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Editor Interview: Blacktop Passages: A Journal of the Open Road

This interview is provided for archival purposes. The listing is not currently active.

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

A: Writing about the road.

Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?

A: The Coffin Factory, The North American Review, The Georgia Review, The Southeast Review, Cream City Review, Saw Palm, McSweeney's, Subtropics.

Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?

A: Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Janet Fitch, Thebe Kgositsile, David Foster Wallace, Daniel Wallace, Robert Creeley, Tom Waits, Jay Hopler, Jim Jarmusch, Frederick Seidel, Don Delillo, David Lynch, John Sayles, Raymond Carver, Sam Shepard, Kanye West.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: At Blacktop Passages, we want to share the experience of the road through poems, short stories, essays, novellas, and photography. We don't charge to submit, we publish online, and we distribute copies of our magazine along the U.S. Interstate Highway system free of charge.

Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?

A: Give us the beating heart of your story. The flash of images flickering by, distilled down to its most potent instances.

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: Poem, essay, story, or image, the ideal submission has a destination--tenuous and ever-changing as it may be. There is a clarity that comes from travel, a sense of self that blooms when we're in movement. Show us your moment of beauty in the whirling landscape.

Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?

A: Our submitters are doing a great job sending stuff in. We really enjoyed the writing and photography we read for our first issue, and we're receiving so much more as we gear up for our next. Our staff is small, but we're working on getting through submissions even faster, so keep them coming!

Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?

A: We want it as bare bones as possible, but structure and etiquette do matter, so we request the simplest of all style cover letters, with a short salutation and bio. The writing matters more than anything else though, and we don't much care to be wowed by an introduction. At the end of the day: don't fret. We're not going to read too much into how you said 'Hello' to us.

Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?

A: We read a lot of pieces to the end because we like to ask for new submissions or revisions if we see potential in an author's work.

Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?

A: We like good writing, we like honest writing and we like our writing to be about the road. Those are really all the evaluations we go through before accepting a piece.

Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

A: Every dozen submissions or so, we try to get together and talk about the ones that excite us. As we get closer to our deadline, we tally up our votes and work together to compile an issue that is as eclectic as the stories you've shared with us.
In our Summer issue, the Southwest emerged almost by accident, and we loved that our best stuff shared a clear, beautiful theme. We want to publish the best stuff we can get, but we also want to give readers a specific thematic arc that ties our content together.

Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?

A: By publishing online through Issuu and by making print copies available through HP's MagCloud service, we try to distribute our content as widely as possible--technology allows us to do that. Readers who want to feel the pages between their fingers can purchase issues on demand for a modest fee that only goes to cover print and shipping costs.
We also distribute copies of Blacktop Passages in interesting places along the U.S. Interstate Highway System, thanks to the donations of our generous supporters. This communal effort allow us to reach an audience who may not read literary magazines, but just might pick up a strange and beautiful artifact along their travels. We hope they're touched by the shared experience of the road.