How a serial plagiarist tried to sneak into Moon City Review
Stop the presses! A conversation with professor Mike Czyzniejewski.
Our topic today: The ongoing plagiarism scandal that hit literary magazines around the country. To learn more, I spoke with Professor Mike Czyzniejewski, editor of Moon City Review, Missouri State’s literary journal. Mike is a returning champion on the podcast: We spoke about Moon City Review back in March 2022.
Mike teaches a Small Press Production class which focuses on Moon City Review. This scandal has furnished endless discussion starters in his class of late. “It gives us this huge topic to talk about,” said Mike. “And then we had a lot of followups. I've given kind of a daily update about this as the stories evolved.”
Here’s part of our conversation about the incident. You can hear the full conversation on The Humanities District podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Jay: How did it first come to your attention that there could potentially be an issue?
Mike: You know, I saw the... I'm gonna feel pretty comfortable right here to say the name of the alleged plagiarizer, because that's been posted everywhere. It's a writer, and I'm not 100% sure who the writer's real name is, because I think everybody in the world has said it's a pseudonym at best, but it's somebody named John Kucera.
I've actually addressed this with the alleged John Kucera at the alleged John Kucera's email address, so I feel comfortable using that name here.
So, during week 1 of classes, I saw somebody post a social media message like, “John Kucera, you stole my poem, how dare you?” I was walking and I just saw it as I was flipping through a Twitter feed or something. And I'm like, huh, I know that name.
Because we had just the day before turned our 2024 issue of Moon City Review — which by the way is in. I'll show it, I'm holding it up for Jay to look at here. — So, spoiler alert, things worked out.
We had just turned it in the day before on Thursday where we approved the proofs of it and they're like, okay, we're going to get started printing on this so we can have it for you. We have a major writers conference happening in Kansas City next week. The AWP conference.
So we're like, well, we want our new issue to be at AWP, which is kind of our deadline every year. And just coincidentally, this year because of COVID rescheduling, it was earlier. Usually it's around spring break in the middle of March, but it was supposed to be in Kansas City in 2021. They moved it to 2024, but I think they had to get an early slot. So it's the first week of February.
So we're like, okay, let's get this magazine done and let's turn it in. And we were really kind of patting ourselves on the back because we had the issue done. And I was even telling my wife, who's our poetry series editor, and our main copywriter, her name's Karen Craigo, isn’t it great that we're done with this already, that we're not fumbling with this or trying to beat deadlines or expediting shipping? A couple times I've paid 300 extra dollars for overnight shipping because we want this in time.
We were really ahead of the game here.
Jay Howard: I love that. So things are going great. You met an early deadline. They're ready to start printing the final proofs.
Mike: And then, boom. And I told our department head this: Never ever will I be early with anything again.
And I told our department head this: Never ever will I be early with anything again.
-Mike Czyzniejewski
Because I saw that one post on John Kucera and I didn't think anything of it. And I went along, I had a couple meetings that I went to, and then I was driving to pick up my kid from school around three o'clock and all of a sudden there's all these messages in my inbox from people I didn't know. There's message requests and they’re all saying like, hey, you should check this out. You should check out this John Kucera.
Because earlier that day, I had posted a list of all the authors who were in this issue of Moon City Review, a list of 53 authors. You know, and you tag people, and you kind of get people excited about it, and they share it, so. People were telling me—like, strangers that I'd never talked to before—hey, you have John Kucera listed in your author list, and this has just exploded today, where he's been accused of over 30 cases of plagiarism today.
People were telling me—like, strangers that I'd never talked to before—hey, you have John Kucera listed in your author list, and this has just exploded today, where he's been accused of over 30 cases of plagiarism today.
So I’m in the car line, which is this claustrophobic place where you can't move and there's desperate parents trying to get closer to their kids, and I'm kind of hemmed in on the side of this road. I'm looking this up and I'm just like, oh no. Well, maybe he didn't plagiarize everything, but by the time my kid got into the car, I had looked up the alleged piece by John Kucera. Sure enough, as soon as I looked it up online, it was written by somebody else a couple years previously. So we had a situation.
