Editor Interview: Third Coast Magazine

Prose, Poems, and Drama

Epoch, Field, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, McSweeney's, Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Tin House

Mary Gaitskill, Tony Hogland, Antonya Nelson, Junot Diaz, A.M. Homes, Robert Boswell, William Trevor, Melissa Pritchard, Mat Johnson, Caitlin Horrocks, Danielle Evans, Lauren Slater, Jane Hirshfield, Norman Dubie, Victor Lavalle, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Lauren Groff, Quan Barry, Ramona Ausubel, Jonathan Lethem, Jim Shepherd, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jenny Boully, Alissa Nutting

Our editorial staff morphs each semester, opening us up to new writers, new voices, and new styles of writing. We are one of the few university-based literary magazines to publish short plays in addition to poetry, essay, and fiction.

Read a recent issue of the journal. Back issues are often on sale. Go back and reread the piece you'd like to submit. Then reread it again.

Pieces straight from the gut, that make the author cringe to reread them. Possesses a fierce originality of voice and/or stance. No neat, bloodless submissions. Nothing easy. No imitation exercises. No unrevised flashes of inspiration. No excessive dialect. If there's a bird, or a horse, it had better be one heck of a necessary bird or horse.

Submitting a piece that a hasn't been revised or proofread. Writing a lot without having a lot. Writing after only having read narrowly. Trying to imitate another writer who has already done what they're trying to do. Ignorance of the literary journal market due to research limited to books and websites on Markets.

Previous pubs, great. Writing-related accolades, sure. Pets? Quirks you think separate you from other writers? When in doubt:
"If a homeless person has a funny sign, he hasn't been homeless that long. A real homeless person is too hungry to be funny." -Chris Rock

If a piece is messily written, our staff can recognize it within a few pages. A strong piece that holds our attention will be read all the way through, multiple times, by several readers, before being accepted.

Its relation to the pieces already accepted for this issue in its genre.

For whatever reason, we receive hundreds of more fiction submissions than submissions to any other genre. As we don't charge a reading fee, think carefully about whether a piece might be a good fit for Third Coast. If you've never read an issue or never liked a story you've read in all the Third Coasts you've seen before, perhaps you'd be better off submitting your own work elsewhere. The volume of submissions paired with the comparatively small size of our editorial staff means it might take us a while to get to reading your submission; don't submit a sloppy work that will be rejected as quickly as it was submitted.