Editor Interview: Places Journal

Urban + Environmental Lit

Favorite literary journals include Ecotone, The Southern Review, A Public Space, Oxford American, Black Warrior Review, Granta. I love getting One Story bombs in the mail. I admire the editors of Creative Nonfiction and The Common, and we've collaborated with them at Places. I love Eireann Lorsung's heartfelt work at MIEL. I miss Caketrain. I think Jacobin, N+1, and The New Inquiry have opened up important cultural spaces. Harper's will always be my bus reading.

Marilynne Robinson, Nicholson Baker, Barry Lopez, Anthony Doerr, Elizabeth Bishop, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass, Juliana Spahr, Rachel Moritz. And everyone we've published at Places, naturally.

We occupy our own zone: literature on the built environment. We publish hard-hitting narrative journalism; we publish peer-reviewed articles on environmental design in the Anthropocene; we publish cultural analysis by luminaries like Richard Powers. Any one of those articles might go viral on social media, spark an editorial in a major newspaper, show up on the front page of Digg, anchor an architectural history syllabus, get circulated at the Department of Transportation, or be anthologized in a scholarly book.

Read the journal regularly. I know every editor says that, but ours is online, it's well lit, there's a newsletter and everything. So you have no excuse. (Oh, and write a good lede.)

We seek writing that probes hard questions and that balances the high-altitude concept with a sharp focus on the messy, complicated details of lived experience, of real places and politics. Whatever the form, we value prose that is both rigorous and accessible.

There's no wrong way to submit. We don't get hung up on process. That said, we see a lot of unsuitable manuscripts from writers who do not seem to understand their audience.

Sure, we like to see a professional email. Clips and credits matter if you're sending an unsolicited proposal; less so if you're sending a complete manuscript.

I read everything through to the end, unless it's clear that the writer has not ever read a Places article to the end, in which case I am happy to reciprocate.

Everything goes through a rigorous editorial process, which typically includes at least a deep line edit and may include several rounds of developmental editing.

I edit articles in the morning, read submissions at lunch, and prepare manuscripts for publication in the afternoon. Unless I do it in a different order.