Jay Howard: Oh my goodness. So yeah, car line, going about your daily business, last thing you need. So what was the first step? How did you react?
So what was the first step? How did you react?
Mike: And I will regret this my whole life, but I called the printer and I did not say, “Stop the presses!” but I did say, hey, are you printing the book yet? Did that print order from yesterday go through that we were all agreed upon? And they're like, yeah, the interior is just about done. We got about 100 copies left to print. And I explained to them what happened, and I was just panicking because I thought, well, this happened. They were really sympathetic. They're a really good crew here. It's the campus printer printing services here. And they really understood what was going on.
Jay Howard: Yikes.
Mike: So I'm kind of like, okay, well I have other calls to make. I'm just letting you know. And they asked, should we stop printing them? And I thought about it, like, yeah, I guess so. So they stopped the presses literally, okay. So then I called other people. I got a hold of the original author of the work. I found her email through her website and I emailed her like, please call me now. We wanna talk about this. You could look this up, that this is happening.
Jay Howard: Okay. So this is the author of the work that John Kucera stole.
Mike: Yeah, it's a writer named Darcy, Darcy Dodd.
And she basically said, okay, so then I got ahold of the head of English, Dr. Linda Moser, who's the kind of the chief person at the press. And she just, I kind of got in to talk to both of them at the same time. And this is all happening at like 4 o'clock on Friday, the first week of classes. So everybody's kind of winding down. The printers are ready to go away for the weekend.
And so I basically just, I got in to talk to Dr. Moser. And she was supportive as could be. You know, she says let's do whatever we can to get rid of this to make this go away and she even said like we'll even back you if you want to start over and it's like double the cost of printing which is which is a big deal because we're not flush with you know tons and tons of cash and printing is our main expenditure every year so to double that is that's a big commitment for her but I believe that she really like wanted this to be okay and was gonna do whatever, so that was good.
And then I talked to the original author and she was also understanding. She was very glad and I made her one promise that we will take care of this somehow, that this person will not steal your work. You know, and then I basically started like, well, what can we do to fix this, and what are our options? Okay, and the printers were going home for the weekend, so they're like, well, what are our options here?
Jay Howard: Right.
Mike: Because if it was completely done, we would have probably put in like a, some kind of a card inside the issue, kind of like, Hey, this happened. Please ignore this. We're sorry that this happened. But since they were mid production, we asked for some, we asked them for some options and how much it would cost us.
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: And that's where we were basically on Friday.
Jay Howard: Okay. And so after you got those options, did you end up opting for the reprint with the... and did you replace the author that was taken out?
Mike: Yeah, the good news was, we just, I kinda set this all off on Friday evening, like I put together like a list of things that we could do and having talked to the printer and what they suggested. And what I, I just kinda waited. We had a couple days to wait. And then Monday was the ice day, was like the bad cancellation ice day. And I'm like, well, we're losing another day here. But the printer is, again, I can't talk kindly enough about them that they had actually worked on this from home and they ran up some estimates and really the luckiest part about this was the back cover, the cover of our magazine wasn't printed yet.
But the printer is, again, I can't talk kindly enough about them that they had actually worked on this from home and they ran up some estimates and really the luckiest part about this was…
And that would have been like the real expensive thing, like the full color like card stock like that went through that. So that wasn't, so we were able to do that. So we had an idea, so for something very affordable for them to reprint those pages, and then what the people in the printing services had to do is to go through every copy and pull pages out. They're printed on these big flat, eight pages per sheet, and they're all stuck together. So what they did is for every stack, they went through and pulled this page, they had to pull pages out and then resubmit new pages in. And they were willing to do that, a very labor-intensive thing for not that much money. But then we had to find something to replace.
So this was a two page flash fiction story that was plagiarized. So we had to find something that was two pages long to keep the table of contents and like the order of the pages in. So there wasn't like, hey, what happened here? There's numbers missing in the middle. Which was another option is like, well, what you could do is just pull the pages and have a gap there. And I'm like, wow, that's not ideal either.
