Editor Interview: SORTES Magazine

Jammy Diversions

Dalkey Archive Press
Prolit (Philadelphia)
The Shoutflower

SORTES publishes writing, art, and music. As editor, I'm deeply aware that my personal fandoms -- for Djuna Barnes, Max Ernst, Balzac, John Bellairs, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, M. R. James, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Butler, Frank O'Hara, Egon Schiele, Arcimboldo, Jan Svankmajer -- may have no resemblance to our other editors' or contributors' digs.

Of all publications, SORTES is the most like itself. Yes, fine, that may be hyperbole: there may be publications more SORTES-like than SORTES, but I still insist we're probably in the top ten.

Never just submit! Be wary. Read your work again, revise one last time. But then capriciously throw in something new, some spangle. Don't revise, don't reread. Be trusting. Just submit!

SORTES tends to like stories that are real stories -- with real characters, real scenarios -- that bend in unreal ways. We tend to like poetry that's cracker-crisp, shaved to the skin, rich and strange. But the ideal submission, of course, is like love: the work we couldn't imagine but, having seen, can't live without.

Submitters seem to have the unfounded idea that we know / don't know what we're doing. In fact, we know very well what we're doing, having ad libbed so long we know our unwritten play well. And maybe I do undersell us a bit: we went to school for this, we've gotten awards for this. But still, we're clearly making this up. We're not professionals; we're talented amateurs.

You cannot petition the SORTES with prayer!: nor resume nor passionate screed shifts our needle to Yay or Nay. We read coverletters last, if then, after we've voted. We love to publish an incredibly diverse range of authors and artists, and we do believe experience is important, but we're equally joyed to meet the previously unpublished. We are not professionals; we are talented amateurs.

Experienced readers come to believe they know, before the first period, how a text will go. In this way, they're identical to inexperienced readers. Realistically, sure, you can sense within the first few bites of a meal whether you'll be cleaning your plate. But some stories start rough; some take a while to find their legs; and while our job is to vote, our ethic should be to understand each author's intentions as well as ability, and this often means reading to the end of a text destined for rejection.

Discussion! Embracing! Temporary rejection! Contention! Wrestling! Friendships torn apart and darned! Universal embracing! Repeat.

I wake. (Am I representative of each of SORTES's editors? A question I think each morning at waking.) There's my phone. Coffee, nibbles. I try to ignore my phone. Submissions! I fuss with administration. I fix myself up and go to my Real Job. At lunch (now) I write this. Later, after work, in the little stone sideyard I call my garden, I will read submissions until the dark comes down.

We'll happily tidy up, noting hilarious typos and Freudian slips then begrudgingly asking the author if we can correct them. We *have* worked closely with authors to refine substantial portions of their texts. This collaboration is a beautiful, exhausting process. It's very wonderful and we try never to do it.

SORTES is currently treading water beautifully, but someday we hope to to swim for such shores.