Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: All good writing and art
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: All journals and magazines, university-affiliated or privately run, that provide platforms for high-quality work, especially by new and emerging writers.
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: It combines a community-building spirit unique to our Central Valley, CA region with a national and international reach.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Make sure to follow the submission instructions. Send us your work every year. Whatever our response to you was last year, we want to read your writing and see your art!
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: All we're looking for is high quality. Your work should speak in your voice.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: Careless proofreading or a failure to supply requested biographical information.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: Cover letters are not important to us, as your biography supplies that information. We like to know about your publication credits.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: We read submissions through to the end.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: First, every student in our Editing Literary Magazines class reads or views the submission and casts an up or down vote. Pieces that receive split votes require additional collective deliberation.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: Back and forth discussion among students, with only occasional guidance from the instructor.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: It's useful for publishers to be conversant with evolving technologies, for the sake of their own publications as well as the writers, artists, and readers they serve.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: We provide as much editing as we feel is needed, which can be a large amount. We do very little to no substantive editing of storylines, but we do a lot of careful proofreading and copy editing. We are more accommodating to creative license (regarding, e.g., punctuation) for poetry than for prose. Authors get to approve final edits.
Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?
A: We provide our own awards; all submissions are automatically entered, free of charge, in our contests for poetry, prose, and visual art.