So we had to do that to the two pages, we had to do that to the table of contents, and then we do contributors notes for our authors at the end. And so we had to do that. So it was four total pages, which meant three different places, the printing people were gonna have to go through and pull pages out and replace. And they were willing to do that for something that was very reasonable. So we went and I went searching for a two page short story in our submissions. And that wasn't actually that hard to find, we get a lot of submissions.
I contacted that author the same thing, like, this is weird, but call me right now. I like your work. That's really weird for two page short story writers to be like, it's Monday.
Jay Howard: Sort of a dream.
Mike: The world is frozen, call me immediately. Don't talk to anybody. So he's like, hey, what's up? And so I explained it to him and he was like, oh, okay. And I'm like, we would have liked this piece anyway, but it would have been next year. So he was all on board, we had him sign a contract. I checked to see that he wasn't plagiarizing anything. Just for the heck of it. And then I got the pages to the printer and they kind of fixed it. So.
Jay Howard: Yeah. Hahahaha
Mike: With kind of a lot of worry and a lot of effort on the printer's part, we were able to fix this pretty minimally and now it's completely eradicated from our issue. There's no sign of this happening. Yeah, within our issue.
With kind of a lot of worry and a lot of effort on the printer's part, we were able to fix this pretty minimally and now it's completely eradicated from our issue. There's no sign of this happening.
Jay Howard: Oh yeah. Like it never happened. Do you get the sense that this fixing the physical copies was like done by hand? Like taking out the pages?
Mike: Yeah, yeah, there was people that, you know, we had a 600 print run to start and they had all about 100 printed so they had to go through 500 stacks of these big sheets of paper and they had to pull out these pages one by one. I mean, it's just like this and they had to do it three times per stack because again, in the front, in the middle and in the back of the book, they had to do it. So.
Jay Howard: Oh wow.
Mike: There's like 1500 things they had to pull out and replace with new pages. I mean, it just sounds like the most tedious thing.
Jay Howard: Yeah. Well, I want to put this in the context of the other cases that other journals have caught the same author, but just based on what you've said so far, my take on this is that this is basically like a stress test. Something goes wrong, and how will it be handled?
My take on this is that this is basically like a stress test. Something goes wrong, and how will it be handled?
—By the community of literary publications. It sounds like they came through sharing news about it on social media. How will it be handled by the, by the editors, by the printers? And it sounds like everyone responded in like the best possible way.
Mike: Yeah, we were really lucky that this happened. When did it happen? I mean, the timing in some ways terrible that it was in 24 hours after we turned in our files and they started printing. But it could have been worse because like three days later, the book would have all been printed and bound and we would have had to put like a retraction card in at best.
It was like, okay, well let's go through now and let's print something that talks about what happened, give the original author's name and their information so you could look that up and give them credit. It would have been an artifact of this process. We would have had this. Because a lot of the victims of this, a lot of the journals that did this weren't print journals, they were online journals. So those people, excuse me, just went in and shut it down. They just took it off their website within a couple clicks and it was over.
Jay Howard: Yeah. Or it could have been even worse, and it sounds like this may have happened in some cases where the edition was already printed and in people's hands and people didn't realize it until way afterwards with some of these earlier cases. And because I've saw that people have changed, rather than removing his name from the list of contributors, they just changed the blurb about him to be like serial plagiarizer.
Mike: Yeah, it is. I mean, different people reacted in different ways to it. You know, I talked about this like we started here. I talked about this with my classes a lot. What everybody wanted to know was what retribution could we bring to this guy? You know, there's the questions like, oh, well, did anybody call the police? And then I had to sit back and think like, is this an arrestable offense? Like, is this something like, you know, this guy plagiarized.
What everybody wanted to know was what retribution could we bring to this guy? You know, there's the questions like, oh, well, did anybody call the police?
Like, here's his address. Go get him. Get the paddy wagon and go get the SWAT team and bust through the windows and the skylight. He's just plagiarizing at his computer. Like, no, what's happening? That wasn't going to happen. I think that's more of a lawsuit, like, breach of copyright law.
