Year: 2024

As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve hit personal records for the most pieces of writing submitted in a year (75 as of Dec. 2) and the most pieces accepted (eight, so far). With a few dozen stories currently in the hands of journals across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., I’m hopeful I’ll hit double digits by the end of the year.

Basically, when it comes to getting my babies out in the world, I’ve become the literary equivalent of a cod fish, known for producing millions of eggs. They follow the strategy that if you spread enough of these things around, at least a few will survive. Some writers are much more selective, submitting their work slowly and focusing only on the ideal markets, in terms of exposure, prestige and payment. You could say they’re following a primate’s selective mating strategy.

If I had the track record, credentials and connections to be a literary primate, I’d be one. But that’s not an option for most of us. I believe that in the age of online literary submissions — which allow anybody to submit anywhere at any time and often with no cost — wide dissemination of submissions is the approach you have to take unless you have achieved a level of fame and prestige that opens doors for you. I find markets on Chill Subs, via the Substack page Sub Club, and on Twitter, where magazines or anthologies will often announce temporary submission openings (better still, free openings), and I pounce quickly. I have a number of stories and non-fiction pieces ready to be submitted on a moment’s notice when I find a place that looks like a potential home.

In the old days of mailed paper submissions, the expense and inconvenience of printing and copying manuscripts, stuffing self-addressed reply envelopes inside and affixing the necessary postage meant that literary magazines dealt with only a small fraction of the submissions they do today. Today, a moderately selective journal you’ve never heard of will publish one to two per cent of the submissions it receives. A prestigious journal, the kind whose writers often end up in best-of-the-year anthologies, will be an order of magnitude harder to get into. So the way to get your work published (aside, of course, from working on your writing and developing a unique voice and all that) is to send it out everywhere.

In addition to submitting to many different markets, I’ve submitted many different kinds of writing. Here’s my 2024 in successfully submitted stories and essays.

March

An odd little memoir piece (titled 9th & Hennepin) about working late nights for a small-town newspaper turned up in Major 7th Magazine, an online journal featuring writing with links to music.

An essay on literary diversity initiatives and discrimination (titled A Likely Story: The Diversity Myth Consumes the Canadian Literary Scene) was published by C2C Journal, an online magazine focusing on politics and culture. At the time it was published, in a journal funded by the conservative Manning Foundation, I was a little worried that the essay would hurt my standing in the literary world. But now that many of my fellow centrist liberals are admitting that left-wing culture-war overreach on race, gender, Palestine, crime and other issues helped elect Donald Trump, maybe I can admit to writing this without becoming a pariah.

April

Flash Fiction Forum, a California-based online series of flash fiction events, had me read a short humour piece riffing off Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word short story (“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) There’s no copy online, but hey, I got paid $25 US for 200 words. In the 21st century literary world, that’s amazing.

October

Erato Magazine, an international online magazine with an Ireland-based editor, published my short story I Know You, a first-person narrative told by a cynical, decadent charmer hiding out on Haida Gwaii an archipelago off the northern British Columbia coast.

November

A New York-based online magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, published my satirical story @vanlifewithJosh&Siobhan, about a pair of influencers travelling to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan to create inspiring content.

Saddlebag Dispatches, a U.S. magazine dedicated to fiction and non-fiction about the old West, selected my story Clay Allison’s Girl as a finalist in its annual short fiction competition. I’ll post a link once the magazine is available and once I know whether I’ve won the big prize. This same story had also been accepted by another journal in the fall, so I had to withdraw from that one in order to be in Saddlebag (but an acceptance is still a win!)

Another U.S. magazine, Clockhouse, associated with a creative writing MFA program in New England, accepted my memoir piece about my small role in a search for two downed aircraft in the Alberta Rockies in 1986. It will be published next summer.

A Canadian magazine has indicated that they’re tentatively accepting an essay from me to mark the 30th anniversary of Martin Amis’s novel The Information in 2025. It’s an odd piece, combining literary criticism and my personal connection to the novel, which I had with me at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital the night (early morning) my son Sam was born.

