Editor Interview: Third Wednesday

Third Wednesday, journal

Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner.

Those who clearly show their meanings through imagery, poetic diction, succinctness, and pictures that carry on beyond their frames.

We look for poets and writers, experienced or relatively new to publication. In most issues we also feature poetry by school-age writers who participate in Inside/Out, a program in Detroit area schools. We love to find new voices and publish them alongside fairly well-established authors. The balance between literary tastes and approaches is maintained by an editorial staff of varied backgrounds and publishing experience.

Every poem is experimental whether by well-established writers or beginners, but make sure your 'experiments' are not made for the sake of breaking new ground.
Study writers you like and understand. Learn how they work and emulate what you absorb, but don't copy them. Our web site is full of ideas and examples. Include all your contact information, including email addresses, at the top of your submission. Have someone else proof-read everything you send.

We appreciate submissions that demonstrate the submitter has read our submission guidelines and has provided all the information necessary. This is important as our editors read blindly.

Too often we receive work that is poorly proof read or that contains document formatting that has to be eliminated. We don't read beyond our three poem limit. With fiction, a story that exceeds our 1,000 word limit by too much stands little chance. We receive too little artwork and, because we use only black and white pictures, some of what we receive does not reproduce well.

All we want from the poet is the poem. Selection is made by seeing the poems only, not the gender, locale, or publishing history of the submitter. We do have a space on our submission forms for a short bio or cover letter and we enjoy reading them. We do not publish these in the magazine but we do feature some of them on our website.

What we receive is read by a staff of associate editors who are experienced writers, editors, teachers, or published authors who are expected to read an entire piece before offering an opinion.

Occasionally our editors make suggestions which are forwarded to the the author. The authors evaluate our suggestions and do their own revisions if they agree with us. We may sugggest cutting paragraphs or stanzas, sorting out problems of clarity, or maybe changing a single word.

I and many of our editors read almost daily. We are organized via Submittable, which means instant access by every editor without any pre-screening. This allows us to respoind to submissions quickly, usually within a couple of weeks. Once a desision on a piece is made, I send the rejection or acceptance and immediately paste accepted pieces into the layout of the magazine. We do not accumlate submissions until the end of submission period. We want our submitters to have the earliest answer possible.

We do very little editing and nothing beyond a spelling correction without communicating to the author. Our editors occasionally make suggestions that can strenghthen a poem or story and if a decision hangs in the ballance, we work with the author. Our most common request for an edit is for a poet to change the order of stanza or to delete a final line. It's amazing how often we write beyond the end of poem.