Jay Howard: Ha ha
Mike: And I really can't say that I know 100%. I don't think you can on spot just arrest somebody for that. That's not, you're not gonna find a patrolman, patrolman O'Malley is walking by and it's like, get him. So there was that and people are like, well, can you get lawyers involved and sue him? That was a big question. And we're a university body and entity and we have lawyers at the university —
Jay Howard: I don't suppose so.
Mike: — that I've talked to because they help us with our contracts and they're very nice. And I think, yeah, we could have called them, but I think the answer would have been like, well, what are the damages here and how worth it is it? To get, you know, the university lawyers are doing all kinds of things constantly, you know, to get this plagiarism thing that's been fixed at a minimal cost, what are they going to do about it? Somebody brought up...
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: …small claims court that this is something we could take because the money that we spent to fix it is really what we're talking here. Plus some time and effort. How much are we really talking and is it worth it?
Jay Howard: Well, yeah, I mean, so the plagiarism is an ethical violation, but money has also changed hands. Not just the money spent to fix the problem, but also the money that he— I'm assuming it's a he, you know, whoever this is.
Mike: Yeah, we don't really know. I think it probably is. I think because there is a name that people have thrown out for who it is and it's just another name and I'm not 100% sure.
Jay Howard: But some journals, I don't know if Moon City does or not, but they pay authors for the pieces. And so he's, through fraud, stolen a bunch of money.
Mike: Yeah, that's where it comes down to fraud, where you really start getting into it. I have heard online, on social media, that one, he won a contest with a plagiarized piece and won $50. One thing that was never going to happen with this was he was never going to get any money from MSU, because what had happened with this contract is that we accepted this plagiarized piece at our last meeting, our class session to get pieces for the issue in early December, and I filled out the contract and I mailed it to him right before break.
So I did that with about five or six other people. We come back from break where mail is shut down and the offices are closed, like January 2nd, January 3rd, the mail's there. All these other contracts from these other authors are back so we can proceed. His contract comes back address unknown.
I go looking up in the system and I'm like, oh, do I have the right address? And I noticed that, like, he lived on South something street, and instead of a South, I wrote S. And I'm like, I know what it is, my terrible handwriting. They thought that was a five. His address is right here. This is crazy, because there's no red flags in my head yet. I just have bad handwriting. I redo a contract and I very legibly write South instead of S. And I send it back, but I dropped him an email and said, sorry about the contract, I sent a new one. So look for that this week.
And all he wrote back was said, “is there payment?” And so that didn't seem that weird. I mean, writers like money as much as anybody who does anything. And that was his, but now that's a red flag because when I originally sent him the acceptance, which lays out the terms and asked them to accept terms.
Jay Howard: Hmm.
Mike: It says, you know, is this your property? Do you own it and have the right to publish it and sign contracts for it? He wrote back and said, I agree. That was an email. I'm like, okay, well, let's go forward with an official paper contract. But I went and proceeded anyway because he had agreed through email, which is pretty legally binding that he agreed to these terms. But all he said when I sent out the terms was, “I agree, is their payment.”
So then all these red flags then are like, now he's just in this for the payment. But what the million dollar question that everybody has is on social media, in my classes, in my general just life is, if this is a scam to get money, why poems? Like aren't there a million other scams in the world that are so much less convoluted and complicated than some of the literary journals? And you know, literary journals, the average response time is six months to get, and so far he's gotten 50 bucks.
But what the million dollar question that everybody has is on social media, in my classes, in my general just life is, if this is a scam to get money, why poems?
So you're scanning the literary world to the degree, like a few dozen cases, at least so far, and your motivation is money. Like, aren't there a lot of other ways? Can you not pose as a Nigerian prince who wants to share his fortune with you? Like, aren't there a million other ways than like, you know what, I'm gonna take poems or short stories that are a page long, and that's the way, you know, that I will pave my driveway with gold.
Jay Howard: Ha ha ha!
Mike: Cool.
Jay Howard: Well, it is. It is hard to put oneself in the headspace. And I believe you had mentioned in a social media post when you reached out to the individual on the topic of plagiarism, they responded back with the phrase, that looks good, or something like that.