The newest of these stories, @vanlifewithJosh&Siobhan, only came into the world in March of this year. The oldest, Waypoints, has been bouncing around to and from various journals for at least five years. As I’ve gradually been eliminating stories from my unpublished list, I’ve been adding new material to my repertoire. In 2024, I wrote five new short stories, all of which have been submitted at least once.

So there you have it. A year of shooting my babies out into the world and hoping they survive. A year of small successes and high hopes. And a year of writing new stories to swim in the vast ocean of words.

Early in 2024 I began a project on Substack that turned out to be one part collected travel misadventures and one part Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Middle-Aged and Old Man. I didn’t set out initially to create something like this. When I began thinking about it, I envisioned something not much more substantial than the lists of favourite hikes and wildlife encounters under the “Traveller” button at the top of this site.

Ultimately, it turned into more than six months of weekly installments, illustrated with photos (mostly by my wife, Rosemary). Taken all together, the entire thing is long enough to fill a book. Could it ever be a book? Who knows?

The whole thing began February 5 with an introduction, followed February 12 by a post of travel experiences under the letter A (Amarillo and Austin). As we moved through the alphabet, I went through some autobiographical sections, especially around the letter F (Fernie and Fort McMurray). Other sections focused more on adventure travel, often with unexpected twists and turns, such as those for the letter O (Odeceixe and Orizaba). And when it came to an end, I found myself thinking about a different kind of journey.

You can find all my posts on Substack by searching for @wanderingwriterbobarmstrong. (Or you can click on the highlighted text here or in the paragraph above.) My Substack is free to subscribe and will remain so until I start to get so overwhelmed by demand that I decide to cash in.

As for what’s next from me on Substack, I guess that’s a whole new journey.

On the way to Berlin last fall, I started making notes about cities I’ve visited in Europe, North and South America and New Zealand. It didn’t add up to an especially impressive list in this age of relatively inexpensive airfares, but it seemed to me I had interesting stories about quite a few of them.

In time, my notes expanded into an A to Z collection of stories of my misadventures and observations in cities and regions (I didn’t have a U city, but I’ve been to Utah; I haven’t been to a city that starts with X, but I’ve been to the Mexico City district of Xochimilco).

What started as a series of very short travel stories grew to include a number of longer autobiographical entries covering my childhood fantasies, youthful dreams and adult ambitions, as well as experiences of marriage and parenthood and intimations of mortality. They’re all illustrated with photos culled from decades of trips, so if nothing else you can follow the upward migration of my hair.

As I pondered what to do with this document, I decided it was time to shift most of my new writing from this website to a new Substack page. For those who don’t know, Substack is an online platform that allows users to create newsletters and other documents that can then go out to subscribers via email.

Compared to this blog, Substack offers a better ability to get my writing out to readers and it even provides the potential to get paid if I find enough people are interested in my work to become subscribers. For the time being, I’m giving away free subscriptions to my Substack.

You can find the first entry in what I call A Personal Global Alphabet here, and you’ll also be able to see a few other stories and essays I’ve written recently. If you like it, sign up for a free subscription. Happy reading and happy travels, whether by plane, train, automobile or printed word.

When I think about the ups and downs and close calls in my writing career, my thoughts naturally turn to Rory Storm and Keef Hartley.

Who?

Rory Storm, leader of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Keef Hartley, former drummer with Rory’s band who went on to found the Keef Hartley Band. Jeez, don’t you know anything about rock music?

Storm led a skiffle group in Liverpool in the late 1950s, played in the bars in Hamburg around the same time as The Beatles, and later hired Hartley as his band’s new drummer, replacing another Liverpool-skin-basher named Richard Starkey (who had departed to take Pete Best’s job in The Beatles and changed his stage name to Ringo Starr). Though popular in the Liverpool scene of the early ‘60s, Rory Storm and Hurricanes never made it on record, releasing only a couple of singles that failed to catch on during the British Invasion of 1964.

