Editor Interview: The Maine Review

fresh challenging varied

Plenty! The White Review, TinHouse, N + 1, Poetry, Hippocampus, Creative Nonfiction, Terrain.org, The Common, etc., etc.... We're always looking at print and on-line work.

We publish only one visual art portfolio per issue, so mostly we're focused on writing. Personal faves include Maggie Nelson, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Alison Hawthorn Deming, Marisha Pessl, Claudia Rankine. Looking at that list, I realize it's all women, which is kind of awesome, but wasn't intentional. I also love Richard Powers, Junot Diaz, and Ben Marcus, among others.

The biggest distinction is that we're committed to having 20% of each issue be work from authors with a strong connection to Maine. Either they are from here or live here now. We want to set that work into the broad context of English language writing from the rest of the world (which Mainers sum up, succinctly, as "away").

Oh, my, just the usual. Read the current issue. Read and follow the instructions for submissions.

It would arrive during the actual submission period, through Submittable. It'd be accompanied by a succinct, uncutesy cover letter that included why the author thought this submission was right for THE MAINE REVIEW. And, getting down to the nitty-gritty of things that make a difference when you have a ton to read, it'd be in 12 point of a standard font. That's the bar. After that, we want writing that demands something of us, as readers & want it to pay off if we genuinely try to meet those demands. We want to see aslant, feel uncomfortable, think hard.

We very much want to know if there's a genuine Maine connection, and the cover letter is the place to let us know that. Previous publication credits are not needed. It's fine to include them, but we're hoping that some of the work in each issue will be by early-career writers.

At least two people read every piece that's submitted. They create short-lists of the material they are most interested in in each genre. I read everything on their short-lists.

If we have a piece that feels like it is one intense edit away from being great, then we try to work with authors to accomplish that. We're lucky to have a consulting editor with tons of classroom experience who is able to do that with writers who are game.

As I mentioned earlier, for each issue, we have enough bandwidth to work with a few folks whose pieces need significant editing. We try to avoid line editing, though sometimes there are small changes that seem obvious to one of the editors. In those cases, the editors propose the changes to the authors, who (so far!) tend to be appreciative of the attention their work has gotten. We do proofread, but we'd rather focus our proofreading time on making sure the journal copy matches the submitted piece, not on proofing the submissions. When submissions are riddled with errors due to poor proofreading, they rarely get to the short-list.