Mike: Yeah, I guess I forgot that whole thing is when I after I contacted our press head and the printers and The original author of the piece You know this is already broken by so many like 30 other people had reported this I'm like okay. Well this person deserves their due process and consideration and the benefit of the doubt. So I wrote him that immediately. I'm just like hey John, probably aware of this but you have been called out for a lot of allegations of plagiarism across by a lot of different magazines. I looked up the piece that we accepted and found that it was published by a different author a couple years before you submitted it to us. I want to give you the chance to explain yourself. What's going on here? I look forward to hearing from you. And about 15 minutes later I get the answer that just says, “that looks good” with no punctuation, just like...
And so then I gave him, and my response to that was, well, that doesn't answer my question. Can you answer my question about the legitimacy of your work? And I haven't heard from him since. So on Sunday night, a couple days later, I wrote back and said, well, I haven't heard from you. I've given you the chance to defend yourself. I am officially canceling this publication and this agreement.
And I'm going to report this in any avenue I can on social media. And that's all I did. I didn't even say, and I actually waited, should I say good luck or should I say stop it? Or I hope that you don't do this anymore, I just stopped it at that. You're canceled, I'm reporting this, end of email. And then that's where that's good.
Jay Howard: Yeah. Well, do you mind if I ask, so what does, in terms of the contract, what does Moon City Review pay authors for a piece like that?
Mike: Oh, we don't. We're paying copyright. You know, we're trying to pay people. Literary magazines are iffy because we are not that old in the world of literary magazines. We've only been a national literary magazine for 11, 12 years now, or we're taking outside submissions. And we just don't.
Jay Howard: Yeah. Still, he may have made more than 50 bucks when you think about all the other publications that were accepted in all the other places. It's possible some of them may have paid.
Mike: I have not seen that reported, I think it is possible. Because some venues do pay, but some venues pay $25. You know, me as a short story writer, the most I've ever gotten, I think, for a short story personally is $500. And usually when you get it, you don't even realize it because it's so infrequent. Like a check just shows up in your mail for like $50, and you're like, what is this for? And then you kinda like start doing some math and investigation —
Jay Howard: Okay, okay. Wow.
Mike: — You're like, oh, I published that story. So yeah, again, I can't imagine there's a more complex way to try to make money than to steal poems and wait this out. Like it really isn't like that efficient of a scam.
Jay Howard: Has anyone floated the idea that, um... I'm interested in whether technology is involved here, and whether this guy is just a chatbot. And the reason I'm thinking about that is because it seems like all of his emails have been three words. You know, like maybe just auto-generated replies based on flow charts, you know? Because it does. It seems like it's his full-time job trying to plagiarize all this stuff. But if somehow he has some sort of, like computer program to pull stories and submit them elsewhere in an automated way, maybe it becomes viable.
I'm interested in whether technology is involved here, and whether this guy is just a chatbot.
Mike: You know, I spent my class periods for like a whole week then kind of, and one of the big questions I ask everybody is like why, what's going on here? Let's try to explain this craziness. And somebody in one of my classes said like, the exact same thing, like it's the three word responses without punctuation, this sounds like an auto response thing. So I think that's viable, I mean it seems somewhat directed.
Because the only other time I contacted him is I sent his galley is like hey Please look these over let us know if you have any changes, and I got a response back from that just said looks good So that was that was at least applicable like what he was responding it wasn't like I love those two You know or some weird thing that didn't apply so I think that's a possibility.
Sure, I don't know how those work that well or how that would help you, but I you know I think if that's what he's doing and he's found a way into the Submittable system, Submittable is the program slash website used for literary magazines. I know it's used for a lot of other things like job interviews and resumes now, but like it started for lip mags as a way to submit to journals and for them to process your work and then get responses to you. If he found a back door into that, that's like, hey, if I do this automatically, I program this.
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: Sure, I mean if somebody can make Submittable, I'm sure a computer programmer could make something that hacks it and auto submits things to it. Sure. Why not?
