Editor Interview: petrichor mag

Text & Image

Afternoon Visitor, ctrl + v, voidspace, Clade Song, Black Stone / White Stone, DATABLEED, A Velvet Giant, Word for / Word

Sy Hoahwah, Catherine Weiss, Jake Skeets, Catherine Vidler, Douglas Kearney, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Harmony Holiday, William Matthews, Sherwin Bitsui, Cy Twombly, Mary Ellen Solt, Linda Hogan, Craig Santos Perez, Iliana Rocha, Ross Gay, Xandria Phillips, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, James Wright.

We're not the only journal that publishes hybrid work , but we feel we are perfectly at home with the pastoral, the abstract, the urban, the digital, and the visual all in one. Too often, journals with vague guidelines seem to nevertheless have a singular house-style, and the work they accept all falls within that milieu. We want our issues to be unpredictable. Readers should not be able to predict the content of the next issue based on the last one.

Don't be afraid of creating something.

Whatever Sappho might've written after binging Battlestar Galactica.

A little nitpicky, but: to withdraw work please reply to your original submission email.

We specifically do not require cover letters, though we do ask for third-person bios. We don't usually read them until after an acceptance. Conversely, in the recent years, toxic "artists' are being held more accountable for their behavior, and we strive to do our homework in that regard.

It varies. If the first poem isn't working for us, it's usually a bad sign; however, we're sometimes pleasantly surprised as we keep reading. Overall, we advise wordsmiths, vispoets, and all blenders in-between to sort your best work up front. We want you to believe in your strongest material so we can too.

We usually descend to our secret lair underneath a former Blockbuster, make a circle of candles, bring the work up on a tablet or laptop, and chant "But is it art" for about forty minutes straight. After that, we know how we feel for sure.

You know those moments in automated check-out where the robot voice says "Unexpected item in bagging area?" A lot of that.

Minor concessions are sometimes made regarding spacing, but we've seldom needed to query a poet about a perceived typo, garbled meaning, or one crummy line. We send out proofs to all contributors prior to making the work public, so that formatting mistakes or operator errors can be nipped.

Our work has appeared in Best of the Net, for which we regularly nominate. We might start nominating for Pushcarts if prospective nominees bribe us with strawberry Kit Kats [Disclaimer: our editors cannot actually be swayed by any form of imported candy, even strawberry Kit Kats].