Editor Interview: After Happy Hour

Weird, well-written words

There are so many great ones out there! But if pressed to name some favorites: F(r)iction, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Split Lip, and Barrelhouse publish the type of stuff we love to read.

We are genre-agnostic in every sense of the term. With prose, most of our past issues have a mix of creative non-fiction, literary realism, and speculative--and we'd love to publish stories in other genres, too! Those are just the main things that get submitted to us. We consider the same full gamut when it comes to poetry and visual narratives, and we love publishing hybrid, cross-genre, and other work that lives in the borderlands and is hard to label.

As a general rule, we're looking for work that does something new. If your story or poem covers well-trod territory, we want to see it treated in a new way, or with the kind of emotional intensity and powerful language that compels us to keep reading. We're unlikely to publish a standard relationship story or love poem, for example, unless it puts a twist on the familiar tropes or really packs an emotional punch. We also don't get as much creative non-fiction as we'd like--some issues we end up not publishing any, and we'd love to change that!

Not taking their name out of their submission file. We like to read all submissions anonymously but a good percentage of submitters still include their names within their story or poem file. We prefer not to see identifying information about the submitter until after we've made our decision based solely on the work itself.

No. We actually don't even see the cover letter until after we've made a decision on the work since we read things anonymously. We ask for a third-person bio on the submission form just to streamline the publication process for accepted works but that's honestly all you need to include in that section.

I'll start off by saying that every submission is read by at least 3 editors before a decision is made on it. Exactly how much of each piece each editor reads depends on the individual. For me personally, I read until I'm sure that I don't want to publish the piece. Sometimes that happens in the first few pages, although it's pretty rare for me to stop reading before page 3--usually only if there are obvious, major flaws and issues. In any given submission period, I probably read 40-50% of fiction submissions the whole way through, and read to at least the halfway point for most of the rest.

Our process starts with editors reading and voting individually. If a work is a unanimous yes or no from 3 or more editors, it's accepted or rejected without discussion. Works that get mixed votes are discussed by the whole editorial crew and then voted on. If the majority of editors want to accept it, we put it in the issue.

It depends on the work. For prose, we always do a close proofread and sometimes request other sentence-level edits. The majority of the poetry is published as submitted. The few times we have requested edits it's normally for poems that use very long lines or deeply indented formatting, which we sometimes need to edit simply so they'll fit on our issue pages. Any edits we make are sent to the authors for approval before publication.

Yes, we nominate for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets.