Editor Interview: Under the Sun

Compelling CNF

Brevity, Granta, The Sun, Ecotone, The Normal School, Rattle, The Porterhouse Review, Waterstone, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Chestnut Review, Memoir Magazine, Ruminate, Narrative, Mizna

Loren Eiseley. Among the living, there are many, many, many. Some of them we have even published since I've been editor: Alison Townsend, Marcia Aldrich, Catherine Jagoe, Patricia Foster, Paul Hostovsky. Some of them we've published in the past, like Priscilla Long. Some of them were former editor Heide's favorites: Ana Marie Spagna, Jacqueline Kolosov. I value every author we've published, or we wouldn't have published them. Every single reading season I find new favorites, some of them up and coming. It's exciting to follow their careers and watch them evolve.
Associate editor Cindy Bradley adds to the list: Angela Morales, Brooke Champagne. And other authors: Steven Church, Melissa Febos, Kristine Langley Mahler, Ander Monson, Beth Nguyen, Lidia Yuknavitch, and, for fiction, Sally Rooney.
Associate editor Nomi Isenberg adds these: William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges, J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick. James Baldwin, James Agee, Annie Dillard, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Daniel Mendelssohn, Joan Didion, Abraham Verghese, Jeanette Walls, James McBride.
I second all of those, add Barry Lopez. And I say again, Loren Eiseley.

The number of creative nonfiction essays we publish in each issue (22 in 2021). We often, though not always, give very good feedback. We are collaborative and discuss the works among ourselves. We tend to choose works according to the mandate principle rather than the veto principle, i.e., if any one editor or long-term reader truly LOVES a work, we generally try to find a way to get it into the journal.

We look for something that is intriguing and well written from the first read, of course, but that also stays with us. That is one of the ways we determine what we will put in the journal. What do we remember by the end of the reading period? What troubles our dreams? Still lives in our imaginations? Becomes a part of the way we, ourselves, see and remember the world? If it passes that test, we often try to publish it. Though I still remember some of the ones we did not publish too, and to me that is one test of meaningful, successful, writing. We have the luxury of discovering what "lives" with us after a bit of time has passed because we only publish annually.

This is a very Platonic question. Am I a believer in "the ideal"? Yes, no doubt. But since the perfect is the enemy of the good, I would say we do not have one ideal. We will read you on your terms and wait for you to surprise us, interest us, give us goosebumps with your metaphors, make us care about you, see new things in the world, increase our understanding, be surprised by your insights and questions, laugh, cry, follow you with our hearts, and in all ways want to read you again. We will often respond to you and tell you what your work did for us, even if we don't publish it.

Our reading period is September 1 to January 2 (though for the last two years we have also run a Summer Writing Contest, on Submittable only). I sometimes receive emailed submissions outside of our reading period. I usually accept them and put them in a folder for next year, but I advise those writers to check with me again when the period starts, or to resend them in September, just to keep them at the front of my mind.
We do still accept emailed submissions, and these are completely free, and I know this is increasingly rare in the literary world. I plan to always keep a free submission option at the journal because I think that's important. We also accept free submissions via ground mail from those who are incarcerated or for whatever reason don't use the internet: P.O. Box 332, Cookeville, TN 38501. The reply time to ground mail submissions is often longer though, so I encourage folks to use the free email option, if they can, and want to submit free. Our charge on Submittable for regular submissions is $2, which is basically a round number that covers the cloud rent with a few cents left over. Some people prefer Submittable--or Duosoma, or some other submission cloud--even though they cost, because they can organize their submissions at a glance from that platform.

For regular submissions, we appreciate a brief paragraph of introduction. We leave this up to the author, how this will be worded, what she/he/they will say. We will read each work on its own merits and for how we all react to it, but, again, I leave it up to the authors to say what they will about themselves. This goes for what they say in their bios, once we publish them, too. I believe people should be able to define themselves as they wish.
Contests we read blind. For those we often get outside readers and have an outside judge, and all of these readers and judges read the submissions blind.
By the way, we read regular submissions blind too, though the editors do see the cover information. We remove that from the emailed ones before we send them on to our other readers in "readers' copies" that we prepare for them.

It's rare that a work of writing sent to us won't go out to at least several readers. But if something is filled with hate, i.e., all the bad "isms," we will stop reading and reject it. I have also read things that were so full of profanity at the beginning they were hard to read to the end of the first paragraph. I'm not opposed to profanity--I can be a fan--but if the author seems to be aiming it at me, and I can't hear anything else they're saying, that can be a stop sign.
Usually, though, things go out to multiple readers. From then on, it's up to the readers to tell the rest of us when they stopped reading, if they stopped reading. Nobody who reads for us HAS to read a work to its end: we're all free agents, and IMO if a work loses you, that says something in itself. That said, whether or not a work loses a reader enters our discussion. Sometimes some readers abandon a work, others don't--and advocate for it--and so we all go back and try to read it again. So, in our process, a work may find a "champion" with any single reader, and that reader's enthusiasm may help determine its course at our journal. This has happened more than once. A lot depends on how articulate and convincing that champion is: sometimes they can help at least some of us see the work in a new light.
We also do send out "rejection" or "declination" letters, but more frequently we send out "response" letters. Even when we don't accept a work, we share with the authors what we have read and heard in it. Often after you read our response letters, you do at least know you've been read. Our process is one thing I think we do REALLY well. With us it is rarely one person reading a work and rejecting it with the click of a button. It's rarely even a few readers reading through it and rejecting it with the click of a button. With us, it is often many readers responding, discussing a work together. and then responding with what those readers said. This, by the way, can slow down our response time somewhat. But with us you often get quality over speed.

If we do not accept a work right away--which we sometimes do--it may go to live in our "Maybe Pile." IMO, this is not a bad place to be. We send out our response, we tell the authors that we will hold onto it until the end of our reading period, and we encourage them to keep sending it out to other journals in the meantime. We just ask that they let us know if it is picked up elsewhere before we get back to them. Then, because our reading period is long, we let the work stay there until the end while other things come in. Then we see which things we still remember the most, what have troubled our dreams the most, and we revisit them.
Sometimes a work interrupts this process, because it keeps returning to us, haunting us, and refusing to live quietly in the "Maybe Pile." So we lift it out and look at it again before the period ends, discuss it again, and accept it. This has happened too.
So it's a somewhat organic process. I like that it isn't very rigid, and that our deadline for deciding is fairly far out. BTW, sometimes we've accepted things from the previous year's submissions too. Some things just refuse to stay buried!:

I'm fairly curious, so I often read everything as soon as it comes in. Then I will assign it, if it is on Submittable, or prepare it (if it is emailed) and put it in a folder to send out to all of the readers at the end of the week.
There are two associate editors for the journal--Cindy Bradley and Nomi Isenberg--and I stay in close, often daily, contact with them via email. Our discussion about the essays, among all the readers, occurs on Slack and via email. For the emailed essays, at the end of the week I compile all of the readers' responses to essays and send them out to everyone via broadcast emails. Then I, or Cindy or Nomi, respond to the authors, incorporating the readers' comments. I'm a believer that most feedback is useful, so I send most of it on to the authors. I do not send dismissive comments, because if an author can't act on it, then in my opinion that's not useful.

This varies. Some end up only copy edited. Some are edited more extensively--even revised--in collaboration with the authors. We work with authors though, not around them or over them, and before we publish anything, the author signs off on it.

We regularly send our entire publication to Best American Essays, and we nominate individual essays for Pushcart Prizes. We also nominate to Best of the Net.