Editor Interview: Qu

Lit that shifts the lens

Ooh! So hard to choose. Guernica and Apogee Journal often offer up literature at the intersection of identity and justice with a side of global conscience that's attractive. We're often crushing on Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast for their literary risk taking and craft.

We love Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, Victoria Chang, and Terrance Hayes - all poets who value precision, emotional courage, and carry multiple worlds inside them. Our fiction identity could be embodied by Lauren Groff, Elizabeth Strout, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Viet Thanh Nguyen: their work carries grief as a transformative catalyst and trusts the reader. We like complexity, emotional courage, and craft. When it comes to cover art, we are looking for bold, graphic compositions and figurative imagery that lends itself well to interiority over decoration. We like an emphasis on emotion. We enjoy all art that makes us feel something and draws the gaze, think Sally Mann, Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson, or Kehinde Wiley.

Most literary magazines draw a line at prose and poetry but we make room for dramatic writing, which we embrace as equal to fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Playwrights and screenwriters are welcome in Qu! Even though we have literary roots in Charlotte and the South, our issues tend to feature underrepresented writers on an international scale.

1. Read Qu to determine whether we are the right place for your work.
2. Polish your work. Sleep on it. Put it away. Re-read it. Work it in your feedback group. Then send it to us.
3. Gain clarity about what your work is about in one sentence. If you know, readers will know.

We love to be surprised. We love language that sings or breaks in unusual places. We like topics that teach us something new. We like the strange that is brought to our attention and we like the mundane when given a new lens with which to see it by. We like emotional truth.

I believe that writers are working out their obsessions on the page. Obsessions take time to process and then craft well for other readers. The one thing submitters most often get wrong is submitting too early - before they've had the chance to fully develop their piece, find its beating heart, and craft something that will last.

We prefer short, concise cover letters with few details. Give us the essentials and what we need to understand your work, if applicable. Do tell us if it's a simultaneous submission. We read blind so we don't see publications or credentials until the final phase however, it is a turn off to read bios that throw in everything including the kitchen sink. If you can't say it in 50-75 words, edit your bio.

The majority of our first readers are current MFA students, so while I recommend that they finish a piece, and read poems aloud and three times before making a decision, that may not always be the case. We trust our MFA students to develop their tastes and understanding of what constitutes "good" writing with the caveat that sometimes we have to expand our own limited definitions. All the work that makes it for consideration to the final round is read multiple times by multiple readers and editors, with comments passed forward by the readers. I personally, have never trusted myself to make a decision after reading the first page alone. It took me twenty tries to love olives, and now I do.

Every work is read and rated in the first stage. If the rating is high enough, it will move on to the next stage where it becomes widely read and discussed in that genre. Once a piece has reached this level, each assistant and editor can comment on it, discuss it, and rate it. Usually the work with the highest ratings from this stage is what we publish but our genre editors can make executive decisions, if something doesn't feel right to them. I read all the work in the second round so I can weigh in, if needed. Occasionally, I write personalized letters to writers whose work was not selected but whose writing I would love to see again.

I remember meeting a high powered editor in NYC who once admitted that if he was having a bad morning, all the work he read that day tended to also be bad. I've taken this to heart and read submissions at different times of the day to combat my natural low energy periods. I also like to read backwards on my list to ensure I'm not tired or fatigued by the time I get to certain pieces. Reading for me is intensive. I will look up definitions frequently, even words, I use regularly. When I'm tired, it's time for art therapy, which means switching over to visual art submissions as a form of restoration.

We look for polished work, however, each genre editor will carefully read for copy edits before a piece is formatted. Authors work with the genre editor to approve and discuss edits. It's not uncommon for each fiction or nonfiction work to have 2-6 small copyedits requested, or 1-2 for a poem. On rare occasions we like a piece enough to discuss substantive edits with a contributor. When this is the case, we will not 100% accept the piece until 1-2 rounds of edits to ensure the writer is on board and able to make the edits at this time. It's important to us that the writer is also happy with proposed edits. It is their work. We also have a line limit for the number of characters our publication can hold. This means that sometimes a poem with long lines needs to get wrapped, but most poets who use the long line understand this.

We do! The best part of my job is asking genre editors to send me a list of the work that they would nominate for an award. I already have my favorites list, so when the genre editors are in agreement, these tend to be the works I submit for award consideration. The works that I submit for award consideration, are the ones that live in my mind and keep taking up space. I've stopped reading them, but I can't put them down.

We have a generous donor who helps to keep us funded and we offset costs by charging a small submission fee.

Our website has recently had a makeover, which has helped to increase views. We don't publish every poem or prose piece online in full, but the print magazines are available to order. We promote our contributors on Instagram and FaceBook and their full bios are available online, even if their work wasn't selected to be published in full on our website.