Jay Howard: I'm familiar with Submittable from my ongoing quest to earn a hundred rejections over the course of my life. So yeah, to me it sounds like, as awful as the situation is, everybody was doing their job, no one was asleep at the Switch. But I have seen, as I was reading about this, some of the, especially from the publications that didn't catch it in time.
They’re issuing apologies and “we should have caught this” and all kinds of these other statements. But as I reflect on it, I'm wondering how is it even theoretically possible to catch stuff like this? Because a lot of the, I mean, the whole point is a blind review for a lot of these. Sometimes people are submitting anonymously and it's not like there's any… What is your opinion on that topic? To what responsibility does the journal itself bear?
I'm wondering how is it even theoretically possible to catch stuff like this?
Mike: Well, you know, part of this is on me. This is our process. What you could do is, and it's anybody who's graded essays from those students or anything like that, what we could do is type random passages from the work into Google, put quotes around it so it'll come through exactly, and see if it comes up. Okay, so that's how I found out in the car line.
Jay Howard: Okay.
Mike: Going back to that part of the story is I found the piece, and I only had my phone because I was in my car, so I'm like looking through my phone for this. I had a PDF because I'd sent him the galley via PDF. I went and copied the first sentence of the story from the PDF and I put it in Google in quotes. Boom, it came up right away, the original piece, okay? So why didn't we do that? Okay, and that harkens back to this was early.
Our deadline is usually in the middle of March. This was in early February. The class that you spoke of, Small Press Publication, English 540, 640. One of the first things they do, or they have the last five years since the class is run, is like, I will bring in all the accepted work and say, hey, here's a step that we need to take in this process. And I divvy it up among the 22 people in the class. Everybody takes three pieces from the journal —
Jay Howard: Mm-hmm.
Mike: — and do that, like just type in a couple random phrases. Type the first sentence, type something from the middle, use quotation marks, see if it comes up. The previous five years, because we've had time to do this, my students have come up with zero instances of plagiarism. Okay, because there's just a lot of good faith going on, and plus we have these email agreements, like this is yours, you own this, you have the right. So because we had to be early this year,
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: And because everything, and this is so rare, we didn't do that, because we didn't have class, like the book was done before the class started. Now, could I have done that all myself? I could have, and I should have. This is showing me I should have done that, and I didn't. Because if any one of my students in that class would have had that piece, and they would have typed that first sentence into Google, they would have had it come up right away, and it would have been really obvious. So...
Jay Howard: I see what you're saying.
Mike: I think that's the message for all of us in the literary magazine community going forward is, okay, we would...
Working on good faith for so long and assuming that people aren't doing this, but now here's this person that's spitting in our faces, I think we all have to do our due diligence a lot more effectively moving forward.
…working on good faith for so long and assuming that people aren't doing this, but now here's this person that's spitting in our faces. I think we all have to do our due diligence a lot more effectively moving forward.
-Mike Czyzniejewski
Jay Howard: With the rise of chatbots, I've heard some journals have circled the wagons entirely and aren't even accepting, well, only accept submissions from people they already know. Is that right?
Mike: Yeah, because if you teach at Missouri State University, that was the talk of our orientation week and all our back to school meetings and stuff, from the provost, the president, all our department heads was, how are we gonna officially deal with AI? Because I found out about AI and CHAT GBT last January, and I didn't know, so I didn't really have a policy in my syllabus because...
My students already had my syllabus. So we talked about it, but we talked about it this past August a lot. And I talked about it this January, just a few days before all this happened, you know, we're the first day of classes, and I'm like, hey, you know, this is part of our world now, and I just wanna hope that none of you are majoring in creative writing, or minoring in creative writing, and taking these advanced classes, and this is how you wanna get your degree. Like, why would you major in creative writing?
Why would you spend all this money so you could turn in plagiarized or automatically produce work? I would have to imagine that you're not in it just to get the assignment done and to get points for it. So we kind of have that message going. Yeah, I have heard that. I have heard journal colleagues of mine that have said, I'm only taking work by writers I know already. And there's a lot, I know a million writers. I could make literary magazines now until I die with only work by good writers that I already know. But that's not really part of our mission is to just keep saying, like, oh, well, nobody else can get on the ship. Everybody else is going to be left behind. That's not why we're in this.
