Editor Interview: The Offing

Literature in all genres

We love all of our contemporaries! We think of ourselves along the lines of The Rumpus, A Public Space, The Common, Apogee, River Teeth, and Black Warrior Review, among others.

We've published some of the best established and emerging writers around! Our contributors include Faith Adiele, Victoria Cho, Desiree Evans, Lisa Ko, Natalie Lima, Aurielle Marie, Joseph Osmundson, Ploi Pirapokin, Elissa Washuta, Keegan Lawler, and a ton of other voices. Among artists who have published comics with us are Angie Kang, Judy Moore, Helena Pantsis, Ben Montague, and others.

The Offing actively seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in literary spaces, including Black and Indigenous people, and people of color; trans people, cis women, agender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, two-spirit, and non-binary people; intersex people; LGBQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, asexual/aromantic) people; people with disabilities; and especially people living at the intersections of these identities.

The Offing publishes work that challenges, experiments, provokes — work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions. So, send us your favorite work that you feel most proud of, and don't give up.

The strongest works leave you with a message or moral or emotion that you didn’t have before you read that piece. The takeaway should be unique and nuanced and insightful.

Unfortunately, we get a lot of submissions to the wrong departments. Please make sure that you are submitting to the correct department, and do not submit if the one you want isn't open.

We only use a cover letter to get a sense of your bio, but overall, we don't spend a lot of time with it.

We try to read as much of a piece as possible, but given that we get so many submissions and are an all-volunteer staff, we're not always able to read piece to the end. We typically decide if we want to continue reading by about a third of the way through.

A piece will typically be read by a least one reader and one editor, who makes the final decision, but some departments (such as Poetry) have much more extensive processes, with multiple rounds of readers' votes before the editors make the final choice.

Our entire staff is volunteer, so our editors work on submissions when they can, be it at night after work or on weekends or during lunch or while our kid naps. That said, we read closely because we take our editorial work seriously and we want to publish amazing pieces.

There are some pieces that are published the way the were submitted, but that doesn't happen often. Typically, prose pieces will go through at least one round of edits, generally no more than a "turn and a half" of edits. Unfortunately, since we are all volunteers, most of our editors don't have capacity to work on an piece for more than 2 turns of edits, so they're not likely to accept a piece that would need that much work. Then all prose pieces are copyedited, which the author gets a final say on what they would like to accept or reject, barring anything flagrantly grammatically egregious (unless it's necessary).

Yes, we nominate work for as many awards we can think of! We've had Best of the Net winners, as well as Best American Essay notable selections and other winners.

We're a nonprofit organization supported by our donors, and we recently instituted a completely optional tip jar on Submittable.

We're super active on social media, especially Instagram. We also send out a newsletter with all of our recent publications on a monthly basis and that reaches about 8,000 subscribers.