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Editor Interview: Witness: A Magazine of the Black Mountain Institute

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

A: Modern writer as witness

Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?

A: Barrelhouse, SplitLip, American Literary Review, F(r)iction, Paper Darts, Hobart

Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?

A: My favorite authors are Jean Thompson, Dan Chaon, Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, TC Boyle, Jincy Willet, Amanda Davis, Matt Bell, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Celeste Ng, Roxane Gay, Kate Harding, Elizabeth McCracken, and Louise Erdrich, off the top of my head.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: I'm not aware of any publication that publishes similar material to Witness. We are really focused on the American experience and how the world views it, but also in a profoundly personal and voyeuristic element of creating poetry and prose. Every editor says they publish the work that surprises them -- we don't. We publish the work that leaves an indelible mark on our psyche after reading it.

Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?

A: It's a cliche to say that you should send us your best work, but seriously, send us your best work -- and I mean in all ways. No typos. Formatted properly (regular 12 pt font, double spaced, 1 inch margins, your name and contact info on the first page, for the love of god include a word count somewhere). I intentionally don't read the cover letters until after I've read the piece and try not to look at the author's name, but when I'm done and if the work has impressed me, the next thing I'm going to do (or maybe by the fourth page) is look at the cover letter and see what it says, so include some basic bio stuff. If you've never been published before, it's okay to say that -- trust me, we WANT to be someone's debut publication! Likewise, I don't really care where you got your MFA. I mean, include it if you want to and are proud of the work you've done (you should be!) but if you've had more than, say, eight literary journals publish your work, that's more impressive to me and I don't care where you got your MFA. Also, editors change frequently and it's confusing, but we're still seeing people address by name fiction editors and EICs who haven't worked for the magazine in years and years. If you're not 100% sure if that editor is still working there, leave it off and just address your cover letter to the Witness editors. And goodness gracious, please change your copy/pastes -- I can't tell you how many times we've seen cover letters addressed to Tin House, Ploughshares and the like. I also see really long cover letters that describe the short story in a blurb, or even worse, a two-paragraph synopsis. This isn't a novel -- your short story should tell me the rules itself and need no introduction.

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: The ideal submission will hook me by the first half of the first page. By the end of the second page, there will be some quality to it that has my Spidey sense tingling - and I usually know that I'm going to accept a piece by the bottom of the fourth page and I'm usually just reading from that point forward to enjoy the piece and also, make sure that my intuition is sound. So the ideal piece starts where it needs to start -- a big problem I have seen with submissions is that the author spends a lot of the first three or four pages trying to set the scene and by the time it gets good, I'm already leaning toward not accepting it, so it takes a powerful story to pull me out of that mindset. Secondly, just because Witness has a top end word count of 8000 words doesn't mean we're looking for super long pieces -- some 8000 word stories probably need to be 3800 word stories.

Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?

A: The biggest misconception about literary journals is that submission fees absolve the author of reading the journal. In actuality, that $3 fee primarily goes to the submission manager hosting fees. Those print issues cost about $8 each just to print, bind and produce the issue, and then mail it to subscribers. That's just the printing costs. Our web hosting and management costs money. Our submission manager system represents a huge amount of our operating budget on top of that. Plus, unlike many literary publications, Witness pays all of its contributors. Most of our staff is volunteer and get paid in a contributor copy and a line on their CV. Most of our staff also are in graduate school themselves and/or teaching undergraduate students. I say this not to have anyone feel bad for us but to realize that Witness operates in a negative cost structure -- we need subscribers! If you are a writer who is hoping to get published in any publication -- not just Witness -- you need to read more literary publications. Look, they come out maybe twice a year -- read a lit journal instead of your phone on the toilet. Leave them in seat backs on airplanes. Consider supporting literary publishing part of your annual dues for being a writer.

Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?

