Editor Interview: Midnight Mind Magazine

Cultural Literature

So many good publications are gone and forgotten. Aspen magazine is amazing - someone should reprint them. I love the underground newspapers of the 1960s. Sumac was a great literary journal. Evergreen was, of course, awesome. I also love the local "Auto trader" magazine. Early Wax Poetics magazines were amazing. McSweeney's and The Believer are inspiration for us.

Well, the list of favorite writers is always changing as I am introduced to my authors all the time. Lately I'm reading the Russians )Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn) and some of the greatest "pop" crime novels (John D. MacDonald, James W. Hall, Walter Mosley and Charles Williams) at the same time. Loved Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. And recently re-read First Blood (basis for Rambo) and Nothing Last Forever (basis for Die Hard) just for the hell of it and liked both books.
For art, I was really pleased to include Deb Sokolow in Midnight Mind Issue 8. Her witty take on data, almost with a sarcasm and dry humor, laid out in a blueprint style is amazing. I wish the walls of my office were full of her work. Cliche, I know, but I dig Warhol and have only seen 1 Ed Ruscha in my life that didn't make me smile in awe.

Well, we hope you can actually read ours. So many publications either get too complicated or just lost the sense of fun. Reading as an act should inform and inspire, but it should be fun or we've lost the game. Even serious work should be fun to read. I hope we bring serious work and lighthearted work together and have fun exploring out culture in a way that readers can feel like they get the joke, not feel left out.

Honestly, read the magazine. I suppose this is true of all pubs that one wants to submit work to. We have a through line of culture slightly askew, so it's important to fit the vibe. I look a the vibe of the magazine as a whole and make sure it all goes together like a good meal. So sometimes people send us great stuff that's just not on target for what we'd include. We have some examples on our website for those who can't find the magazine in a bookstore (but you can order a copy online!)

There are a few of us reading work and we all say the same thing - I can tell 10-15 sentences in if it has the feel of something we'd include. So, what is that feel? Well, we are about culture and, with any luck, looking at it differently or documenting it. I love poems that have fun with the language, stories that deal with us as humans and the ironic surreal nature of just getting by the the world. It can't be too obvious. It has to be there but slyly hidden.

We always have a general theme for the issue we are working on. You'd be amazed at how many people send us stuff off the theme. Sure, we might need it in the future, but we are never going to hang on to all of it to revisit years from now. So send us stuff that's on theme for sure. Again, it helps to actually read our magazine before submitting so you can get the vibe of what we do.

I don't need to know anything about the person submitting other than how to get in touch with them. I don't care if it's the first thing you ever wrote or the 1000th time you've submitted the piece to try to publish it. We'll ask questions (sometimes we can't tell fiction from non-fiction and need to clarify what the intention is) if needed.

I can usually tell within the first few sentences or maybe first few paragraphs. Okay, I'll level with you - then I skip ahead and read the last page. If the writing is good enough for me to skip to the last page, I'm looking for how the author wraps it up. If that passes the vibe check, then I read the entire thing.

Without revealing too much, several people read the piece before we accept it. We actually start to lay it out and see how it all goes together. It takes a while, and we've lost pieces that are accepted by other pubs while doing it, but we want all the pieces to go together. At that point, several people read the whole thing to see if it works as a whole. The only exception is if we have a guest poetry editor, which we have. I let them have control over that section without any input from the editorial readers.

Well, today I have been: answering interviews from Duotrope, thanking authors from the previous issue, sending out some invoices, updating the website, making a video to try to increase sales and writing letters to prospective authors for the next issue. In the evenings, l read.
It's a cycle - it will be much more reading and layout in the months leading up to the release of an issue. Less Social Media and website updates.

Usually very little unless something is obvious, likely missed by the author.

We send a few names into the Pushcart Prize every fall but I have never heard from them. They might have died and just keep getting mail? Who knows...

Sales of the magazine and the occasional selling of family heirlooms. So buy a copy!

We are starting to do more readings. It's hard for a national pub because our authors are all over. We will reach out to their local bookstores as well. And we have a webpage for each author that helps with google results for their name. And we do social posts about all our authors. For the pub in general, we'll take out some digital ads. We keep sending copies to Poets & Writers magazine, but have yet to hear anything!