38 | The Writer • March 2020
LITERARY SPOTLIGHT
BY MELISSA HART INSIDE LITERARY MAGAZINES
T
he door was locked.
The Simmons public
library was a melting pot of
the haves and have-nots, a
mixture of homeless people and the
wealthy older residents of the nearby
neighborhood.
Loud music filled the room, making
it hard to hear anything else.
All prose and poetry submissions to
The First Line in 2020 must begin with
one of these three sentences. David
LaBounty is founder and editor of this
20-year-old international literary quar-
terly with his wife, Robin, who coordi-
nates manuscripts. They’re fascinated
by how a mandatory first line show-
cases the variety of stories that emerge
from a single common sentence, and
how the restriction inspires creativity
when writers sit down to a blank page.
“I suffer from writer’s block,” he
admits. “I have three projects of my
own sitting on my desk staring at me,
ugly. I’m not motivated enough to fin-
ish them. If writers have a book or two
sitting around and they can’t get back
into them, often they’ll stumble across
us and write something that will get
them back into their own words.”
In addition to stories and poems,
The First Line includes short nonfiction
essays by writers reflecting on their
favorite first lines in published literature.
Tone, editorial content
LaBounty notes that after two decades,
he sees few submissions on topics that
strike him as “new.” That’s not a prob-
lem. “Someone may have written
about a topic 20 years ago, but new
writers can write about similar topics
The First Line
A mandatory first line inspires a wealth of creativity
at this 20-year-old magazine.because they bring truth and power to
an experience that will resonate with
readers today,” he explains. “There can
still be truth in a story about someone
with Alzheimer’s even if, as an editor,
you’ve read that story 1,000 times.
That story may impact someone else
who’s never read a story about some-
one with Alzheimer’s.”
He recalls an editor he knew who
refused to read submissions involving
zombies. “I thought, well, there are a
lot of zombie stories out there, but that
doesn’t mean that you’re not going to
get a zombie story that absolutely
knocks your socks off. As an editor,
you have to be open to everything.”
He tells potential contributors to
write what they want to read, not what
they think he wants to read. “But bewary of writing about anger or disap-
pointment with current events,” he
cautions. “People try and write out
their feelings in a story, which is fine,
but because an event has happened so
recently, you don’t always have the per-
spective to write about it. Some people
can do art from pain that’s current, but
it’s better to wait a little bit.”Contributors
Sela Ellen Underwood’s “Lambs to
Slaughter” appears in the Summer
2019 issue. The protagonist is a Chi-
nese-American teacher who’s been liv-
ing in Gansu Province for two years,
meeting foreign teachers who’ve
agreed to judge a secondary school
English speech competition with tragi-
comic results. It begins: