Editor Interview: streetcake

experimental, innovative

Knives Forks and Spoons
Adjacent Pineapple
Hesterglock Press
3AM Magazine
Selcouth Station
Fly on the Wall
If p then q
Nostrovia! Poetry
Tall-lighthouse
Degenerate Lit
Pamenar
The 87 Press
Guillemot
The Emma Press
Eye Flash Poetry
Influx
Gallery Beggar

bp nichol, SJ Fowler, Sascha Akhtar, Eileen Tabois, Asta Papachristodoulou, Irene Okojie, Leone Ross, Charles Yu, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Emmerson, Maggie O'Sullivan, John Keats, Bernadette Meyer

We champion underrepresented writers, as well as more established writers. We offer a pathway into publication and have connections with other amazing presses. We welcome a variety of work that is non-traditional and do not require you to be university educated or previously published. We are willing to take risks. We also support all our writers and shout about your work.

Read past issues and our anthology to see what we like. We generally prefer non-traditional writing so if you write rhyming, very formal stuff, it probably isn't for us. If however, you experiment with form, content, presentation, style, blends of styles and languages etc - please consider us!

Something that surprises us, makes us laugh, makes us think differently. You don't need to do all of these at once! Also images that jar or fill our heads with something fresh and exciting.

Not reading the guidelines and sending us work that we don't normally publish. Also calling us 'sirs'!

We love to have a biog for the site and to learn more about the writer AFTER we have read their submission. We generally tend to read the work before looking at anything else. Even if we know your name, we try to focus on the writing alone. We have rejected work by writers we know because we have to make a connection with the writing first and foremost!

We get a feel for it quite quickly - probably in the first page for fiction, but we always keep reading until the end. For poetry, we read all of it as well, but it's great to have 2-5 poems to consider as we may like one piece more than the others.

Nikki and Trini both read the submissions and we decide together. We may disagree about some and go back and forth, but we always settle on the issue jointly.

We only publish 4 issues per year and when we have funding, we run our prize. When we get around to new issue time, one of us will often read first and makes notes on which ones we think might be a yes, maybes and then the ones we don't think fit well. Then the other editor will read through everything and we'll compare notes. Usually we agree but we may have a few pieces to discuss and make a final decision on. Then we set about emailing the writers, getting the issue together, ensuring we have the correct biographies and updating the site.

We try not to edit someone's work, unless there is an obvious typo. Sometimes writers ask us how we feel about an aspect of their work and we try to give helpful feedback and let them make the final decision.

We do not have the capacity to do that. However, many writers we publish have gone on to be published by other presses, some of whom were discovered in streetcake. Moreover, we established our prize in 2019 to recognise young writers creating exciting innovative work, which has been hugely successful and aided writers' development.