Half a decade later, though, drummer Hartley had his own shot at the big time, when the Keef Hartley Band played Woodstock. In a festival line-up studded with superstars – Hendrix, Joplin, The Who, Santana, The Band, the Grateful Dead and more – the name Keef Hartley stands out as one of the very few that you haven’t heard of.

Obviously, I’ve never stood as close to literary stardom and Storm and Hartley did to music stardom, but stories like theirs make me think of the close calls in my own artistic life.

One came through a play of mine, a philosophical comedy called Noble Savage, Savage Noble. An absurd, dark comedy in which the 18^th century philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau have been stranded in the Canadian wilderness, where they debate their ideas about “man in a state of nature,” NS,SN was my first professionally produced play and received rave reviews when it was produced by Theatre Projects Manitoba in 2003. A kind of Waiting for Godot with canoes, it was published in a Playwrights Canada Press anthology of new western Canadian plays in 2004.

The key challenge for any playwright is not so much to have a play produced (though that’s tough), but to get a second production. My timing wasn’t ideal in this endeavour. My play was produced by Theatre Projects during a lull for that company, when it didn’t have any media sponsorship or staff support to draw much of an audience.

I sent the play off to companies across Canada and the US, attaching the glowing reviews and mentioning the play’s runner-up status in two national playwriting competitions and I managed a pair of close calls, including one in which I received my nicest rejection letter ever, from the influential Tarragon Theatre artistic director Urjo Kareda. I received another nice rejection letter from an artistic director who enjoyed the play but didn’t think there were enough theatre goers in Montreal familiar with the French Enlightenment to fill up a three-week run in a theatre.

A few years later, I was invited to New York University’s hotInk International Playreading Festival for a workshop and staged reading of the play. I was one of two Canadian playwrights featured – the other being Nicolas Billon, an Ontario playwright who went on to win the Governor General’s Award. At the time I was a bit put out by the fact that Billon’s reading, but not mine, was attended by a cultural attaché from the Canadian consulate in New York.

What made these close calls especially painful was that just a couple years later, Canada’s best-known comedic playwright, Morris Panych, premiered a new play that seemed almost identical in theme and setting. His play What Lies Before Us featured bickering 19^th century railway surveyors lost in the Rocky Mountains, with their Chinese labourer keeping them alive, just as my play had a French Canadian coureur de bois keeping Rousseau and Voltaire from starving. And like mine, his play took inspiration from Godot while reflecting on exploration and colonization of the new world. Panych’s play was featured on stages across Canada, effectively killing any shot I might still have had at a second production for mine.

Close call number two:

In 2007, a play of mine at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival drew a five-star review and my first-ever Fringe sellouts. One of the reviewers wrote “writing so fine it should be between covers in a book,” which got me thinking about expanding the story – a comedy about a personal crisis in the life of a stay-at-home father – into a novel. After I’d done a few drafts of the novel, I discussed it with Winnipeg writer Daria Salamon, who’d recently had her own domestic comedy, The Prairie Bridesmaid, published by Key Porter Books. Daria referred me to her agent and, after I wrote a new draft, her agent agreed to represent me. (The agent in question has gone on to become one of biggest literary agents in Canada.) A little later, I was thrilled to hear that, following her pitches to the Canadian operations of what were then the Big Five publishing houses (this was before Penguin and Random House merged), four of the big publishers requested copies of the manuscript. This was my shot at the big time!

Unfortunately, all four of them passed on it. I tell myself that bad timing played a role. This was the summer of 2009, when the world was in the depths of the recession triggered by the banking collapse of 2008. My agent dropped me as a client. I went on to find a publisher on my own, Winnipeg-based Turnstone Press, which published it in 2011. With only the promotional resources of tiny Turnstone to back it, my novel, titled Dadolescence, didn’t exactly take the literary world by storm. Reviews were good and I did a “book tour” to Calgary and Edmonton, but Canada’s bookstore behemoth Indigo only ordered copies for its “Local Interest” section in its Manitoba stores, rather than stocking it nationally or even regionally under “Fiction.” It sold around 500 copies.

