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THE WRITER'S DIRECTORY OF PERIODICALS

THE fourth printing of this Directory - which is constantly being revised and enlarged. began in THE WRITER for July, 1922. The information for it, showing the manuscript market and the manuscript requirements of the various publications listed, is gathered directly from the editors of the periodicals. Great pains are taken to make the information accurate and the Directory complete.

Before submitting manuscripts to any publication, it is advisable to secure a sample copy.

(Continued from February WRITER)

SUNDAY SCHOOL WORLD (M), American Sunday-
School Union, 1816 Chestnut st., Philadelphia,
Penn. $1.00. James McConaughy, editor; Arthur
M. Baker, assistant editor.

Uses articles based on actual experience, dealing concisely with all phases of Sunday-school work, particularly in the rural districts and smaller schools, accounts of new forms of Sundayschool activity and new solutions of old problems being particularly desired. The organization and equipment of a school, the work of a superintendent and other officers, methods of teaching, teacher training, securing the co-operation of the pupils, the influence of the school in community life, making the school a spiritual force, its continual extension and improvement, accompanied wherever possible by photographs or other illustrative material—all these and similar phases constantly need new treatment. Sets length limit at from 1,200 to 2,000 words, and pays, at a minimum rate of five dollars a thousand words, on the tenth of the month following publication.

SUNSET (M), 1045 Sansome st., San Francisco, Calif. $2.50; 25c. Joseph Henry Jackson, editor.

Devoted to the West- the new Westpreferring romantic fiction with a Western setting and dealing with young people. Does not want six-gun, or Wild West stories. Uses general articles, short stories, serials, and poetry, but no novelettes, plays, juvenile matter, humorous verse, or jokes. Sets length limits for short stories and articles at from 3,000 to 5,000 words and for serials at 40,000 words. Buys pictures, with full caption for the departments, "Interesting Westerners" and "Western Homes and Gardens," paying five dollars each. Buys photographs, preferring personalities, news and society pictures having Western slant, and pays, at a minimum rate of two cents a word, on accept

ance.

SUNSHINE (W), United Lutheran Publication House, 1228 Spruce st., Philadelphia, Penn. William L. Hunton, editor.

Uses very short and simple stories for young children, preferably with pictures. Sets length limit at 400 words, and pays on acceptance.

SUNSHINE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE (W), Editorial Department, Nazarene Publishing House, 2923 Troost ave., Kansas City, Mo. 40c. Mabel Hanson, editor.

Uses short stories and verse pointing a moral for very little children. Sets length limit at 600 words, does not buy photographs, and pays on publication.

ADDITIONS AND CHANGES

ART AND LIFE (M), Kalamazoo, Michigan. $2.50; 25c. Guy H. Lockwood, editor.

Does not buy manuscripts. Publishes cash art assignments, lessons and articles on cartooning, designing, illustrating, and chalk-talking, poetry, and jokes. Buys photographs.

BOOK REVIEW, R. R. Bowker Company, 62 West 45th st., New York. Rebecca Deming Moore, editor.

All material supplied by staff. Not in the market for outside material.

BOYS' COMPANION (W), 1716 Choteau ave., St.
Louis, Mo. 75c. A. Ruecker, editor.

A paper for boys of from ten to fifteen, using general articles, short stories, and serials, but no poetry, jokes, or plays. Sets length limit for articles at 1,500 words, and for single stories or chapters at 2,500 words, buys photographs only when submitted as illustrations for manuscripts, and pays, at a minimum rate of twenty cents a hundred words, on accepttance.

CHILDREN'S COMRADE (W), 1716 Choteau ave., St.
Louis, Mo. 50c. Miss Leota Diesel, editor.

A paper for little children under nine. Uses general articles and short stories, but no poetry, jokes, or plays. Sets length limit for articles at 800 words, and for stories at 1,500 words. Buys photographs only when submitted as illustrations for manuscripts, and pays, at a minimum rate of twenty cents a hundred words, on acceptance.

EVANGELICAL TIDINGS (W), 1716 Choteau ave., St.
Louis, Mo. $1.00; A Ruecker, editor.

A paper for young people from the age of sixteen upward. Uses general articles, short stories, and serials, but no poetry, jokes, or plays. Sets length limit for articles at 1,500 words, and for stories and chapters of serials at 3,000 words. Buys photographs only when submitted as illustrations for manuscripts, and pays, at a minimum rate of twenty cents a hundred words, on acceptance.

CONTINUED ON INSIDE BACK COVER

CAN AUTHORS' MONTHLY FORUM

Volume 39

BOSTON, March, 1927

The Ingenious Mind

By EUDORA RAMSAY RICHARDSON

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HE says Stevenson,

Number 3

est circulation in the world. Uncle Sam's

"Tu ingenious mind,mething it clown; ostal business uses up the better part of an

right ought to do, does something else. But the relief is temporary."

He was referring, of course, to writers, who between the two definitions of happinessunimpeded energy and remorseless idlenessfall upon rather shameful compromise. The writer's ingenuity, as we all know, is employed not merely upon plot, character, and complication but in excusing work undone. It is the ephemeral quality of the relief afforded, however, that urges us to lay aside excuse-making and court the keys of our typewriters.

