Editor Interview: Cola Literary Review

The weirdly normal

Greywolf Press, Land-Grant College Review (no longer in print), Harpur Palate, River Styx, dislocate, Fiddleblack, Paris Review interviews and the Best European Fiction series.

Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Toni Morrison, Milan Kundera, Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, Cather and Hemingway, Tim O’Brien

We hope we don’t publish material that is similar to other journals/magazines. What use would we be if that were the case?

We get a lot of awesome submissions that have fizzly endings. That’s disappointing for us. We’re all writers, and we know endings are hard. So if you give us one that leaves us a little breathless, at the very least your work will get another look.

We wish we’d written it.

We really prefer for submitters to address the genre editor by name in the cover letter. It takes a few seconds longer to find the right name on our masthead, and shows a level of care that “To the editors” does not. We won’t usually base a publication decision on that, but it’s in our guidelines and it does make us happy to know an author has paid attention.
As a larger issue, we ask that authors wait three months after hearing from us before submitting again in any one category. When someone resubmits right away, we return unread because it’s obvious she or he hasn’t read our guidelines.

I think most of us read the cover letters, but not until after we’ve read the work. We publish a mix of established and newer writers, so a list of where someone has been published isn’t going to sway us one way or the other. That said, we do want a cover letter because we’re interested to know who our submitters are. It doesn’t have to be anything long or complicated.

Our goal is to give each submission as much attention as one of our potential readers would give it if they picked up our journal. All of our staff members and editors take great pride in being able to find a story or poem that they can recommend for publication. After all, sending out that acceptance letter is the highlight of our jobs, and we want to be able to give as many people as possible the thrill of opening that email that all writers long for. But we also know that great literature speaks to you in some way early on and encourages you to find out why. This isn’t to say that a submission has to blow us away in the opening paragraphs, but it should give us an indication of good things to come. If someone picks up our journal and reads three paragraphs, we want to make sure that we picked a story that will encourage them to want to read the fourth one.

Every submission that gets a vote of yes or maybe on the first read is sent to the appropriate genre editor. They will then read it and filter through the maybes before sending their recommendations on to our editors. At this point, we all have a conversation about the work sitting in front of us, and try our best to work with the genre editors to pick the highest quality work that fits the needs of our upcoming issue. It can be a long process. But it is always a rewarding one.

We spend more time than we would like to admit doing those mundane behind-the-scenes acts of responding to emails and going over depressing budget reports. Our days also include doing more glamorous things like promoting our contests through Twitter and Facebook, and working together to build an issue that we’re all proud to send out to our subscribers. But the one thing that consistently defines the majority of our time working with Yemassee is reading through submissions.