Critque #3: Online Journals

To begin this assignment, I hopped to the bottom of the list and randomly selected The Literary Bohemian. The Bohemian is an online-only journal that gathers user-submitted traveling poetry and prose large and small and publishes them together twice a year. Readers only need to relinquish their e-mail address in order to subscribe.

Something I noticed immediately after entering the Bohemian was its graphics and layout. Its entire site is covered with weather postcards, letters, various coins, tickets and other traveling memorabilia. This visual element makes it memorable, as well as appeals to the part of the brain that likes to hold onto the ticket stubs and stamped passports leftover from travel - if that pack rat part of the brain exists inside everyone, that is.

Regardless, it's clear that the Bohemian's layout is taking advantage of its digital format, but only to an extent. A glossy magazine page could easily recreate this layout, and the only thing that version would lack is the hyperlink.

Still, as a creative platform, the Bohemian lives up to its genre. Although the writers aren't paid, it doesn't seem to impede on its number of literary submissions. After all, published is published. But I would be picky and choosy about which work to submit to this journal - for a real living, you may just want to send your 300-page traveling novel elsewhere.

But perhaps the most useful feature of the Bohemian is its dedication to the writer's cause: it encourages travel, and even gives writer-friendly locations to lodge for the night. This tool could not be more useful to someone traveling on a writer's budget, which of course is very meager. In some ways, this journal is promoting a tighter-knit writing community without use of Twitter, or an online forum.

As for myself, I would be tempted to send smaller works to the Bohemian. After all, published published, and it's a resume builder for a writer. But again, as for the larger works, the Bohemian is not the platform for you. Instead, it's best used as a smaller stepping stone to the real books you wish to get published down the traveler's road.