Editor Interview: Johnny America

Oddballs, micros, humor.

Monkeybicycle, the New Yorker, the Lowbrow Reader, McSweeney’s, and of course MAD Magazine.

We don’t play favorites, but some of my favorite repeat writers we’ve printed include Eli S. Evans, James Spillane, and Kyle Sundby.
I love Pynchon at his funniest, Sedaris at his drollest, Chuck Klosterman most of the time, and Philip K. Dick for warping minds in all the right ways.

We have superior core strength and better-defined abdominal muscles. Our published work reflects our interests in both the lowest of lowbrow and more lofty literary larks.

Please read a fair amount of our recent published work before submitting and of course please peruse our submissions guidelines. We publish everything from whimsical reviews of lottery ticket scratchers to serious and sincere fiction, so while we don’t have a definable type of story we’re looking for, we do have a sensibility that you’ll only register by reading a chunk of our catalog.

Clocking in between 250 and 1,500 words, submitted with a brief but thoughtful cover note, proofread and edited to the nines such that we don’t want to change a comma.

They fail to mind our extremely explicit list of topics and themes we could do without and send us their rejects from The Onion or McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
A fair number of submitters continue send us college drug stories, which only work if you were there, or are in college, or are presently on drugs. It’s unlikely we were there, and we’re long past college.

We appreciate a brief note of introduction, which will help us gauge whether you’re actually targeting our little publication or just sending the same submission to every email address you could find on the Internet. Publication credits are fine but mostly ignored — chances are good that most of the publications will be as obscure as ours, and we’ll never have heard of them.

We read each piece from beginning to end, though we usually have a good inkling of whether it’s right for us by the tail of the first paragraph.

None.

Mostly I just laze around in luxe pajamas, drinking a coffee or a glass of wine depending on my mood, reading submissions from whatever soft surface is most agreeable to our house cats.

Just as much as is necessary.

From time to time we’ve done so, but most our our work is on the short-ish side of award criteria, so mostly we do not.