Editor Interview: re•mediate lit mag

Broadly, CPU-assisted lit

Any magazines that invite and go the extra mile for experimental work. I tried to do this for Black Warrior Review, when I worked there (much love for them!). DIAGRAM does this, too. Ghost Proposal!
All the journals and presses also welcoming to computational and computer-generated work: MIT Press, Ensemble Park, AI Literary Review, Taper, Trick House Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and many others.

My biggest influences early on were poets who were radically tapped-in to 'what was happening' — Carolyn Forché, Ernesto Cardenal, Muriel Rukeyser — or opening up possibilities in language I didn't know were there, like the Oulipo, Robyn Schiff, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Paisley Rekdal, Valerie Wallace, Jay David Bolter, and Elissa Washuta. I should speak as well of my friends, Acie Clark, Kate DeLay, Javier Sandoval, Aurielle Marie, Jane Morton, and Grey Wolfe Lajoie. In my research, I've been struck by the poetry in the first 15 years of Ms. Magazine, and some unlikely poetry by celebrities like Jewel and Jimmy Carter.

I'm in a small niche of publications that invite digitally-inflected work, but what sets re•mediate apart is that it broadly construes this inflection. I'm not *just taking AI-generated poetry, or *just computational work (thanks to Monica Storss for the encouragement on this issue).
Re•mediate recognizes that if you're on TikTok too much, your language is inflected by that— in the words of my prof. Mel Stanfill, some writers have "Tumblr accents", and Re•mediate welcomes writing cognizant of its linguistic positionality. At the same time, we're really excited to publish folks who want to make their poetry kinetic, who have used publishing software to overlay or concretize their writing— work that bucks left-alignment, linearity, and so on.
We also want to platform visual work: VR and AR poetry, video and audio exhibits, and so on.

Help us give your work a fair shake! We have a spot for both a cover letter (that's just for us) and a process note. We're anti-gatekeeping; we'd like for readers to have a sense of where you're coming from or how work was developed, whether you used a python script or found language.

The ideal submission believes in itself.
The ideal submission is aware of its situation in literary space.
The ideal submission is not a hype machine.
The ideal submission is not a doomer.
The ideal submission invites the reader to participate in its language.
The ideal submission teases these prescriptions.

Look, if your work doesn't fit in the categories of the Google Form, don't be afraid to pitch us over email or DM! Several pieces so far were a conversation that turned into an experiment that worked out, and we welcome critical making and process-oriented work. We don't believe in editing a submission into some sort of perfectly-worded masterpiece, but if you've got a concept you want to pitch and need to bounce the idea off us, we welcome that email.

Your academic credentials, previous publications or workshops don't earn/ding you points in our consideration of whether to publish or not.
However, we take a positionality statement and a bio, so that if you're doing a work that critiques or collages something problematic, we know the position you're coming at that from.
We want to give your work a fair shake, so if there's something you think we should know about you that helps us understand the work, we make room for you to share that.

We read each piece the whole way through, because often you may be working with a concept (disclosed in the process note) and we want to get a good sense of how well the piece is engaging with that concept from top to bottom. Our magazine is a digital scroll with click navigation, and we want work to be worth the two or three scrolls of the mouse it takes to get through them— plus, we don't take work long enough that we don't have time to read the whole thing. Giving it a fair shake means giving the whole thing a fair shake, but it also means reading the piece well enough that even if it's not for us, we can point a writer towards another publication that might work better for them!

If we really love a piece, we might have an idea for how to represent it on our site in a way that lets it shine or engages even more with the concepts of the poem. We have the luxury of turning a piece, for example, that's contrapuntal, by animating that process on our website, or letting the user interact with the contrapuntal nature of the piece somehow. If we're uncertain about the thrust/aim of a piece, we might query the author and say "tell us a little more about this piece," or invite a longer process note. We also galley every piece with our authors after subs close, before the issue goes up.

I'm a full-time graduate student, so I'm also doing research, reading, and classwork around the same time. I do a promotion schedule for each issue, and try to schedule out social media content a month at a time, so that I can focus on my work, but I check our submissions queue once or twice a week and try to get emails out to submitters within 2 weeks. I feel like I'm probably in full gear one weekend a month, designing the issue, planning content, reading submissions and responding to queries, because I want to make good use and respect my academic work as well.

We assume that the author was done with the piece when they submitted it, especially because a good deal of this work is computationally-produced. We're open to the aesthetics of the glitch, but we do provide feedback to authors who have pitched an idea and are thinking about the best way to express the concepts they're working with. The author *always* gets to approve the final version before we publish. The only major edits we'd provide, as I said before, are design ideas— I'm interested in using the affordances of our site builder, ReadyMag, to help the pieces stand out.

I'd like to do this; it's a little outside of my previous editorial experience, but when I do see an opportunity like this come across my email or feed I am thinking of which issues or pieces deserve that nomination!