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Editor Interview: Nat. Brut Magazine

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

A: Surprising, engaging work

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

A: Nat. Brut loves McSweeney's, TheNewerYork!, The Public Domain Review, and RAW Magazine (from the 80s). We loved what was coming out of Buenaventura Press and PictureBox Inc., and love the big art books that come out of Abrams and Yale University Press.

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

A: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Ware, Joe Brainard, Lydia Davis, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, David Foster Wallace, Katie Roiphe, Stephen Burt, Mark Newgarden, Toni Cade Bambara, and Harper Lee.

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

A: We want to provide quality, engaging, dynamic, inspiring work from a wide array of genres and mediums in a way that values the potency and interconnectivity of these mediums, and to demonstrate balanced representation, especially among gender, in a way that allows all artists' work to coexist fluidly. We also want to do all this while leaving the smallest possible carbon footprint. The latter is a pretty tall order, but we do our best by offering the magazine for free online, and when we do print supplements, we try to do so as responsibly and sustainably as possible.

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

A: The common through-line of things that appeal to us seems to be a sense of human vulnerability - work that makes us feel connected to humanity in some unexpected way.

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

A: Submitters often ignore the criteria for the project their submitting to, and they sometimes submit non-visual material through email, which we don't consider.

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

A: The cover letter is basically an introduction to the writer. This being said, the tone of the letter is more important than a long list of credentials. We do tend to appreciate brief cover letters that tell us where the author is located, what the author does, and what the author is interested in.

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

A: We read all entries through to the end.

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

A: We tend not to publish work that is overtly racist, sexist or homophobic, regardless of the author's intent.