Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: Writing that spans genres
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: There are so many excellent online and print journals. Big guns like Tin House and PANK and Monkeybicycle and Hobart come to mind. Of course the Kenyon Review is important. Then there are smaller spots online, like Spartan, WhiskeyPaper, and Cheap Pop. Wigleaf is an amazing resource for smart, interesting short fiction. Brevity is also superb. I like what Necessary Fiction and Smokelong put out there, too. I come from more of a fiction/essay reading and writing background, so these are places that I enjoy visiting. Our managing editor, Mahtem, also edits our poetry section, and I'm sure she'd have a huge list of other journals to add.
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: This is such a difficult question to answer. I'm currently really excited by people like Lindsay Hunter, who try to push the reader into uncomfortable corners. But I love so many writers: Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, James Salter, Aimee Bender, Amelia Gray, Barry Hannah, Shirley Jackson, Anton Chekhov, David Foster Wallace, Julio Cortazar, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Carol Shields. I really admire Haruki Murakami's short fiction quite a bit. One of the best story collections I read this year was Julia Elliott's The Wilds. And Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams was such an amazing essay collection from this year. For poets, Mary Ruefle is one of the magazine's favorites, for sure. Matthew Dickman, Jamaal May, too.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: The goal of Atlas and Alice is to focus on work that blurs genre, whether that's a story or poem that takes on an interesting form (like, for example, an academic bibliography), or an essay that flows in a lyrical nature. While, yes, we're publishing fiction, CNF, and poetry, what we're looking for is work that meets at unusual intersections. We take our name from the ATLAS and ALICE experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and we love the idea of combining something like science and literature. Like we say on our website: "We like things that meet, conjoin, dance, rebound, explode. Bring two things together; see what happens."
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Give us something that doesn't fit into one category, if possible. We like weird, but we also like funny and heartfelt. Check out what we've already published in our inaugural issue (or in the more recent pieces we've added to the site) to get an idea of what we're looking for.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: There's no such thing for us. We're always hoping to be surprised by what appears in our inbox.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: We want the work to speak to us, so we don't ask for a cover letter. A great story, essay, or poem stands on its own.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: Pieces are generally read by four or five people before being accepted, from initial readers to genre editors and folks like myself. On the flip side, we also make an effort to have everything pass through, at minimum, two people before we decline.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: I began as one of the magazine's fiction editors, and moved into the EIC position when our founder, Brendan Todt, decided to take a break. My daily life with Atlas and Alice consists of emailing with Mahtem, our managing editor, to make sure pieces are being formatted for publication, and checking to see how submissions are coming along. I'll put writers in direct contact with editors to work on pieces we're interested in accepting. And I'll do small updates to the site, when needed (Mahtem takes care of 90% of our site and design). Everyone involved in the magazine lives all over the world, so we pretty much function through electronic communication. If you check our masthead, you'll see that I also fill the role of "Social Media Extraordinaire," so I'm the voice behind our Twitter and Facebook accounts, too.