Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: unapologetic lit
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: Spartan, New Pop Lit, Autofocus, BULL, HAD, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, Conjunctions, SORTES, Vast Chasm, Pithead Chapel, among others for a variety of reasons.
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: Philip Roth, Colette, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Susan Minot, Colum McCann, John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, all of our contributors, I could go on and on and on.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: We very much want to encourage writers to take risks within their work. It might not be universally liked, in the end, but we want our contributors to feel like they have a space for their most audacious, challenging, unpublishable (however you interpret that) pieces. We believe flash prose, in particular, works well for experimentation, stylistically or otherwise.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Read the guidelines. We don't accept poetry, or multiple submissions at the same time, or anything over 1,000 words. Remember, we want to like you and fall in love with your writing. Don't give us a reason not to.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: One that doesn't want to teach me anything or convince me of a point or preach the gospel of whatever but instead bears something real and raw in naked prose. Make me fall in love with your sentences. Hold my attention. That's the game.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: They go over the word count or send us a poem.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: We don't read cover letters until after we've read a piece and voted to accept or not. That being said, having a nice cover letter is always better than not. Because we do read them, and we always remember. Previous publications don't matter in terms of whether we accept/decline a piece. But I do always like seeing a submitter's other stuff, if applicable. We'd be very happy to be your first, though ;)
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: I read until I get bored or can't understand what's going on. I know whether a piece is going to work within a couple sentences, if not the first line.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: We have an editorial meeting every other week to discuss submissions. If one of us votes yes on a piece, we discuss it at the meeting to decide whether or not to offer acceptance. That sometimes, but not always, depends on what else is in our queue or if we feel a story doesn't fit what we're trying to do with an issue.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: I open the submissions and read them.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: I think it depends on the type of publication. One shoe does not fit all. We're very excited about the possibilities and opportunities Substack has to offer, but there are many ways to make a literary magazine work.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: Sometimes, quite a lot of editing goes into a piece. We're very big believers in working with an author to strengthen the story; that's what an editor is for. You might think of it like a musical artist working with different producers on different tracks. You're trying to help the author reach a potential that he or she might not have realized exists. On occasion, we get a piece that we really love and have minor edits for, but it's almost always the opposite.
However, we do look for a quality of "finished-ness" to the pieces we accept. We're not going to accept anything that we don't think already works as a story.
Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?
A: Yes, of course. We're still relatively new, but we're figuring out how that process works, and we plan to support our contributors in every way we can.