Still, one wail in deafening unison goes up from those who write and from those who long to write. Pruned of its variations, the cry is simply this: "We have no time. Scores of interruptions come to entice us from the wooings of the muse." In our Writer's Club here in Richmond the author of a best seller and of a dozen other successful books has found it hard to resist the entreaties of organizations to accept office. Our most delightful humorists compose two-thirds of the state board of motion picture censors. A satirist, a poet, an essayist, a short story writer claim that newspaper work is grinding down the keen edge of their genius. The selling of farm implements has plowed deeply into the time of a man who has sold to the magazine that boasts the larg

other writer's day. Teaching has sapped the creative urge of a woman who thirty years ago according to first-hand information wrote with fine promise. And problems of a culinary and parental nature are engrossing minds that might better be employed with fictional complications. We could be great writers if we had time for the full development of our powers!

So we lay to our souls the comforting unction that we are victims of the age in which we live. Indeed our art is a peculiar one. We must have mood; we must have inspiration; we must have leisure and quiet; we do have temperament, and that must be respected by the ordinary mortals among whom we live. So if we do not write, it is not our fault. Circumstances over which we have no control have prevented the flowering of our genius. There is many a fastidious kinsman of Bret Harte in our midst who because of improper light and heat, maladjustment of furniture and poor writing materials calls off the day's work. If we had only lived in another age, we might have been worthy descendants of Homer, Virgil, or Shakspere!

Suppose, however, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not writing was ever accomplished with ease, we stop for a moment

and compare our problem with that of others who have achieved literary preeminence. It might be just as well to skip the day when the poor man could not afford to write unless he found a wealthy patron who would supply food and raiment. Because biography is of comparatively recent development and autobiography a disease only just reaching its most virulent stage, our discussion will be executed with less difficulty if confined to the writers who have suffered in the last hundred years or so. Between loving and singing it is probable that even the burning Sappho had her share of domestic upheavals, over which the centuries have hung their gracious curtain. If the philosophy of the untidy Socrates had been of the sort to be committed to papyrus leaves within the realm of the immaculate Xantippe, Athens would likely have been spared the necessity of administering the fatal hemlock. It is, moreover, a very safe wager that Ann Hathaway's household often made composition difficult for the immortal William. Yet all for the want of a record the tale can not be told.

In the nineteenth century, however, we find the biographer plying his trade; and our fond suspicion that even the greatest geniuses had obstacles to surmount and by-paths to avoid becomes a blessed reality. The writer's interruptions, while matters more or less of invention, bear no twentieth century patent. Only a few fortunate souls like Byron and Alan Seeger can have their careers cut into by Crimean skirmishes and world wars. The rest complain, even as you and I, of the petty annoyances that sometimes merely sidetrack but more often reduce us to a state of gibbering idiocy.

letters. Poor writers! How they have suffered from every ill under the sun! George Eliot, frail from childhood, seems rarely to have been free from a headache, varying, of course, in degrees of severity.

"I am always a croaker, you know," she writers to one of her friends, "but my ailments are of a small kind, their chief symptoms being a muddled brain, and as my pen is not of the true literary order which will run without the help of brains, I don't get through so much work as I should like."

Everyone knows the story of Mrs. Browning's fifteen years in bed. Though Stevenson's triumph of mind over matter has become a Sunday School classic, surely in the light of his achievement, it bears repetition. This historian, essayist, poet, critic, and story writer perhaps in his entire adult life never was really well. There were times, of course, when he was not permitted to write, long periods when he wrote only two hours in the morning and one in the afternoon.

"In fourteen years," he writes George Meredith in 1893, "I have not had a day's real health, and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed and written out of it, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weariness."

During several prolonged and serious illnesses Sir Walter Scott was quite as indomitable as Stevenson. The "Bride of Lammermoor," "Legend of Montrose," and almost all of "Ivanhoe" were dictated from the author's couch. Scott had at the time two amanuenses, William Laidlaw and John Ballentyne. Though he was deeply attached to both, he seems to have found Laidlaw a source of distraction more real than his own illnesses. While "John" kept pen to paper without interruption, "Willie" entered with such zest into the interest of the story as it flowed from the author's lips that he could not suppress exclamations of surprise and delight - "Gude keep us a"! "the like o' that!"-"Eh, sirs, eh, sirs!'- which to say the least did

Of the many distractions, illnesses, social obligations, and economic pressure easily take the lead. It has just been borne in upon me that a considerable chunk of the world's literature was written by invalids of the real or Freudian variety. If you are uninterested in personal diagnoses and the recital of ailments, don't read a collection of author's

not promote dispatch, but which the amiable author endured with patience.

The story of writers' physical disabilities, too gloomy for pursuance, I should not have mentioned at all except for the stimulus it gives us to write straight through the ailments which could be turned into pretty enough excuses for idleness. Perhaps the morning headache and the after dinner weariness are but inventions of a subconscious mind eager to protect us from the effort we should rather not make.

