HINT: We don’t call it slush.
Every new literary magazine or zine is created for a reason: sometimes they function as a personal or community showcase, sometimes as a portfolio or idealogical calling card, and sometimes, our time, they are meant as medicine. Penny is here to disrupt your everyday with a small dose of intelligent difference. Or, if the idea of medicine freaks you out, you could say it’s like stepping into a many-roomed museum of concentrated thought for a few minutes whenever you please.
The idea began as a personal one. When I was younger, I had the privilege to attend a college filled with fantastically intelligent people, but before I got there I spent time as a couch-surfing high school dropout who couldn’t get into hairdressing school because I didn’t even have a GED. I was a card-carrying member of knowing what it was like to be on the outside looking in, and then I slipped in through an unlocked door (aka Cornell University). Years later, when I was getting my masters for creative writing in London, I felt the warmth of being in a room full of writers. It was a place where admitting that you’d studied architecture, aerospace engineering, old norse, design, computer science and anthropology was met with approving interest and not polite unease; in the world of art and literature, curiosity and experimentation are positive forces. Penny was created to spread the warmth of that room full of writers to any of you who are curious and up for a challenge, and is committed to curating prose and illustration by artists from every section, cross-section and intersection of human society.
While it’s a happy thing to say you want to find new writing and illustration from people with a variety of experience and viewpoints, actually doing so is quite hard. A lot of people with talent don’t have time to develop their writing, or a support network of other writers to give them feedback, or they come from a place, physically or mentally, that has made them believe no one wants to hear from them. That’s why we ask for prose submissions between 500 and 2500 words: it’s long enough to be meaningful, entertaining and thought-provoking for the reader, but also short enough for experimentation or just trying to express yourself while you have three jobs. Within the umbrella term of ‘prose’ we include fiction, creative nonfiction and prose poetry.
Numbers-wise, we are looking for the most amazing things we can to publish, and so far that has come to about 2% of our submissions.
Penny is ‘a collaborative zine of illustrated prose’. We call it collaborative because each issue is the product of over 40 voices coming together. Six of these voices are our submissions readers. They go by such names as Aparna Datey, Jack Feerick, Yadira Lopez, Maeve MacLysaght, Marissa Sammy and Mitucami Mituca. They have such jobs as newspaper journalist, comics artist, teacher of architectural design, secretary at a mental health clinic, proofreader and illustrator. Together they widen the experience of the editors at Penny. I think the readers at Penny are a unique bunch: they’re the type of people who show show up and make a community. They read every piece submitted as a blind submission and then vote on whether to accept the piece or not, as well as leave comments for the editors. The comments they leave go something like this:
This reads like Hemingway if his male characters weren’t always such assholes. An exquisite little slice and it perfectly captures that moment when you’re so rattled and consumed with a movie that you need to ground yourself.
My only suggestion would be to have a careful copyeditor watch tense. Otherwise, I love the spiraling chant-like progression
It’s a cute story, though I can’t shake the feeling that it’s the kind of tale you’d read in a children’s text book or inside a standardized test.
Not great, not terrible. Vivid sensory imagery, clear through-line.
A touch jumbled in places, but it’s got a good feel for itself and even though the ending’s predictable you still enjoy getting there.
This submission cuts off mid-sentence, and I’m not quite sure if that’s an error or a stylistic choice. But either way, ugh, a story about an asshole white guy exploiting a woman of colour. I’m tired.
Chilly and weird in the best of ways. Also, I recognize my elderly parents in this, which is a whole new layer of chills.
There was a sense of playfulness, with a irreverent hint of inevitability. I enjoyed this read.
Sweet and poignant character sketch with good dialogue. But predictable…..
Not a perfect story, and wears its T.C. Boyle influence pretty strongly. But it is strange and relentless and its voice is careful and controlled. The author knows exactly what s/he’s doing.
And so on…
Each piece submitted is read by three readers in the first round of reading. Every month, the top-voted stories are sent to a second round of voting where everyone on staff reads the submissions and votes once more. If we’re lucky, we then get to publish our favorite pieces.
We are currently accepting submissions, and you can find our guidelines here. We left the door unlocked.
Kate Thomas Wood, Editor
