Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: We particularly like The Offing, Birdfeast, Tinderbox, and Adroit.
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami, Kyung-sook Shin, Richard Siken, Jean Valentine, and Ocean Vuong.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: I think our clean, non-intrusive aesthetic, which pulls focus to the work.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: As most editors would probably say, read our issues to get an idea of the type of things we publish.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: Ideal in the formal sense would be a submission that has taken note of the guidelines.
In any other sense there is no ideal. It’s based on feeling and what works for us and the journal.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: Not reading the guidelines.
But specifically, we get a lot of submitters who attach a document and don’t give any other information, no biography, nothing at all but the file.
Or often we’ll get eight poems in eight separate files, which is time consuming to sift through.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: We ask for a short bio and a list of publications, but we also like a website link where we can learn more about the submitter.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: With poetry, we read the whole thing, but with prose we usually read the first few paragraphs, skim through the rest, and then read the end.
If I’m hooked after the first few paragraphs, I’ll read it all.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: We do all of our reading first thing in the morning. So we’ll get up, get a coffee and start going through the emails that have arrived during the night (we’re in the UK, so a lot of them come while we’re sleeping). We separate them into two folders: considering and declining. I then start emailing acceptances or rejections from the previous weeks. I always double-check before sending a rejection just in case I missed something or let something slip through that deserves another read.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: Very. We only take electronic submissions, which saves time, paper, and money for everyone involved. I also think that social media is imperative to reach a wider audience.