Editor Interview: Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine

all genres, all styles

Glimmer Train, Puerto del Sol, The New Yorker, among others

Flannery O'Connor, Yusef Komunyakaa, Shakespeare, Donald Barthelme, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), William Carlos Williams, Nikki Giovanni, Lewis Thomas, Edward Albee, Amiri Baraka, E B White, etc.

We accept writing and art/photography in any style, genre, or subgenre. While we welcome submissions from anyone, we especially encourage work from those living life's second half.

Read the past issues to see if your work "fits" (although we welcome all types, styles, etc.). Then produce a polished, vibrant, surprising piece of art that you're proud of and want to show to the world.

The ideal submission can be many things: shocking, current, nostalgic, literary, experimental. The only constants in what we seek are that elusive word "quality" and Pound's dictum to "make it new."

We occasionally have someone who submits more than the maximum allowed per issue.

We would like a short bio included that we may edit and include after the contributor's work. It should list publication credits, although we may limit how many of those credits we list.

A team of readers (for example, fiction staff) completely reads every submitted work (without authors' names identified). That team then individually ranks all works numerically. They then meet to discuss and decide which works should be included for publication. Only the editor knows the names of submitters.

The editor reads and reviews all works, and he may consult with the teams before making a final decision on what gets published.

There's a lot of reading of submissions, a lot of formatting submissions, a lot of distributing submissions via Dropbox to the staff, some consultation on submissions (especially on technical questions). And, of course, an editor must maintain deadlines to get the issue online by the publication date.