A: I don't read the cover letter usually until I'm either about to decline or accept the piece -- I try not to even look at the name of the author when I first read the story if I can help it because I don't want their address, perceived gender, or anything to influence any unconscious bias that I may have.
Previous publication credits do matter to us in the end deliberations after we've been whittling down our decisions, especially if the author has never been published by a literary journal yet. There is nothing I would love more than to have Witness debut an author's first publication. Additionally, we do love to know if the person is a past contributor or if they have received a past personal feedback decline from us -- it shouldn't matter, but usually if I'm about to decline a piece and then read that someone had a past personal feedback communication from me, I'll go back in and make sure I haven't misread the piece.
That said, cover letters need to be considered as a business communication. I see a weirdly high percentage of cover letters that are aggressive or challenging, or insult another publication. That's not a good look on anyone. Don't do that. Editors all talk about their weird cover letters when we go out drinking together, and take screenshots of the really bizarre ones.
The less said the better. Get in. Get out. Always thank the editor for reading and for their work on the magazine.

Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?

A: I do not read every piece to the end, but usually someone on our team has before it gets to me. The senior editors make the final decisions on keep or kill, but our first and second editorial assistants or readers will usually have gone through a piece front to back and written some notes on the reading. Generally, I can get a good vibe for a piece by the end of the first page, usually by the halfway point. I've certainly been wrong, but typically a piece that starts well is going to end well.
Also, this is entirely anecdotal, but it seems like a high percentage of stories that I end up bailing by the first page either start with an alarm clock going off/the character waking up, a piece of cold-open dialogue or the character looking out a window. That's weirdly coincidental, right? And yet, it keeps being true.

Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?

A: Our first readers read most if not the entire pieces for suitability for the magazine and "ready for publication" (which means -- are there typos? Is it formatted correctly? Does it have an ending?) and then they also consider any impediments to publication or yellow or red flags. For instance, if there is a racist or misogynistic character, how is the story handling it? There's certainly a difference between a racist character and a racist story -- we have featured a lot of stories with racist characters, but we are not interested in publishing racist stories. Plus, they note whether they LIKE the story or if it is doing anything interesting that they admire. In the last call for submissions, we received about 500 stories and fewer than half were approved by the first readers. Then another reader looks at it -- are they seeing what the first reader saw? If they like it too, then the senior editorial team reads it. Generally, the assistant editor reads it first and we try to prioritize the works that got unanimous votes first, so that we can reach out to the authors as quickly as possible. For the stories with mixed reviews, the senior editorial team reads those next -- a surprising number of stories we publish do NOT have a unanimous approval from the team, but that's good. We like our controversial picks.

Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

A: I try to read first in, first out. One of my goals is to reduce our queue time for the submission process, so if we're in a submission period, I'm checking the new submissions and assigning them to readers who have room/time to read that week. I've asked our first readers to have their assessments for their assignments in three weeks or less. As the stories go through the editorial process, we endeavor to respond as quickly as possible. As a writer, I live for the "no thank you" from editors who take the time to write some personal words of encouragement, so I've been trying to include personal notes in about 20% of the declines for fiction.
The real tragedy of publishing is that we get about 500 submissions during an average call for fiction, and we can publish less than 2% of them, so the most painful part of the process is trying to figure out the 8-10 stories we can publish that issue. We end up absolutely loving about 50 of them, and usually because it takes so long to get through all of the stories, we lose quite a few to other publications before we can respond. That destroys me, particularly because we've usually been debating between two great stories and then suddenly, in like two days time, both of them are withdrawn because someone else got to them first. Our loss, their gain, but still, it stings about once a week.

Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?

A: Electronic publishing is definitely a boon to our industry. I don't know the magic bullet to entice subscribers but if we have to rely on subscribers, there will quickly be no literary journals -- printing costs are killing us. Social media is underexplored and you can really see the publishers who rock social and online content starting to pull ahead -- I'm thinking in specific to Barrelhouse here. Those folks are rocking the literary scene and more people should pay attention to what they're doing.

Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?

A: I really don't edit an accepted piece prior to publication. We have a style guide, but when we accept a story, I generally give the author a chance to make any changes (small) with the caveat that if they make huge changes, we might not want to publish the piece. This is also why it's CRUCIAL that you send publication-ready stories -- we assume that what you send us is what you think should be in the magazine, so why would we mess too much with that?

Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?

A: Yes, we nominate for Pushcart, O.Henry and others. We just had a Witness story win the most recent O.Henrys, and Witness has had notable stories in the last several Best American Short Stories.