38 | The Writer • October 2019
LITERARY SPOTLIGHT
BY MELISSA HART INSIDE LITERARY MAGAZINES
J
ames McNulty, co-founder of the
literary organization Driftwood
Press, recalls with admiration a
contributing writer named Shane
Page who separates his paragraphs
with multiple spaces when he’s revis-
ing so that he can study each clearly
on its own.
“There’s so much attention paid to
each sentence and paragraph, and that
gets to me emotionally...seeing really
gorgeous writing,” McNulty explains.
Editors at Driftwood Press, a print
and online publication now in its sixth
year, look for beautifully crafted stories
and poems. All topics and genres are
welcome as long as the writing indi-
cates time spent pondering each sen-
tence and its effects on a reader.
McNulty urges potential contribu-
tors to look at their prose as if evaluat-
ing a poem. “In poetry, you think
about where lines break, where stanzas
break,” he explains. “A lot of writers
don’t think about language and craft.
They need to look closely at sentence
and paragraph structures and how
these contribute to executing the nar-
rative, to tone and pacing.”
Tone, editorial content
While poetry editors at Driftwood
Press consider lyrical poems, they
prefer narrative pieces like Julia
Levine’s “Ordinary Psalm with Assas-
sination and Slaughter” (Issue 6.1),
which begins:
“In that basement, before the
RCA console, she stood the
hissing iron on the board’s end,
away from my father’s white col-
lar, and wept.. .”Fiction editors lean toward literary
writing, with ideas presented in a com-
plex and nuanced way. “If a piece is
more content-driven, putting all its
attention into plot and none into craft,
then that’s not something we’re inter-
ested in seeing,” McNulty says.
He admires Nicole Zdeb’s “Honey-
comb Beach” (Issue 7.1), a short story
about the sexual awakening of two
young women on the beach. “One likes
the other, who picks up a dead turtle
and starts scraping it out,” he says. “It’s
grotesque and bizarre, and it brings out
these complex, compelling feelings
about loving someone while being
made uncomfortable by them. It’s a
beautiful story, told in just three pages.”Contributors
McNulty points to Susan Jardaneh’s
“The One You Love” (Issue 6.2) as the
type of fiction he likes to publish. “It’s
about a daughter dealing with her
mother’s illness, and the interesting
structural premise is that the story istold in reverse,” he explains. “This enliv-
ens the reading, as we get to see how the
mother’s illness first started presenting
itself toward the end of the story. It
plays with our conception of traditional
plot momentum; the structuring breaks
all our expectations of how a story
should evolve.” He also appreciates Joe
Totton’s “The Starling Killers” (Issue
6.2), about a father and son embroiled
in a difficult relationship and hunting
starlings in the wheat fields. “The son is
being forced to kill all of these starlings,
and he doesn’t want to,” McNulty
explains. “There’s this really gorgeous
imagery of the birds coating the trees,
then later of them raining down from
the sky. Both pull you into the story.”
He notes that the content of the two
stories couldn’t be more different – a
father and son hunting starlings, and a
daughter going through her mother’s
cancer experience. “But all of our sto-
ries have a similarity in that the writers
pay particular attention to each sen-
tence, to the crafting of really gorgeous
language,” he says.
Issue 6.1 includes a story titled “Ter-
minal Velocity,” by Claire Agnes, whose
work impressed editors so much that
they invited her to work as a guest edi-
tor on Issue 6.2 and then hired her on
permanently. The story begins:“Our last dinner as a family had
been at Pizza Peddler. It was our
Saturday night, post-Commu-
nion tradition. My mother liked
the grilled chicken salad and my
dad liked the cowboy burger
and Billy King. I liked Billy King
too. He always made Hershey’s
kisses appear underneath ourDriftwood Press
This 6-year-old journal seeks lyrical writing with a fine attention to detail.