Editor Interview: The Airgonaut

Fabulist and surreal

Wigleaf, Vending Machine Press, Fair Folk, Unbroken Journal, Gravel, Dogzplot, Jellyfish Review, The Cabal, New World Writing, Live Nude Poems, gobbet.

Favorite writers: Jorges Luis Borges, Roberto Bolano, Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Virginia Woolf, Carol Guess, David Mitchell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Shane Jones, Michael Robbins, Tim Earley, Anne Weisgerger, Hugo Esteban Rodriguez, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok.

Unlike a great many other journals that publish fabulism and surrealism, I exclusively publish these kinds of stories. Innovation is my number one criteria. I've turned down a lot of great realism pieces, for example, because I'm only interested in the strange and different and exploratory in fiction.

Look at the Submissions page. I know a lot of journals say this, but I took a lot of pains with it and go over what I'm looking for in a very extensive fashion there. If you read that page before sending, there is no chance you'll not have an exact idea of what I expect and what I'm looking for in a story. Other than that, I'd tell someone to not send realism. It's frustrating reading through a submission waiting for something innovative to show up and get to the end and realize I've read yet another story about a relationship falling apart or a guy trying to "find himself" in the wake of some tragic event or something like that. There's been enough of that, I think. Or at least for my tastes.

Rather than describe, I'd be more inclined to point you to a couple of stories I've published that are the ideal submissions. Follow the two links below and read them and know that it doesn't get closer to the mark for me:
"Puppah Fish" by A.E. Weisgerber - https://theairgonautblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/puppah-fish/
"The Ritual" by Hugo Esteban Rodriguez - https://theairgonautblog.wordpress.com/?s=the+ritual

A few things: They forget to send a third-person bio; they send straight-forward realism; they send too soon after hearing back from me with a rejection. All of these things can be avoided by simply reading the submission guidelines.

I do want to know a little bit about their publishing history. There's a reason writers will allow journals to publish their work without paying. One of these reasons is to build publishing credits to include in their bios. Some editors don't think this should matter, but it just does. Having been published in reputable venues shows that you have a certain level of professional know-how as a writer. It shows that your work has been good enough at one time to be published. All of this information can be important and inform a submission in ways that are beneficial to editors. Anyone who says differently has probably not been editing for very long. I'd like to still be idealistic, but I'm too busy trying to find the best work out there.

There's no reason to read every piece to the end, and this shouldn't be expected of editors. Writers who are doing this work seriously should understand that it's important to grab a reader's interest early on. It's a necessity whether we prefer it or not. If you spend two long paragraphs describing the town where the main character lives, I'm probably going to move on to the next submission. I need to know what the character is wants, what the character is struggling against. Also, if I find grammatical errors in the first paragraph or excessive use of adverbs or a writer showing off on the page for no other reason than to show off, I'll move on.

I ask myself if I'd want to read this story if I saw it posted in a social media feed. That means looking at the title and possibly the first paragraph and evaluating if it peaks interest right away. It doesn't have to, of course, but if it does, that's an added bonus. Other than that small evaluation, I'm honestly most interested in whether or not the story is exceptional in a way that is innovative and imaginative while still being entertaining.

I keep my cell phone on me all the time, like everybody else these days. I have the email for The Airgonaut linked to it so that when I get a submission I can then flag it as unread. I do this throughout the day (I only get about five subs a day) and sometimes I get the chance to actually read a submission here and there. Once I'm back home from my day job (I'm a substance abuse counselor) I then sit down with my laptop and open the pieces, read, accept or reject. That's pretty much it for selection. Then on the last day of the month I go in and arrange the next issue and get it ready to go. I push the publish button early the next morning and there it is, the new issue. This is the process, and it's not really difficult at all, especially getting responses to writers in a timely manner. But I guess when you're only getting five submissions a day that can be easier. I publish ten pieces each month, so it's not as involved as when I used to have journals that published on a rolling basis. I greatly prefer the monthly publishing schedule.

Of the ten pieces I publish each month I'd say only two, maybe three, actually require very much editing. I ask that writers send highly polished and professional submissions (again in the guidelines) so this cuts down on the line editing stuff, etc. When I do offer editing insight it's most of the time either with the beginning or end of the story. I've never had a writer balk at any of my suggestions, and they do get final approval. I've been very lucky in that way.

I do nominate work published in The Airgonaut for a variety of things including Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web, storySouth's Million Writers Award, and so forth. And I love to see stories included in any of these. I just today had two stories I published this past year included in Wigleaf's longlist for the Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2016, something I'm especially proud of on behalf of the included authors, A.E. Weisgerber and Hugo Esteban Rodriguez, and for myself and my journal.