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Editor Interview: The Collidescope

Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

Creations of logophiles.

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

Some of my favorite writers include James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Joseph McElroy, Garielle Lutz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alexander Theroux. Some of my favorite artists include Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Hieronymus Bosch, Leonora Carrington, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Zbigniew M. Bielak, Eliran Kantor, Frida Kahlo, and Gustav Klimt.

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

There are few publications, if any, that are willing to feature innovative and uncompromising works. Some publications pay lip service to this idea without reaching beyond the usual parameters. The Collidescope is also willing to publish writing of any length instead of the measly several thousand words or so that other publications restrict submissions to.

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

We're looking for two main things: a high degree of surreality and a high degree of linguistic consciousness. What I mean by the latter is the idea of pairing words together for their visual and phonetic wonder.
There are two essays that can provide further clarification. Here's one by Gariell Lutz: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-sentence-is-a-lonely-place/
And one by Paul West: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/15/books/in-defense-of-purple-prose.html

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

More often than not, submitters have little to no understanding of our aesthetic and so they send commercial, traditional writing. It's worth taking the time to read at least a few poems or a couple of fiction pieces to better understand what The Collidescope is all about. Otherwise, submitters are wasting their time and the team's.

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

Cover letters, personal information, previous publication credits, and the like couldn't be more meaningless. We only care about the words. Great art can come from anyone, but not everyone.

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

Word-pairings and sentence structures are more important to us than "plot" or "characters." Thus, it's easy to tell whether a piece is a right fit or not within the span of reading the first page or even the first paragraph.

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