Editor Interview: Invisible City Literary Journal

Specific surprises.

Our tastes are wide and varied. We are committed to finding work that surprises us, whether that means work that is experimental or that subtly subverts traditional forms. An important part of that commitment is remaining submission fee free, including for contests. We hope this lack of financial barrier continues to welcome new forms and perspectives in.

Read our guidelines. They're not weird or stringent but they're important. We don't want to disqualify submissions for avoidable things, like sending a 2,000 word story to a flash contest.
Read our magazine for a sense of our aesthetic, but also know that we're constantly looking for something we've never seen before.

Our publication is staffed by MFA students at the University of San Francisco, so "ideal" will vary as editors and readers move in and out of their positions. Our overriding sensibility is omnivorous. We've been described as experimental in our tastes, but we also enjoy well-crafted work that follows more traditional arcs or forms. Send us your best, and send us your misunderstood.

We read cover letters, but in terms of publication credits, Invisible City is equally inclined toward emerging and established writers. Our ultimate concern is the work itself. We want Invisible City to continue to grow in terms of diversity and inclusion, and we encourage writers to include any background statement in their cover letter that offers insight into their work.

We read all submitted work in its entirety; this is a necessary respect shown to our submitters. (The only exception is if a submitter does not read our submission guidelines and submits, like, a hundred page photo album to nonfiction. That's an automatic no, even if we've looked at all the photos.)
Two readers are assigned to each submission during a normal non-contest submission period, and if they wildly differ in their opinions, a third reader or editor will be assigned. When we're in the later stages of building an issue, more editors and assistant editors might read a piece. Even if it's ultimately a decline, it's likely one of our readers found something to appreciate about your work.

As I mentioned, we might go back and forth with different readers and editors if our opinions on a particular piece vary. We have to take the entire issue into account—have we already accepted something with a too similar theme or form? Now that we’re a paying market, we also have to manage how many acceptances we have in total.
This is all to say, if your work is ultimately declined, please try us again. We’ve accepted multiple writers who we previously declined, and we’re grateful they continued to trust us with their work.

As EIC, I have a more administrative task list than when I was fiction editor, and my primary focus is to make sure nothing is falling through the cracks. While the EIC of Invisible City is always the final person to read and vote on a piece before acceptance, I like for the genre editors to have the freedom to create their own aesthetic within the larger IC aesthetic. That said, I still love going through submissions as they come in. It’s a wonderful feeling to find something exciting in the pile.

Everyone on our staff is also a writer, so we understand the editing process can be a mixed bag. Most writers are submitting something they consider finished, and they might feel strongly about making subsequent edits. I don’t want to put a writer in the position where we suggest a substantive change that they disagree with, but feel inclined to agree with for the sake of publication. This means we’ve sometimes declined pieces that we really liked but felt needed some larger change.We have a copy editing process to clean up anything grammatical and sometimes for style consistency. We will pose questions or make suggestions on a thematic or narrative level, but we stress to our writers that these are suggestions, and they can take or leave them.I don’t care about the odd typo or grammatical error in the submission pile. These are easy to fix and not necessarily indicative of the work as a whole, though an excessive amount can point to a piece not being ready for submission. We get called Invisible Cities all the time. Again, this is not important to me or our readers if you’ve sent us a banger.

Yes. Last year we nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. We hope to nominate for more awards in the future.