Jay Howard: Well, exactly. You have to have at least a mirage of hope for new authors.
Mike: Alright, you authors, you are officially no longer needed. Check again when everybody else is dead.
Jay Howard: Well, you mentioned also in a post, let's contact Submittable, get his account deleted. You may have mentioned that, but I saw in, I think I saw in one of the articles, maybe it was the Plagiarism Today, which if anyone wants to read about this online, you won't have any trouble at all finding all kinds of news outlets and other newsletters reporting on this. Moon City Review as well as the other journals have all been collated together, everyone who's hit. But I think I saw that Submittable did shut down like three different accounts associated with this serial plagiarizer.
Mike: I think that's good, but I mean, of course, what he could do is just make up a new name and start again under a new name. But it's good that they're at least compliant and trying to help. I don't have anything... The Submittable people have been really great about everything since they've been around for about 15 years, or maybe a little longer than that even. They're part of this world as much as anybody, and it's good to see that they stood up and said, yeah, we're going to do this.
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: Not like maybe certain social media platforms when somebody does something horrible. It's like, well, let's see, you know, you don't know. We're just gonna keep them around because who's to judge? Like, Submittable acted pretty quickly when they were called out, so good for them.
Jay Howard: Yeah. One other question I have is kind of on this topic of people acting in good faith. I mean, we've sort of seen this to some extent in politics where if someone decides to take advantage of the system that expects good faith, then there's not any safeguards in place to prevent it. And in part, that's by design because we want an open society. We don't want everything to be locked down and everything. And so we... We sort of rely on the good faith and that creates a free rider problem. But what, there are a variety of other conventions in the literary magazine world that I wonder to what extent they are checked and to what extent they are just presumption of goodwill. And the specific example I'm thinking of is the policy on simultaneous submissions. Um, is that something that people have any way of checking?
Mike: No, for 25 years I've been in on that conversation. I think it's died down a lot. I think what I'll say, the quote unquote old guard of literary magazine editors, simultaneous submissions just for the audience are like when you say you have a short story out there and you're submitting it for publication, simultaneous submissions mean you send it out to multiple magazines at one time and then.
The unwritten rule that's really kind of written is whoever says yes first, you take that submission, you take that publication and then you immediately withdraw it from the other journals so they're not spending any more time on it. A lot of the old, especially esteemed magazines said no simultaneous submissions and they would go so far. If you withdrew something from them and said somebody else took it, they would cite their no simultaneous submission policy and blacklist you from their journal and be like, well, that's not very good. I think we've evolved away from that policy and 95% of the journals out there publishing don't have that policy.
Jay Howard: So if we had someone who is shameless and they did simultaneous submission, maybe they notify that it is a simultaneous submission, maybe they don't, and then it's accepted somewhere and then they don't withdraw it from elsewhere and someone else accepts it too. And so both publications publish it thinking that they are publishing it exclusively. That may or may not be caught as well, it seems like.
Mike: Yeah, that happens quite a bit. That's happened to me at journals a few times where we caught somebody. And then what we do with literary journals, the print journals is we exchange. Like we have a list of 75 journals in the United States that we send copies of Moon City Review to, and they send us our copies. So we have a big library of journals on the third floor of Siceluff Hall where we just exchange. It's like, hey, look at our journal. Get your students to look at our journal, and we'll get our students to look at your journals. It's been a nice system that's been in place since before I was in this. So we get these journals in the mail. I got one in just the other day, and I always look through the back cover, and I'm like, oh, I know this author, and I look up pieces, and then a few times in my career, I'd, oh, cool, we just published something by this guy, too, and then I look it up, and it's like, we just published this exact piece in our journal, too. So.
Those people get caught and they're kind of shamed and blacklisted in another way because it's kind of more of an auto-plagiarism thing. The rights that we ask as literary magazine editors and I believe every single literary magazine on earth works like this except for Zoetrope All Story which is owned by Francis Ford Coppola who takes all rights for your stories because I think there's some notion that he's going to turn them into movies someday. Not that he's made a movie in 15 years.
