The debate is raging (and continues to rage) across the pages of just about every lit-blog out there. Which debate? Oh, you know. THAT one. The one about the huge imbalance between the numbers of male and female writers featured in literary magazines and journals. Yeah. We’ve read the comments. All of them. In their hundreds.
Our take? Women are badly under-represented. Fact.
How do we fare here on > kill author? We’re doing okay — and better than some — but we rarely achieve a true fifty-fifty gender split. In five of the six issues we’ve published, female writers only accounted for between a quarter to a third of the contributors. In our worst showing — back in Issue Five — that fell to just 4 female contributors out of 21 names, but in our favor we did manage an almost unheard line-up of 9 women writers out of 16 in Issue Four.
When we’re looking through submissions, we’re not ticking the equality boxes. We never want to get to the stage where we’re doing that. All we’re looking for is fantastic, vibrant, visceral fiction and poetry — the kind of work that we believe has given this journal its very strong identity in such a short time. But as we begin setting aside the successful pieces for the next issue, we’re continually disappointed by how few female names are being added to the list.
We’ve questioned ourselves and what we do. Is it something in the character of > kill author that puts women off submitting their work? Does the fiction and poetry we publish seem especially testosterone-fuelled and masculine? We honestly don’t believe so. It got to the point where we initially planned to announce that Issue Seven — arriving in the first half of June — would be an ‘all-female’ issue, and that we would be accepting only submissions from female writers in the two months before publication. In the end, we decided against this course of action — mainly because doing a one-off ‘special’ wouldn’t solve the real problem. It would just be tokenistic. But also because, more realistically, we were unsure whether we’d get enough material together based on the current level of submissions from women.
Which means that as we head into the final two or three weeks before Issue Seven hits the web, we’re still very short of pieces by female authors, especially in fiction. We’ll be ashamed if the numbers remain as they are. You wouldn’t want to make us feel ashamed, would you?
So this is an urgent message to women writers out there: it’s time to find out what > kill author is all about — particularly by reading through some back issues — before acquainting yourself with our submissions policy. Once you’ve done those three things, we want to read what you’ve got to offer. We’ll be waiting impatiently.