Editor Interview: Spirit Lake Review

Poetry, Short Prose, Art

Spirit Lake Review is completely ran by undergraduate students. All submissions are reviewed, voted on, edited by students who want to learn about the publication process and get involved.

If you submit a poem with unconventional structure achieved by special manual edits to the doc, and your piece gets accepted, please let us know some specifics about your piece. If our editors have questions, we'll also reach out, but having extra information about how the piece was made will be helpful to us when trying to preserve all creative liberties.

A piece that's packed with intent, that grabs attention, and has a unique spin to it.

Sometimes people forget to provide a brief bio with their submission. Also, if someone submits multiple pieces, we require all intended pieces to be attached to the same submission email which helps us stay organized and reserve the proper time and attention to an author's/artist's submissions in their entirety.

We do not require the submission of a cover letter, nor any publication background.

We often review 50-100pg packets of submission material at a time, so if a piece isn't sitting well with us as we review it then we may move on to the next one. That said, we vote on pieces as a group and review the pieces independently, so we review the pieces at our pace and discretion which is different for everyone. We all aim to treat every submission with the same amount of patience going in, and we also will rediscuss pieces that were originally rejected if we feel that it deserves a re-vote.

If a piece was initially rejected, it can still be brought back up and argued for throughout the publication process. Since lots of debate happens during voting stages and re-votes will occur, we don't know the final results of who's pieces are accepted until March when we send out the announcement emails.

Accepted pieces go through three stages of editing that focus on grammatical errors and spelling. After that, they are put into InDesign and are put through additional editing rounds to ensure everything is ready for the print issue. If there's anything we need clarification on, we will email the author directly to make sure all author intent and style is preserved. We will also refrain from grammatical edits if it is clearly a stylistic choice which can come up often with poetry.