tenderness in june 2020

by amelia seidel

Hey!

You found this post because you are on our website, cool! Maybe just perusing (awesome, welcome), maybe looking for an online piece or print book that we’ve published (wow literally thank you -- this is why we do what we do), or maybe you’re wondering about any declarations we’ve made since the current Black Lives Matter protests have begun. If you’re here for the latter, congrats, you found it. 

I say found because we won’t be tweeting this out. While it is so very important for organizations to publicize their social promises, I don’t think that your timeline would benefit from our personal broadcasting right now. I would rather spread and share other voices who have been doing this work for years, and let the words we choose to publish (retweet) be representative of what we believe in and are fighting for.

While tenderness is at the moment run by one cis white woman (two, Zoë is just on sabbatical), we recognize simultaneously that white silence does equate to violence and that it would be a distraction from the Black Lives Matter protests for us to take up any more space than necessary right now.

Moving forward, our mission doesn’t change because we absolutely fucking meant it when we said “tenderness is a space that was created to uplift the voices of LGBTQ and POC writers. we want to find ways to bring those writers closer to the center of the literary conversation. we want to find ways to get them paid. we want a better world. we’re trying to get to it.” 

We know that our masthead has no Black people. We aren’t going to proposition anyone for the sake of optics, because we don’t feel that is genuine. We will continue to invite guest readers who we know will treat every piece sent to us with complete tenderness and prioritize LGBTQ and POC voices. So we’re going to stay on the path we’ve been on because we still believe it’s the right one.

If there’s any misunderstanding, here’s a little cheat sheet for you:

Black Lives Matter

Black Trans Lives Matter

Black Disabled Lives Matter

Black Nonbinary Lives Matter

Black Queer Lives Matter

Love,
Amelia

opinions don't matter imo

by zoe blair-schlagenhauf

The only reason I have a right to say whether or not your poem can be on my website is because I paid $144 dollars for a domain. More candidly, Jo paid $144 for a domain because I didn’t have enough money for rent that month. As a writer I am new to the world of publication. I have only been quote-unquote seriously writing poetry for less than a year, and have literally been published in less than three literary magazines. The fact that I myself run a literary magazine is in some respects offensive. I have no idea what I’m doing. On a week to week basis, I decide what pretty illustration I will associate with what is the equivalent of someone’s heart and soul on paper, as well as whether or not we will publish it at all.

Regardless of how long I have been involved in this scene, I feel especially raw to its pitfalls. A lot of the time, I’m not sure if someone is publishing my work because they genuinely like it, or because they think I’m cute on the internet. No matter how alternative or rebellious poetry is, it becomes a pageant in the sense that the pretty people win.

All of this is really fucked up. The notion that we decide whether or not your work is relevant is fucked up. To me, poetry isn’t about who thinks it’s good, it’s about the person who took the time to hurt and to break and to be tender, and to have the courage to send an email to people they have never met before, telling them who they are. Even further, it’s about the dozens or hundreds or thousands of people out there who will be affected by that. Because we all want to feel a little less alone, if only for a moment.

To say that alt lit has become an establishment is bleak but true. Anything that sets out to upset the status quo will eventually become the thing it was trying to destroy. This is not ugly or even wrong, it’s just the way it is. At tenderness, when we publish work we are trying to curate an idea that fits within our mission statement, which is more than anything to spread the notion that breaking is beautiful, whether it is in your bones, your heart, or the establishment. We aren’t saying that what we’re doing is right, because every single time we send a rejection letter it feels anything but. We’re saying fuck what everybody else thinks, even us, and keep doing what you’re doing and fighting the good fight because that is the most tender thing you can do.

Let’s have a conversation about publishing and why a handful of people get to decide which words matter more. The bottom line is that ethically they shouldn’t get to decide. More often than not when reading submissions, Jo, Amelia, and I become more preoccupied with the moral dilemma of what a writer is saying rather than the actual structure of the piece. This has everything to do with who we are as people and nothing to do with your skills as a writer. We understand our work as an extension of ourselves, and we think it would be irresponsible to treat your work any differently. It’s about the writing, but it is about so many other things. It’s fucked up that I get to intake these variables and these personal attributes and decide whether or not they are enough, because our opinion matters just as much as anybody else’s, which equates to absolute zero.

The people who start small presses and literary magazines are presumably trying to do the same thing. The only reason we started tenderness is because of the inspiration our predecessors handed to us: publish the work that you want to see in the world. More than anything, we are looking for people who are trying, because we are trying too. Whether or not this is particularly punk, we want to create a space designed for people who give at least one flying fuck. We are here for the writers who run out of cigarettes and keep writing, we are here for the writers who are bleeding and crying and scream that sentiment into our inbox. Because all we have to know you by are our screens, and honestly that is not enough.

Whether or not you like that it rhymes, writing is fighting. And whether or not we like your work or publish it on our $144 domain, we want you to keep fighting. We want to clutch your hands or our hearts in our chest and pray that you keep breathing, if only to whisper the words of a poem under your breath in order to post it on twitter later, because I bet their domain cost that much at the start too.