• Average Guys: Impress your bleeding-heart girlfriends!
• Wannabe Poets: Get tips on how to darken your blacker-than-black wardrobe!
• Angsty Teens: Jot down lines you like and use them to protest your parents!

Furthermore, people who are — no! — legitimately interested in the simple pleasures of a nice, grandmotherly-cum-trendy cup of tea and/or fabulous poetry will enjoy themselves.

On November 10 — that’s tomorrow, for those among you who grope blindly at thin air like angry babies deprived of their Blackberries and iCal organizational tools — Painted Bride Quarterly is very pleased to present count ‘em 2! poets at Bubble House.

To get all the W’s out of the way in one fell swoop:

• What: Poetry reading.
• When: November 10, 7:30 p.m.
• Where: Bubble House, located at 3404 Sansom St. in good old Philadelphia
• Who: Lynn Levin, Ernest Hilbert
• Why: To spread great literature and all that good lofty stuff.
• How: Magic.

But what is a literary magazine? And why do you need to know?

Most people have the wrong idea. They’re surprised to see a real, bound, book-thick “magazine.” Dump the image of some shlocky glossy number that’s stapled together and is full of the local creative writing teacher trying frantically to endorse himself. (Or herself, sorry.)  9 times out 10 — heck, 9 times out of 100 — that’s the wrong idea. While tragically (tragically!) little-known to the general non-literary public, lit mags are actually a fabulous starting point for any aspiring writer.

I don’t want to shatter your precious, harp-scored dreams of overnight success with the To Kill A Mockingbird of 2009, but chances are, in the cruel, cold world of publishing, it’s just not gonna happen. Don’t trash your manuscript, of course — but I can’t stress enough that it’s (imagine me saying this slowly and pounding my fist for emphasis) a very good practice to hone your skills and rack up credentials on smaller pieces, like short fiction and poetry, by winning the hearts of literary magazines.

Some carry more weight than others, and each one has its own editorial voice (i.e. preference) in terms of the material they publish. Some are in distribution of greater than 10,000, and some drop into obscurity at the opposite end of the spectrum.

A few great resources for lit mag beginners are NewPages, Poets & Writers, and Webdelsol. Check out lit mags like The Paris Review, Tin House, and AGNI. Poke around. Read some material from the archives, check out their links, and definitely look into submitting your own work! You can put yourself out there — you just need to know the right steps to take.

It’s up to you to make the transition. Sadly, I can’t wave a literary wand and transform your long suffering, coffee-stained manuscript into the masterwork that makes Ulysses look like child’s play. What I can do is point you in the direction of a small press with big ambitions.

(Painted Bride Quarterly, of course, is always nosing out the best of the best, so check out our guidelines and hit us with your best shot of poetry or prose.)

But why stop with PBQ? As a poetry editor at First Step Press — remember the small press with big ambitions I mentioned earlier? — I’m calling YOU, Mr. or Mrs. Up-And-Comer, to submit your original work to Stepping Stones Magazine, an electronic journal that features innovative poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and artwork.

So what are you waiting for?

Our statement can put it to you in formal terms:

Painted Bride Quarterly was established in Philadelphia in 1973.  As a community-based, independent, non-profit literary magazine published quarterly online and annually in print, PBQ’s main agenda is to maintain and grow a venue for the highest quality literature that best represents the individual voice.  PBQ does not limit itself to one particular school or genre.  We publish emerging and established regional authors in the context of their peers from across the country and around the world.  The combination of PBQ’s editorial tables and the ever-changing student staff makes its published voiced unique.

Or, you can think of it this way:

PBQ is great literature. Period. And we’re always looking for more.

You don’t have to be a Pulitzer winner. You don’t have to have a five-book contract with Random House. You just have to love writing, like we do. Now show us what you’ve got.

For rules on submissions, check here.

I’ve set my sights on obtaining a job in the publishing industry, and from my initial job research I’ve found that the most suitable job titles for me right now are assistant editor and associate publisher. Nine out of ten of these jobs are in NYC. And they are with MAJOR companies. I’m talking Random House, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster. Can I really expect to even get an interview with these people?

After some initial panicking, I’ve realized that yes, I am good enough and I do meet the criteria for these positions. I think the most important part about starting a job search is having confidence in yourself. Other than the obvious steps of perfecting your resume, learning how to write a captivating cover letter, and getting good references, the rest is really up to you. 

So maybe it is only March and maybe I don’t graduate until June, but I think that for me, starting early and starting strong will end up with me landing that job. I needed to get over the initial hurdle of psyching myself out and not believing in my talents. I’ve found that conducting tons of job searches, sending my resume out to tons of people, and building up a knowledge of “what’s out there” has been a great start to what (hopefully) will be a fruitful job search.