Editor Interview: West Coast Review

Full send or die!

Puerto del Sol, Fiction International, Story Quarterly, Craft, Zyzzyva, The Drift, The Northridge Review, and Ploughshares.

For writing, we enjoy Sally Rooney, Min Jin Lee, John Steinbeck, Susanna Clarke, Isabel J. Kim, Charlotte McConaghy, and Joy Williams.
For art, we enjoy Tillie Walden, Arch Budzar, Dale Chihuly, and John McCracken.
We most love the artists and writers we've been able to feature in the magazine thus far.

We aim to be an accessible magazine. We want to cater to new writers, whenever possible.

We encourage you to thoroughly review our submission guidelines to make sure your work won't be auto-rejected. Then, we encourage you to review the free sample stories on our website to get a sense of what we publish. As said before, we would love to see you full send it. By this, we mean create a piece that makes it obvious you were fully committed to its creation. If you think anyone could doubt your level of investment, give it another go. Make your work the best that it can be.

Our ideal submission takes advantage of every element of the literary experience---meaning character, sentence, prose, plot, and pacing---in order to convey the thing it has to say. At our magazine, we'd like this "thing" to be something that matters, especially something that would matter to a west coast readership.

Submitters most often do not follow our formatting guidelines. We ONLY will read works submitted to us in modern manuscript format.

Previous publication credits don't matter to us, but if they matter to you, we'd love to see it. Frankly, we care more about your bio than the cover letter. We do also ask that you tell us how you find us (and doing so lets us know that you've read our guidelines, which we really appreciate).

Every piece is assigned to a team of interns (including both undergraduate and graduate students), and read in full by them. They deliver a report to their editorial assistant, who decides whether or not the piece will be rejected, read in full, or read in part. The editorial assistants then decide, based on their own reading and that of their interns, if a piece will be rejected, or passed up to the other editorial assistants. So, all pieces are read in full, as long as they are submitted to us in a way that follows our submissions guidelines.

An accepted piece will be read by a team of interns, their assigned editorial assistant, the full team of editorial assistants, and then our managing editors, who make the final decision.

As a university publication, we make use of the Canvas platform to distribute submissions and engage in preliminary discussions. As the editorial assistant in charge of submissions, I receive our submissions, organize them, and assign them. Then, once our interns have had a chance to read each submission assigned in a given reading period (we meet biweekly), I look over their responses. We ask them to provide a numerical rating of 1-4, with 1 being a hard yes and 4 being a hard no. I skim their responses first to see if there's any glaring concerns (which, usually, there are not) and then I read submissions myself. I then decide on my own ratings. Any stories where we are all unified on a No answer (meaning, generally, that our average rating is above a 3) do not end up being discussed in our meeting, in order to effectively manage our limited time. We do discuss stories that are more contentious, or those where anyone feels particularly passionate, or, of course, those we enjoy and wish to publish. If I do decide that a story is a yes within my group, I send it to my fellow editorial assistants, so they can read and deliberate with me.

As a university publication, we only have the bandwidth for copy editing. We do send our edits by the authors before printing for approval. We will edit according to an author's preferences as much as possible.

At this point in our tenure, we have not yet been able to nominate for awards. Maybe some day!

We engage with our published authors and artists on social media. As we grow, we are particularly invested in improving our promotion.