Editor Interview: Alyss

Works that provoke

Quaint, Dancing Girl Press, Thank You for Swallowing, Anthropoid, Dreginald, The Fem and Muzzle

Anne Rice, JK Rowling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lucille Clifton, Anne Carson, Eula Biss, Jeanann Verlee, Amy Hempel, Diablo Cody, Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, Dee Rees

We honestly try to publish works that aren't similar to what's being published elsewhere.

Please read prior issues before submitting. That way you'll get a good indication as to what types of work we're into. If you decide we might be a good fit for your home please follow the word and page length restrictions.

An ideal submission is well crafted, well written, engaging and provokes an emotional response (negative or positive) and deals with a subject matter/POV/technique that we haven't seen a few hundred times before.

Poets often make the mistake of putting more than one poem on a page. And prose writers often include their names in the header which we discourage as we read blindly.

We don't read CLs or bios until after we've decided to accept a piece so they don't matter that much in deciding what to publish. However, once we've decided on a piece we try to find out as much info about the author as possible because it's fun to learn about new writers we're excited about.

You can pretty much tell if a piece is going to work or not in the first few pages/stanzas but I always read all the way through in case there's a surprise. Also, I suffer from a serious case of FOMO so...

Each piece is read by at least three readers before a decision is made.

Wake up, work 9 to 5, read a book on the commute home, eat dinner, work on Alyss related stuff (reading subs, assigning subs, website work, etc.) for an hour or two, work on personal writing projects til midnight and then go to sleep.