I don’t know why it took so many years to appreciate the practice and enjoyment of reading and publishing in online literary journals. Lately, I’m really digging online journals, as a reader and a writer. So many online journals have poetry, prose and artwork that take off the top of my head, BlazeVOX, Shift, and Guernica, among others, for example.

It’s not that print journals don’t have online components. Print journals have web sites and submission portals. Print journals rely on social media for publicity, award announcements, release dates, news of attendance at book fairs or literary events, and/or shout outs to previous contributors. Some print journals link selected work online, so readers can sample the content.  

During the early years of my writing career, print journals were widely judged as superior to online journals. Online publications weren’t held in high regard by most poets and writers. Without a gatekeeping editor sheriff, any outlaw poet or prose-writing varmint could wander into town and ruin literature. Even if the creative work was astounding, there was no assurance the words would last for posterity. The disembodied nature of online content felt dangerously ephemeral. Without warning, the pixels might disappear as if they never existed. If you were an associate professor back in those days, online publications often didn’t count for tenure. The power of the canon was founded in print. Print journals were solid artifacts collecting dust on bookshelves everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be a bibliophile. Books are dear companions, and I keep my bookshelves dusted. My project is additive, even expansive, as Whitman might express. As a reader, online journals provide me access to contemporary poems and prose that enthrall me and which I wouldn’t otherwise discover. To the claim that online publications would not last, some online journals, like BlazeVOX, have been in production more than twenty years. When Geoffrey Gatza, the editor and publisher of BlazeVOX [books], sent me an acceptance message for my short story, “John Wayne on Fire,” for the Spring 25 issue of the journal, he wrote, “Our online edition will be online for a very long time, and it is accessible by everyone with a computer or mobile device. So hurray!” The archive of past issues of BlazeVOX is cleanly designed and as navigable as a card catalog.

As for writers, online journals open up windows for a wider audience for their work and allow unlimited circulation, though these are not unqualified benefits. Online publications are as vulnerable to content predators as a flock of one-legged chickens in the wild. Photojournalist David Carsons describes how AI scrapes “every corner of the Internet” for content to feed its hungry algorithms. Defenders of AI say the scraping is “transformative fair use,” though Carsons and a multitude of other writers view scraping as pirating akin to the theft of creative and intellectual property. The catch-22 for writers who participate in the online publication community is that their poems, stories, essays, and art are available for unlawful appropriation.

Some other defenses of online journals and publications are economic, environmental, and aesthetic. Online journals are less expensive to produce, and no trees are killed in their production. Online journals might take greater risks with content and include graphics and sound. It’s worth noting that some online journals are bound up with feature authors and the quality of content, referents back to print journals and academic worlds. On the other hand, just like print journals, online journals that have deeper pockets and funded budgets can buy legitimacy and visibility.      

It feels like only recently that I’ve come to appreciate online journals, but I’ve probably been dabbling for ten years. Most recently, I’ve had a lyrical short essay, “Umbrella Rhapsody,” appear in Issue 8 of Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, the annual publication of the Ringling College of Art and Design. The publication acceptance was the best of both worlds because Shift is an online journal with a print journal component. I’m reminded of the old saying, “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours forever.”