But every other journal in the world takes what's called first North American serial rights, which we say that we want the rights to this, and as soon as we publish it, the rights automatically revert back to the author. And that is standard for magazine periodical work, is that we only want to print it once and then you can have it back. So like, you want to put that poem in a poetry collection in a year or two or down the line, those are your rights again.
Jay Howard: Yeah.
Mike: You can't sign over first North American serial rights more than one time. Because it's a different thing. Okay? Go to Australia, go to Antarctica or Asia or Africa or any of those other continents. But North America, that's awesome.
Jay Howard: Well, yeah. Any of those any of those other continents. Man, I would just be so embarrassed if that happened to me if I tried it and got caught.
Mike: You know, it happens that basically one guy was just like, well, why not? It's mine. It's like, well, you signed a contract that said this. That's why. If you hadn't signed a contract, and you know, what's fun is that the editors of the other journals that it happens to, you get together and you know, it's like, hey, we all did this. Why are you doing this to us? And you know, you can't say it like, you know, you can't play mom against dad if mom and dad are both standing there. So I know how we put that together, it's pretty easy to do. Right.
Jay Howard: Absolutely. And the reason for that in the first place is just because every journals don't want to be publishing what other journals are publishing. They want something unique for their own pages.
Mike: Right, and you know, that's the way that we keep things going, and like we said, keep those new authors going. Because somebody who is really talented, like you could be.
O. Henry and you could publish The Gift of the Magi 150 times, you know, oh no, the watch chain and the combs, oh no, what irony is happening here? And if, you know, if O. Henry publishes that story a hundred different times, that's taking away 99 slots from other writers. And then no new writers ever get a chance to do that. So we kind of, one time publishing and then go put it in a collection later and we'll celebrate it there again, but you get one shot at a journal.
Jay Howard: Yeah. So if we look into the future, I noticed people reporting John Kucera doesn't appear to have been stopped him because there's not really any way to stop someone who is anonymous and shameless and synonymous... do you think that this will die down or as has he is he like made his point and will maybe move on something else. What would you predict?
I noticed people reporting John Kucera doesn't appear to have been stopped him. There's not really any way to stop someone who is anonymous and shameless and synonymous... do you think that this will die down?
Mike: Well, I reported this on social media because we had a reading on campus, a live Zoom simulcast reading with one of our authors, a writer named Leanne Rorpaugh, who is the editor of South Dakota Review. And we were kind of in this pre-Zoom chat, and we just started talking about this. She had received a submission from him two days prior to that, which was about four days after this whole thing broke.
Jay Howard: Hmm.
Mike: So he had been made aware that people knew and that they were posting on social media and he was continuing to submit to other journals. So I think now that Submittable’s canceled him out of their system, probably we won't see that again until he finds another name. I don't know, because I don't know what the motivation was. And that was again, the main question I put to my class is like, why do you do this? Like, is it...
You know, if it's money, that's ridiculous, okay? Somebody, and people in each one of my classes suggested, maybe it's like a study, it's like a sociologist, okay? Who's like, well I'm going to try to do this experiment to see how people react to this. You know, I don't know what you're proving with this, you know, other than, well good work is good work, and you know, if it's published once and it's published again, that just proves that work is good, so.
Jay Howard: Right.
Mike: I don't know what the study would be and what your thesis and your conclusion would be in that study or who in the world would be interested in that study.
[…]
Well, thank you for breaking this all down with me. This episode should go to press (I don't know if that's the right term, since it's a podcast, but either way.) probably the week after the AWP conference, because I know that's all right upon us.
Mike: Yeah, that's like five days away. I'll be there in five days, that's crazy. […] I'm hoping that we have a really strong Missouri state presence, you know, that maroon, maroon and white, the Pantone 505 is just in full force in Kansas City.
Jay Howard: That's right, All hail maroon and white. I'll see you there.
Mike: I'll see you there. Unless I run into you before that, which is likely.