Editor Interview: The Hooghly Review

Literature, culture & art

The Belfast Review, The Madrid Review, The Piker Press, BULL, Stanchion, Poetry Wales, Poetry Scotland, The Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Bus, The Seventh Quarry, Porch Literary Magazine, Paddler Press, Roi Fainéant Press, etc.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Kurt Vonnegut, Ruskin Bond, Satyajit Ray, Philip Larkin, Charles Simic, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Updike, John Steinbeck, Roddy Doyle, Carol Ann Duffy, Agatha Christie, Premchand, Dharamvir Bharati, Shrilal Shukla, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Shih-Li Kow, François Bereaud, etc.

Our heart, humour, aesthetics, and attention for detail.

Think of it like sharing your most personal secret with a friend. We care for your work and are grateful you chose us, whether or not we end up publishing you.

It should make me stop everything else and finish reading it. And then come back to it, and back again.

Some submitters just don't read the guidelines (which are pretty easy to follow).

Only that they are real humans, adults (except for our Wee Hooghly project, which is for creatives under 18), and are not disrespectful.

Even if we decide midway that a piece is not right for us, we read it to the end because we believe our final decision should be based on the entirety of a work.

We may do a basic google check to know that the writer/artist is real (we are aware that some real writers prefer to be ghosts on the internet, and we're okay with that), the piece is previously unpublished and not plagiarised, and the writer/artist does not have a history of misconduct. More recently, AI has emerged as a real pain for editors. You can tell a work has AI-generated elements from the looks of it, but looks can be deceptive too.

The Hooghly Review is an unpaid passion project. I am a college professor in my daytime. I devote the rest of my time to writing, editing, chores and hobbies. You can expect me to read and respond to submissions anytime: in between my lectures, lying on my couch at home, in the park during my evening walk, on the toilet seat, or when I wake up past midnight to take a leak.

Proofreading: always. We also go for copy editing and line editing. Substantive revisions are something we have been trying not to commit to lately. The reason is the sheer number and quality of submissions we receive. We end up having a full issue without having to offer extensive revisions to "maybe" submissions.

Yes. We nominate for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Best Spiritual Literature, Monarch Queer Literary Awards, etc., and are read for the Wigleaf Top 50.

We are a self-funded, non-profit passion project.

Social media, word of mouth, blurbs, reference letters, etc.