Editor Interview: Ecotone Magazine

place, reimagined

Orion, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Granta, Missouri Review, Sycamore Review, New England Review, Florida Review, Southeast Review. We are also deeply invested in Lookout Books, the literary press that was founded by combining the editorial strengths of Ecotone and the in-house production and design capabilities of our Publishing Laboratory.

Ecotone Journal is unique in the way that it is run by two communities: graduate students obtaining their MFA degrees at UNCW and a small staff of super-talented editors. Ecotone Journal is committed to excellence in literature and design and it realizes these goals through the help of young writers as well as seasoned professionals. It's a balance that shows itself not only in the publication, but in the graduate class offered to those students ready to work
Ecotone is also special since it's the first home and incubator for stories, poems, and essays of Lookout Books authors.

Read a couple issues of Ecotone. See what we like, how we've changed over the years. Pay attention to our themed issues.
Love your work as much as you want others to love it, then send it to us.

Depends on the genre, but usually, the ideal submission does a few things:
1. Makes us wish we wrote that
2. Makes us wish we could have a whole book of that
3. Makes the class of readers talk and talk about how good it is. Keeps them talking at the bar, after class.

Not much. The best cover letters are short, to the point, and relevant to the submission. We usually look closer at cover letters once we really, really love a piece, and by then you've hooked us anyhow.

Our readers generally get through everything. However, there are pieces that show within the first page/paragraph/poem that they won't pan out, or they're just not what we're looking for. Once a piece gets passed onto an editor, though, everything is read front to back.

After readers pass on pieces to their genre editors we have editorial class meetings in which we all read the piece and have a discussion. These can get pretty heated. Sometimes things we really, really love end up not making it or not being the best fit.

For me? Coffee, get mail, log submissions, organize Submittable submissions, log orders, answer emails, send out orders, update social media, email class, production schedule business, meetings, etc.
It depends for the other editors. But we're all MFA students so our day-in-the-life cams show a lot of going to class, writing, and generally not sleeping.