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Editor Interview: Foreign Literary

This interview is provided for archival purposes. The listing is not currently active.

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

A: Life lived elsewhere lit

Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?

A: This is a tough one as being based in South Korea we feel cut off from the world of publishers and publications. We're sort of old-fashioned with our tastes though, and appreciate The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harpers, those big names which are still at the forefront of publishing.

Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?

A: I'm big into the modernists for all literature. For me, on writers living elsewhere, it's Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, that inspired so much of my desiring an expat life, who began to show me what it was like to live and exist in another world. It's also the candidness and vulnerability in authors like Gilbert, in her very human confrontations and struggles. Also earlier writers that you read in Lit class, like Melville and Hawthorne, or others you'll find flipping through the anthologies. I'm reading Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek right now, and am in love with her content, voice and style. Some of it is just breathtaking.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: We're pretty new to the game, so are hungry to read everything you send to us. We won't make you wait too long for a response--maybe a few weeks and you'll hear from us. If there's others publishing a similar theme we'd love to read it also, so let us know.

Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?

A: Break our hearts and make us laugh and charm us with your style.

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: We were talking about submissions a couple of nights ago, and I remember thinking about a piece, "The writing is good, but a bomb doesn't go off." I think there needs to be a reaction, something big that makes us have a response--the bigger the better. Whether that be in laughter, fear, exhilaration, or sorrow. The ideal submission grabs us with some sort of intrigue, and keeps us there, teetering on the edge, and then also explosions. Due to the theme of our journal, it should also involve living somewhere else, or anything connected to this.

Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?

A: They just fail to look at our theme and send us things that have nothing to do with it.

Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?

A: Yes, a good author bio is hard to ignore, but many times the author has claimed hundreds of publications and we've found the work not for us. So the pub list/bio can raise our expectations / hopes a little at first, but by no means dictates our decision.

Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?

A: We are different. I will sometimes read a page or even a half of a page and if it hasn't gripped me or interested me I'll pass on it. The other two editors are generally more forgiving and will give something more of a chance.

Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?

A: Primarily we want the piece to fit the theme and to be "literature", by which I mean the piece deals with the emotions and struggles that make us human and is well-crafted.

Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

A: The three of us are ESL teachers by day, so we teach Korean college students how to use the present progressive tense and what not.
Regarding our roles as editors: we three read each piece and keep notes in a shared document. Then we meet once a week or so to discuss the submissions and discuss the merits and fit of each piece and make a decision.

Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?

A: We have chosen to print our journal because we like to hold books.
I don't like to read literature on my computer. The Kindle is okay, but really a book is so, so nice. In part we read literature because we don't want to be scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. We keep a Facebook and Instagram page, and try to do some advertising work on there, but for the most part we feel that the world of literature still belongs in books--archaic perhaps, and we have a Kindle issue as well.

Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?

A: We don't really have much time for many edits. If we receive the submission early enough we may request some edits, but nothing too major, and we'll ask the author to make the changes. We will do minor line editing and proofreading before the final print, and the author can approve of final edits.

Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?

A: We're only beginning but we would like to submit for things like Pushcart prizes and best of the net, and whatever other ones are out there that we're currently not yet aware of.