Editor Interview: The Literary Hatchet

Curious works.

The Strand Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Shroud Magazine, Ripperologist.

HP Lovecraft, Eugène François Vidocq, Shirley Jackson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Erik Larson, Stephen King, Jo Nesbo, Josephine Tey, Oscar Wilde, Stieg Larsson, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes.

We pay our authors and artists for their works and strive, through a careful reading of all submitted works, to publish the best of the best short stories, poetry, reviews, essays, and interviews. When we find a submission with potential, we will work with that author to find the best edited version for publication. Our editors are quite good in their own right. We have a fiction/short story editor that writes fiction and short stories. We have a poet as a poetry editor, and a humorist as a humor editor. And we get better with each issue!

Give us your unique voice. We want you to not just tell a story, but make us feel the story. Make sure your work is perfectly proofread for errors and accept any criticism or fixes in the spirit in which it is intended. And if we don't accept a piece, it does not mean we didn't like your writing, but that this particular work did not fit our publication. Don't give up!

The ideal submission is a story or poem that catches us off guard and makes us feel something about the work. We like surprises, not just with endings but with authors who stretch us to learn about ourselves and our world through their words. Avoid derivative works and fan fiction. We would rather the story run long and flesh out the character than be truncated to fit our word requirements. Of course, the ideal submission is also proofread for grammar and typos and is in nothing larger than 12 pt. font. I guess that goes without saying.

A pet peeve is poets who submit more than one poem in one submission. We welcome multiple submissions by an author, but would like them to be submitted individually so we can properly assign them to an editor. We also need bios, and they really have to be under 50 words, 25 is best. Other than that, we are quite happy with the way authors and artists submit their works.

We require cover letters. We would like you to list the type of work right off the bat (poem, short story, essay, interview). We only read the bio when we accept the work for publication and are ready to include that information in the Contributor's section. We don't base any of our choices on a resume and while we think it is great that some authors are widely published, it doesn't matter to us in the long run. Our bio section can't really be longer than 50 words to fit.

We read every piece from start to finish. You never know when you will find a gem lurking.

Sometimes an editor likes a piece but is unsure of its quality or whether it works or not. We then go through a second read by the Editor in Chief (me), to give another vote on the matter. Also, sometimes a work is a crossover piece, a poetry/short story amalgam, so we assign multiple editors to works such as these.

Every day I check my Submittable.com account for new submissions and assign them to editors. If an editor needs a second read, I provide that and give my feedback. Most of my work is the design and publication of the issue, which we publish three times a year. My heaviest workload is in the month preceding publication. It can take over 300 hours to design an issue. At this time, all works are proofread again, and then the issues is proofread by the short story editor. During a typical day, I also answer about a dozen emails relating to the magazine from authors with questions or inquiring about their submissions.