Editor Interview: The Massachusetts Review

Literature and art

Ploughshares and AGNI, APT, Confrontations, the Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Poetry Magazine, Southern Review, Parnassus, RainTaxi, among others.

Grace Paley, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Noam Chomsky, Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, Tabish Khair, Edwidge Danticat, too many to mention...

From the start, we've had a commitment to social justice and underrepresented voices. We publish work from around the world--often for the first time in English--and try to promote emerging writers alongside more established voices. We tend to publish literature with an eye to the wider world, work that moves beyond the interiority of a single character toward something more universal or empathetic.

Please read our submissions guidelines and do not send work to us by email or during our closed season. We do have a specific aesthetic and point of view, and it's helpful to have read a couple of recent issues to know what we're looking for. We often receive work that's very good but simply not within our wheelhouse.

This is a difficult question, since every time we state what we like and don't like, we inevitably receive a submission that completely upends our prior thought. We do, however, look for work that is strong and thoughtful on the level of the sentence. For fiction, we are happy when we read something that surprises us, that takes a turn we didn't expect or experiments with generic norms. For nonfiction, we tend to prefer work that moves beyond personal memoir toward something more universal. (We rarely take memoirs, for example, unless they offer a lens on a greater social or historic moment.) On a technical level, we are most pleased to receive submissions that adhere to our length and submission guidelines.

It seems like some writers believe that we will read (or not read) a submission based on how clever the cover letter is (as though they were applying for a job). We are committed to reading every submission we receive, and often don't read the cover letter at all, unless we suspect we've published the person in the past. We're judging submissions based on the quality of the individual piece, not whether the writer has been published elsewhere. We see a lot of effort go into cover letters that would have been better expended on revising the text itself.

Having said what I did about cover letters, the most important things to us are text-related: the genre and title of the piece you're submitting; whether it's been simultaneously submitted; if it has been previously published (we don't accept work that has been). Beyond that, we try to read as "blind" as possible--if a piece strikes us as particularly provocative, it can be useful to know the writer's stake in the matter but that usually gets sorted out during acceptance.

It depends, in some ways, on the genre. With nonfiction, we can generally tell pretty quickly whether it's within our purview, usually within a page or two. Most often, when we reject nonfiction, it's not because the writing is bad but because we just don't publish work like that (for example, coming-of-age essays about summer camp). For fiction, we try to read at least halfway through--sometimes a writer takes a while to hit their stride, and we've occasionally worked with writers to cut slow or problematic beginnings (or endings). That and, as writers ourselves, we know how hard it can be to write anything ever, and we want to respect that effort, even if we ultimately feel it wasn't successful.

We read on three levels: we have volunteer writers, editors, and academics who read general submissions regularly. If they like something, they forward it to the senior editors. If it passes their scrutiny, it goes to the Executive Editor, who generally makes the final decision for prose. Our senior Poetry Editor makes the final decision for poetry.

A lot of reading. We generally receive around 2,000 submissions for prose and another 2,000 for poetry. With a full-time staff of one, and volunteers, this means a lot of time is spent reading. And that's on top of the production side of things: contracting for accepted work, layouts of accepted work, proofreading and editing, and of course the marketing and social media to promote the published magazine.

Because we have such a small staff, we really need a piece to be nearly perfect when we accept it. Often we suggest line edits (or as I mentioned before, cuts), but unless we've solicited a piece we simply don't have the resources or time to do a substantial workup of a single text. The author gets final approval of all such edits--we don't publish work that the author does not approve. Of course, we do have a professional copyeditor who does the final proof before publication, but that's primarily focused on conforming a text to our house style, and correcting typos.

Yes: We send work to the Best American series, and make annual nominations for the Pushcart Prize. We also submit to smaller contests where applicable.