claims about reality. ...
The Chinese poem Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain by Emperor Gaozong (Song Dynasty) Poetry (from the Greek , poiesis, making or creating) is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning. ...
A critic (derived from the ancient Greek word krites meaning a judge) is a person who offers a value judgement or an interpretation. ...
Essay, a short work that treats of a topic from an authors personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them. ...
Southern United States. ...
This article is in need of attention. ...
History and mission
storySouth (the initial lower-case s is a deliberate device) was founded in the autumn of 2001 by fiction writer and editor Jason Sanford. The magazine's poetry editor is Jake Adam York. While storySouth focuses on the traditional genre of southern literature, the journal generally attempts to expose the newest generation of writers from the American South. Southern literature (sometimes called the Literature of the American South) is defined as American literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region. ...
storySouth's online mission states:
- "storySouth's most important mission is to showcase the best fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that writers from the new south have to offer. Special emphasis is given to finding and promoting the works of promising new writers.
- In addition, storySouth aims to prove that the internet is not just a medium of flash and style; that excellent writing can attract attention without programming gimmicks and hard-to-read fonts. To this end, storySouth practices clean, simple web design."
The journal has published pieces on such prominent authors such as Forrest Gander and Charles Wright, along with historical figures like George Wallace, and has tackled topics ranging from the trivial to the sociological. Stories, essays, and poetry published in storySouth have been honored by the Chronicle of Higher Education's Arts and Letters Daily, selected for anthologies of best web-published fiction, and received other awards. Forrest Gander (b. ...
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. ...
Governor George Wallace (in front of door) standing defiantly against desegregation while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach at the University of Alabama in 1963. ...
Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education. ...
A number of new writers first featured in storySouth have gone on to get book deals with major publishers. While storySouth's fiction and nonfiction has been responsible for its considerable online influence, it is the poetry section which has drawn the most critical accolades.
Million Writers Award storySouth also runs the annual Million Writers Award, started in 2003, which honors the best online short stories of the year. The award has become one of the premier online literary awards and was named a Hot Site by USA Today. This article is in need of attention. ...
USA Today is a national American newspaper published by the Gannett Corporation. ...
Influence storySouth's growing influence in the publishing world was evidenced by a feature interview with Jason Sanford in the 2005 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market in which the role of the Internet and the influence of the Million Writers Award was featured.
Part of the growing influence of storySouth has been the sometimes combative nature of its founder. An essay of Sanford's that was published in several online venues, called "Who Wears Short Shorts? Micro Stories and MFA Disgust" [1], sent repercussions through the online literary community, as it ripped into the claimed incestuous nature of Master of Fine Arts programs and creative writing workshops. In one passage, Sanford shocked the sensibilities of the normally staid literary set with this charge: "That MFA programs have created a standard, bland style of writing shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. After all, no matter how many new MFA programs open up in this country, they remain a rather incestuous, similar lot. The average MFA professor is white, upper-middle class, and unacquainted with anything other than their little academic life. It is through their particular worldview lens that all MFA students pass through and hone their skills. Students who don't match these professors' ideas of life and writing either don't get into the programs or get their writings gutted from the inside out. In genetics, this type of phenomenon is called the Bottleneck Effect. That's where a small group of animals is cut off from the rest of their viable population and only breeds among themselves. This inevitably results in animals having less genetic diversity than their relatives who didn't get isolated in the first place." For alternate uses, see MFA (disambiguation). ...
By combining controversies such as this with a high standard for online literature, storySouth has established itself alongside other well-known southern literary journals as the Georgia Review and the Southern Review. Southern literature is defined as literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region. ...
The Southern Review is a publication of Louisiana State University. ...
Notable contributors Forrest Gander (b. ...
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. ...
Greg Downs (born November 22, 1971) is the author of the Flannery OConnor Award-winning short story collection, Spit Baths published in 2006 by the University of Georgia Press. ...
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