But if illnesses are frequently imaginary, certainly social obligations are not. Who can gainsay the demands made upon us by a social order more complex than any other the world has ever endured? Perhaps writers of ages gone were engaged in pursuits of another sort than ours, but we share with them a homesickness for days that are no more. Listen to the words of the poet Horace singing in the literature-promoting days of Augustus Cæsar:

"Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
Tills the few acres which his father tilled,
Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold."

Personally I am not at all sure that the lot of our sires or of their wives was easier than ours. Indeed the accounts of domestic interruptions have a flavor that seems to us quite modern. If, because of poor transportation facilities, guests were fewer, their visits were longer; if servants were more plentiful, labor saving devices were scarcer; if children required less attention, there were more of them. Emerson was not far wrong when he worked out his pleasant law of compensation. I venture without fear of convincing contradiction that the Marthas of today are no more or less cumbered than they were in the slower moving era of Queen Victoria.

Jane Austen, we gather from the little we are able to learn of her, was a domestic soul. The erratic Charlotte Brontë, interrupted by poverty, by delayed education, by positions as teacher and governess, by duties her

father's blindness and her sisters' ill health imposed, worked doggedly upon "Jane Eyre" even while the manuscript of the "Professor" journeyed to and from the publishers.

In her teens George Eliot became the family housekeeper and later her father's nurse and constant companion. She was thirty when Mr. Evans' death brought relief from the thousand uncongenial tasks that engrossed her, but the years of her youth had been spent in study and in translating difficult German books into English. In 1839, when only eighteen, she wrote to her friend, Miss Lewis, "I have emerged from the slough of domestic troubles, or rather, to speak more clearly, 'malheurs de cuisine,' and am beginning to take a deep breath in my own element, though with mortifying consciousness that my faculties have become superlatively obtuse during my banishment from it."

During her father's illness, ten years later, she wails, "My life is a perpetual nightmare and always haunted by something to be done, which I have never time, or the energy, to do. Opportunity is kind, but only to the industrious, and I, alas, am not of them."

Another ten years elapse, and we see her writing to Miss Hennell, after life with Mr. Lewes had become a story of happy industry, longing for a servant "who will manage without incessant dogging;" and to Mrs. Bray she expresses the wish that she were not "an anxious, fidgety wretch and could sit down content with dirt and disorder."

Finally when domestic problems had reached solution, correspondence became arduous, friends were more exacting, and time was still elusive. "Writing notes," she complained to Mrs. Peter Taylor, "is the crux of my life. It often interferes with my morning hours (before one o'clock) which is the only time I have for quiet work." In the latter days she writes, "Only by renouncing all social intercourse but such as comes to our fireside can I escape sacrificing the chief objects of my life."

But for Scott there was no escaping the stream of visitors who enjoyed the genial

host and the baronial hospitality of Abbotsford. According to Lockhart, his son-in-law and biographer, Scott, when his prosperity was at its height, entertained as many persons of distinction as the most princely nobleman, and indeed entered into the traditional festivals of the Scotch countryside as became a laird. For a man turning out an average of twelve volumes a year, the duties of host must have been terribly exactly — as indeed the records testify that they were. During the summers that Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart spent near Abbotsford, Scott used to slip away from his guests before breakfast, ride Sibyl Gray to his daughter's cottage at Chiefswood, take possession of his daughter's dressing room and undisturbed write through the entire morning.

Rare is the author who has for the sort of writing that he loves best the interruption of neither literary hack work nor some other pot-boiling job-certainly during the years that he is getting established. Almost without exception, the greatest writers while serving their apprenticeships in some form of journalism have complained of the grind that threatened to kill the creative impulse. But the real impulse may be known by its tenacious vitality. George Eliot, with no time for creative work, read to her invalid father such books as would be of future use to a writer and took a dose of mathematics each day to keep her brain from growing quite soft. Stevenson, ill unto death, writes to his mother, "I work, work, work, and get nothing, or but little done; it is slow, slow, slow; but I sit from four to five hours at it and read all the rest

of the time." Looking now upon the four feet of buff buckram comprising my set of Stevenson's complete works, I am impressed anew with the cumulative power of steady effort. Marion Harland, becoming the wife of a country pastor after having made a successful step in authorship, turned temporarily to household matters for the themes of her books. Amelia Barr, junketing about the country, managed to prepare with some degree of patience for the day when there would be the chance to write. The man whose studies of international politics, appearing almost annually, are considered highly authoritative, told me that to supplement his income he found it necessary to do daily syndicated articles and to give Chautauqua lecture courses, reducing, of course, the time that he may spend upon the work he thinks most worth while.

But why pile up instances? We are all reading the lurid stories with which les arrivés - from Hergesheimer to the Norrises — are filling the popular magazines. I believe that without further testimony I can deduce my conclusion. We of the ingenious minds write if the urge is strong enough, no matter how numerous the interruptions - and if it is n't, we manufacture beautiful and plausible excuses with which now to regale our friends and later our grandchildren. After all, perhaps Cabell is right in saying that the literary artist writes to divert himself. If in inventing excuses he finds adequate diversion, is he not cleverer than those of us who serve the stern taskmaster?

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