Editor Interview: Assay

NF scholarship & pedagogy

Assay is unique, though we see ourselves in conversation with journals like River Teeth, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and Creative Nonfiction. Brevity has an excellent craft section, Passages North has a great Writers on Writing feature, but we aim to go further, to elevate the critical discussion of nonfiction as a genre. We publish critical explorations of the writers published in these journals (as well as in other fine publications), past and present. We want to see examinations of names you would find in Best American Essays as well as classic nonfictionists.

This one is tricky, because who we admire (as a staff) isn't who we're publishing. That said, there are a thousand and one writers we'd love to see critically explored, everyone from Dinty Moore to Gretel Ehrlich to G.K. Chesterton. The field is wide open--and that's a great opportunity.

Opportunities for publishing in nonfiction scholarship are so thin as to be nonexistent, especially in a creative writing context. You'd most likely find these types of critical articles in discipline-specific journals, like Irish Studies or composition and rhetoric. We are interested in craft-based criticism, and we do publish it, but in our first issue, we saw Derrida applied to memoir, we saw the neuroscience of memory, we saw leisure studies applied to the nonfiction written by those in the prison system. We're also unique in that we're dedicated to nonfiction pedagogy. We're interested in lore types of pedagogy, but we also want to see current pedagogy applied to the conversation of creative writing (and nonfiction) pedagogy. We have a section in each issue dedicated to teaching, but we also have our In the Classroom feature, which includes a syllabi database and other classroom resources. In between issues, our blog publishes short pieces (that's also open for submissions) on "My Favorite Essay to Teach" and "Wednesday Writers to Read."

The only hard and fast rule is that we don't publish original creative nonfiction. We're looking for critical explorations of the genre. Beyond that, there are no rules for how formal or informal the work needs to be--we've published the spectrum. No topic is off limits. We welcome multimedia work, especially work that takes advantage of our paperless state with hyperlinks and such.

What makes or breaks a submission centers around the question of "what's being added to the conversation? What's new here that hasn't been said before?" We won't rule out work, say, examining truth and fact in nonfiction, but if it's just a regurgitation of common arguments in the field, that's not going to go very far with us. If you're going somewhere new and different with that argument, go for it. Our best submissions examine a text (or a grouping of texts) through a specific lens, whether that's a theoretical framework or something else. We're looking for interviews with writers as well--and what gets our attention is what you're doing with the interview, what new thing you're getting that writer to say.

Actually, I can only think of one instance where we've had a problem and it was just a matter of a writer clearly not understanding that we don't publish original creative nonfiction. Beyond that, there are very few wrongs: we encourage simultaneous submissions (and we've got a fairly quick turnaround time) and we're not limiting ourselves to one type of critical expression. We have segmented essays, we have narrative scholarship, we have multimedia pieces--everything really is wide open. But if you're not sure if what you have is right for us, send us an email. The answer is probably going to be that you should send it.

We do like a bit of information, but we don't need a huge cover letter. There's a space in our submission form to include some information, but that's optional. Previous publication credits don't matter, because most people won't have published the kind of work they're submitting to us. And we'd love to be the first place that publishes your critical work!

For myself, as the editor, I generally read the entire piece, because the majority of submissions that come in contain quite a bit of runway to get to the meat of the argument--and often, the strongest moments of the piece are at the end. But our process is that I read everything first and last, with our Advisory Editors reading the submissions blind in between. They are directed to read the piece thoroughly.

We have a blind peer-review process that starts with me, as the editor, and ends with me. Our philosophy is of a trickle-down editorial process. I read everything that comes in--I believe that's essential. We don't start with our assistants and move up. The submission comes in the email and I read it before I decide which of the Advisory Editors should read it. (If we are clearly not the right audience for the piece, I return it to the author fairly quickly.) The two Advisory Editors read the submission and write up a short bit of substantive feedback. Based on their recommendation, I return their verdict to the author. We either accept, reject, or ask for a revise and resubmit.

Submissions pick up at certain times of the year, particularly around the ends of semesters. Many of our submissions come from graduate students who have written critical papers for their classes--and these papers are often exactly what we're looking for. We have general deadlines of July 1st and January 1st, for the Fall and Spring issues, respectively, so submissions pick up then as well. Our goal is to read and respond to submissions as quickly as possible, because we recognize that your work and your time is valuable--this is why we encourage simultaneous submissions. We want to compete for your work. This process is what I've mentioned in other aspects of this interview. Between issues, when we're concentrating on our blog and In the Classroom initiatives, we are regularly soliciting and posting short pieces to the blog, to the syllabi database, to other aspects of the journal. Our goal is to keep conversations moving.