Editor Interview: orangepeel literary magazine

Thoughts and memories.

Since the beginning, I and the staff have been heavily inspired by the optimism of high school and undergraduate literary magazines. Aside from those, I look up to Shenandoah and the Oxford American, as well as my friends that I've met through the online litmag community.

Our staff members' favorite writers include J.D. Salinger, Haruki Murakami, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Charles Yu. Favorite artists include Ralph Goings, Judy Chicago, Piet Mondrian, Louisiana Bendolph, and Audrey Flack.

We love to promote our contributors. This includes artist interviews on our site and a "meet the contributor" series on our Instagram account. On Instagram (hi, I'm the one that runs the account :) ) I try to like and share our contributors' works both in and out of our magazine.

Knowing what publication you're submitting to can go a long way. While I wouldn't say it's a requirement to read our previous issues before submitting to us, I do recommend at least getting familiar with the theme of our current submission call, as we do consider adherence to the theme in our decisions. And I feel like it goes without saying that you should read the submission requirements of any publication before you send your work to it.

A striking, memorable, and thoughtful work that makes me want to either reread, if it's a written work, or stop and stare, if it's visual art, any time I see it.

We don't consider .pdfs because of some formatting mishaps we've had in the past. Nevertheless, we get a lot of .pdfs.

We don't consider cover letters or artist bios at all alongside works.

We receive a lot more poetry than prose, and most of these poems are pretty short. A shorter poem is easy to read through even if it starts off poorly, so, with that being said, most written submissions are read in their entirety. However, we have received some longer submissions (both poetry and prose) with red flags at the beginning that I personally have not completed reading. Red flags that could cause me to not finish reading a work include very clearly not following our theme or instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Any written submission over our word limit (2,500) will not be read.

For written work, we usually do a quick Google of a line to see if the piece is online elsewhere, as we do not accept already-published work.

After a deadline passes, I'll spend the hours between getting home from work and going to bed assessing what's come in through our form. Each staff member provides input for each piece in a collaborative spreadsheet. As a group, we'll discuss anything that we're on the fence about before we decide what is ultimately accepted. While this process used to take as little time as possible (resulting in a lot of late nights), we're trying to be kinder to ourselves and stretch it out over a month for future issue cycles.

As per our submission requirements, we'll make small adjustments such as spelling corrections and punctuation edits without asking for author approval. We have, in the past, reached out to authors for permission to make more substantive edits. Those have been mostly related to word choice, more in-depth punctuation issues, and line breaks.

Yes! We nominate for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.