Editor Interview: Adventitious

What grows where it can't

Strange Horizons
Clarkesworld
Otherside Spec
Deadlands
Foofaraw Press
Flash Fiction Online
Uncanny
Trollbreath
HAD
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
McSweeney's
Electric Lit

Kurt Vonnegut
Shirley Jackson
Stephen King
Tananarive Due
N.K. Jemisin
John Wiswell
T. Kingfisher
Kelly Link
Carmen Maria Machado
Karen Russell
George Saunders
Ted Chiang
Wole Talabi
Aimee Bender
Ray Bradbury
Victor LaValle
Mariana Enriquez
Brian Evenson
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Ursula K. Le Guin
Octavia E. Butler
Rivers Solomon
P. Djèlí Clark
Nghi Vo
Italo Calvino
Samanta Schweblin
Cristina Rivera Garza
Stuart Turton

The range of moods, emotions, styles, and subgenres. A single issue might have a thoughtful farmer upholding local traditions for a crashed alien craft alongside a lesbian assassin with a brain-patch-addicted mark on Jupiter. I love putting seemingly incongruous stories next to each other to tease out the surprising similarities. To see what connections can be made between different flavors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and magical realism.
The magazine's title comes from botany, regarding roots that grow from stems or leaves. In other words, not where you'd expect them. I'm looking for stories, characters, and events that come from unexpected places or head into territory they "don't belong."

Read at least three stories from a single issue.
Don't self-reject because you don't think your story "fits."

Something strange or intriguing shows up pretty quickly. Weirdness is not apologized for or explained away, but there's more depth than simply curiosity. Writing is confident, no matter its style. Be lyrical, blunt, or sharp, but give me a voice that's memorable.

It's just me editing, so our submission window is admittedly quite tight. Our cap is usually either 200 or 300, and that fills up usually within a few hours. I know! It's frustrating.
Also, you should genuinely never take a rejection from me personally (and I hope writers don't). It's exceedingly rare that I reject a story because it's "not good," and far more likely that it's simply not the right fit.

I don't. Writers should feel free to list their previous publication credits and/or who they are as a writer, but the story is paramount.

I read in waves. In the first wave, I tend to read the first five or so pages of every submission to get a feel for whether it has a shot. If the writing just isn't there, I'll reject and move onto the next wave. That's where I tend to read the remaining pieces through to the end to render a verdict.

Every submission window has more stories that I love than I can publish. Typically, I end up having to reject stories that I'm head over heels for, and in those circumstances it's a matter of fit with the rest of the pieces as the issue is coming together.

Well, I accidentally did this with the other answer. To expand on the waves of reading, I usually only reject a small handful during the first round -- work that isn't quite ready, writing that's clearly not confident enough for publication. In the second round, I tend to read every story completely, rejecting those that are underdeveloped, don't end strongly, that lose momentum, that simply don't have much impact. In the third round, I have to make tougher choices about stories that are incredibly strong but still have one or two elements holding them back. By the fourth round, I tend to send out hold notices and have to make the hardest choices about imminently publishable stories that either don't quite fit the tone of the magazine, don't gel well enough with the other stories heading for publication, or that I have to reject solely because I just can't buy everything. Then, I send acceptances and get ready for constructing the issue.

Authors should expect close to zero editing. Pieces should be polished and publication-ready by the time they reach me.
I copyedit all pieces for grammar, punctuation, and house style, and authors get to approve final edits. Occasionally I have developmental edits about how a line might read. Authors also get to approve or reject those edits.
It's exceedingly rare that I will provisionally accept a piece and work closely with the writer to develop it with more thorough and structural editing. (It's only happened once so far.)
I tend to shy away from sending R&Rs because I dislike the idea of a writer laboring to alter something without solid odds that it will be published.

Absolutely. I submit selected pieces for all major Best Of anthologies as well as awards like the Hugos, Nebulas, Pushcart, O. Henry, and other major literary and speculative-focused awards.

The project is funded by kind people buying subscriptions and single issues and/or joining our Patreon. We sell through the Adventitious storefront as well as Weightless Books.

I promote via Bluesky and Instagram, as well as talks on podcasts and at conventions like Flights of Foundry. My goal is to promote every single story I publish to find as broad a readership as possible.