Editor Interview: Lightscatter Press Prize

Poetry, multimodality

I admire Wave Books for their beautiful design and consistent editorial vision. I love seeing new presses, like Thirdhand Books (3rdhandbooks) and River River Books, as they come into being, forwarding a point of view about what matters in the writers they choose. I love Prompt Press for their innovative and collaborative work.

I love the authors whose work we've published, of course. I also love and admire the work of Rick Barot, Eduardo Corral, John Murillo, Paisley Rekdal, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Diane Seuss, Jill McDonough, Larry Levis, Natasha Saje, Kim Johnson, Jay Hopler, Joshua Bennett, Kathryn Cowles, Katherine Coles, Katherine Indermaur--to name only a few!

We publish multimodally, which means we develop an experience for the reader that extends the spaces in which they can read the poems. We have a highly collaborative method, with the author first and always, but also with a coder, designers, and artists in many mediums. Currently we are pursuing a collaborative relationship with a dance company, for instance, to create work that responds to poems in our newest book. We see ourselves as shifting the horizon of what counts as a page, and our books are proof of that.

It's not original, but make sure the manuscript is the very best you can make it. I believe so strongly that one of the most important things a writer can do is to read widely and across aesthetic tendencies. We admire manuscripts that are formally adventurous, that have a strong voice, that exhibit a sure-footedness on the writer's part--where the writer exhibits a strong and accomplished sense of their own project.

Fresh, original, formally lively and daring. Invites the reader to imagine again what poetry is and can do.

Most of our submitters seem to get it right, so that's great!

I always read every cover letter, and am interested mostly to see how writers represent themselves. As a writer myself, I know how hard won publication credits are, so I'm happy to see them in a cover letter, and although they are not the be all and end all of a writer's credentials, they do show something about the writer's experience and accomplishments.

I always read a substantial portion of a manuscript. If I begin to feel that the manuscript isn't right, I read a little further. If I still feel that way, I move to the middle of the manuscript to see what's happening there. If the middle gives me new information about the quality, overall, of the manuscript, I'll resume reading until I have a stronger sense that it should move on in our (tiered) reading process, or isn't quite ready, or right for us.

We publish through our annual competition. We read every manuscript that comes in, in an initial screening. From there, we compose a long list, which we forward to the second set of readers. The second set of readers come up with a short list--usually 10-12 manuscripts--that we forward to our competition judge.

I try not to read too many manuscripts in one sitting, because it's easy for attention to flag and aesthetic judgment to get less consistent. When we're reading, it's exciting, though, to allow the manuscripts to create a new space and to enter a new verbal world. It's a lot of work and it's also a real privilege.

We do collaborative editing with the author, once the work is accepted and we have an agreement. It's my strong belief that our authors have the final say about their poems, but I do think it's a valuable thing to have feedback on even already excellent work. With each of our authors I've spent several hours over three or four sessions, discussing the order of the manuscript, specific editing suggestions, and so forth. Then the author takes that feedback and their own best understandings of what's going on in the manuscript, and produces a final edited copy, and at that point, we start layout and design. Multiple opportunities for input and feedback all the way through. I think this is a value Lightscatter Press offers its authors.

Yes! I collaborate with each author on suggested post-publication prizes, and typically submit each book to several.