Editor Interview: Sonora Review

Innovative F/P/CNF

DIAGRAM, Spork Press, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, The Volta, Ploughshares, Tin House, Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, Fairy Tale Review, Missouri Review, Unstuck, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Fence

Kate Bernheimer, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Joni Tevis, Salman Rushdie, Ander Monson, Aurelie Sheehan, Manuel Munoz, Lucy Corin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Jonathan Safran Foer, Annie Dillard, Dinty Moore, John McPhee, Claudie Rankin, Joan Didion, Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, C. D. Wright, Italo Calvino, Kevin Brockmeier, Jenny Boully, Pablo Neruda, Clarice Lispector, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, George Saunders, Steven Millhauser, Joy Williams, Lydia Millet

Our editorial staff is a one-year constitution, meaning every two issues, our taste-testers get swapped out. Traditionalists give the baton to experimentalists, experimentalists to formalists, formalists to lyricists, lyricists to minimalists, etc. We are a kinetic publication with an always-evolving nucleus of staffers. If you didn't get published in 2013, try again; the alumni are loooong gone.

DON'T read our previous issues. Well, read them, sure, we'd like to get some of these back issues out of our closet, but really, it might only confuse you if you use our previous issues as a basis for your next submission since we have such a quick editorial turnover. We tend to skew toward formally innovative work because that's the emphasis of the MFA program at the University of Arizona (think Ander Monson, Kate Bernheimer, Josh Wilkinson). Just send along your best work!

It should be spare, not swollen. It should be sincere, not precious. Formal ambition is good, but it should either a) be formally excellent -or- b) triumphantly own its failures as a form (nothing in between). It should be astonishingly human (or eerily cyborg). It should not remind us explicitly of something we've read before (no imitations), but rather, it should be innovative but harbor nuanced echoes of the things that inspire you.

Be sure to submit to the right category (fiction, poetry, or nonfiction), and there's no need to withdraw your submission and re-submit (thereby accruing another reading fee) for small edits, formatting, or typos. If we like your work enough, we'll ask for those kinds of edits.

We want to know about your previous publications -- this gives us an idea of your aesthetic up front. A word count of the piece is also nice. Keep personal information to a minimum. There is something honest and endearing about letting the work speak for itself. No matter your resume, we seek to publish the best writing, not the best writers. The best story by an unpublished author could very well be better than the worst by a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Also, if you have many cats and they have cute names and they are your creative muses, it's probably best (IMHO) to leave such things left unsaid.

In fiction, all of it. By two readers. Minimum. In non-fiction, all of it. By two readers. Minimum. In poetry, all of it. By two readers. Minimum. The only exception is a piece of long piece of prose that makes repeated errors in an uninteresting (accidental) way as to render the submission incomprehensible. Our staff is dedicated to the consideration of your work as a whole.

None. The more method we apply to the evaluation of submissions, the less organic the result. Therefore, we keep our conversations about the submissions limited to its integrity as a piece within the genre it was submitted.

One of the biggest responsibilities of being editor is communicating with genre editors, staff, the blog editor, graphic designer, graduate faculty supervisor, departmental supervisor, undergraduate interns, financial consultant, etc. All of these people play significant roles in the production of Sonora Review. My major responsibilities, along with my co-editor Mike Coakley, are securing grant funding, advertising the magazine, developing new projects, organizing community readings, running contests and selecting contest judges, responding to submitter/reader emails, maintaining a database of libraries and individuals that receive our journal (and sending the journals out), AWP considerations, and troubleshooting a miscellany of problems that a lit magazine can encounter.