For much of the next decade, I focused on freelance writing jobs that actually paid. I wrote several long, technical reports on the environmental impact of major hydro-electrical projects. I worked as the constituency communications person for a Winnipeg MP. But around 2017-2019 I also devoted time to a new novel: which I originally thought of as a YA superhero steampunk western about three youths with uncanny powers who converge on the gold rush boomtown of Deadwood in the 1870s. I tried every publisher I could think of in Canada, with no success and in 2019 I connected with Five Star Publishing, a division of the educational publisher Cengage/Gale, based in Maine. Five Star’s focus was specifically on western/frontier fiction. And they paid an advance in U.S. dollars.

I signed a contract and was assigned an editor, with the novel – titled Prodigies –   scheduled for publication in January 2021. Thanks to the pandemic, that was bumped to July 2021. But still, the book was published and I got a royalty payment to cover sales Five Star made to libraries, the main market for the company’s books. Unfortunately, Five Star, being a small U.S. publisher, didn’t have a regular distribution deal for sales to Canadian bookstores. So aside from in Winnipeg, where I stocked McNally Robinson Booksellers with my own author copies on consignment, the novel was hardly available at all in stores in the author’s own country. That meant that I wasn’t really able to capitalize on the fact that Prodigies won the 2022 Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction in the Manitoba Book Awards.

Still, a legitimate award for my book! That was another close call, and it augured well for the sequel I was at that time working on. Except that later in 2022 Five Star announced that it was ceasing publication of new books. The company announced that it was going to focus on its other business publishing large print editions of existing books. As a result, my sequel was an orphan.

These aren’t the closest of close calls. I’m not the Canadian literary equivalent of Rory or Keef or Pete Best, fired from The Beatles to make way for Ringo. But they are reminders of the way quirks of timing, global economic circumstances, far-off business decisions and the presence or absence of a single champion can make all the difference in the world for a piece of art and for an artist.

A chance encounter with a small-town museum volunteer last summer led me to an unexpected new writing project.

Like most small Manitoba museums, the Dairy Museum of Manitoba is only open in the summer months and is a labour of love for local volunteers. In addition to objects that tell the story of the dairy industry in and around St. Claude, Manitoba, it displays a variety of artifacts from local life in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

When my wife and I stopped there one afternoon last August, the volunteer who showed us around told us the stories behind a number of objects, one of which especially stuck in my mind. It was a bugle that had been carried during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and then brought to St. Claude after immigrants from eastern France founded the town. I was so captivated by the story behind the bugle that I wrote a very short story about it, my first foray into what’s known as “flash fiction.”

Before long I was seized by the idea of writing similarly short stories inspired by other artifacts at other museums. Looking through the gallery on my phone, I saw photos of old mining tools, flamboyant suits worn on stage by country singers, children’s shoes left as offerings at a pilgrimage site. Then, in the fall, when Rosemary and I travelled to Germany and the Czech Republic, I found myself pondering objects that we’d seen in well over a dozen museums and historic sites, from a Renaissance statue disfigured by fire in the last months of the Second World War to a beautiful, elegant dress once worn by Eva Braun.

The word museum comes to English from the Greek, via the Latin, for “seat of the Muses.” Those divine beings who inspire poetry, music, history and more whisper to us when we let a museum take us to some place new.

So in one of my newest projects, I’m listening to the Muses and letting them take my writing on a short journeys. Maybe it will lead to publication in some of the many literary magazines that feature flash fiction. Who knows? Maybe if I write enough of them I could collect them in a book. If nothing else, maybe I can justify writing off some museum admission fees on my taxes.