Editor Interview: Saint Katherine Review

Beautiful, enduring work.

We love the work we see in presses like Kenyon Review, Image Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Rock & Sling, and Ruminate Magazine. In addition, we admire the tenacity and commitment to integrity and beauty we see in small, independent journals like Bird's Thumb, Literary Orphans, and Whale Road Review among others.

In Fiction, we love the work of George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Flannery O'Connor and Amy Hempel. For poetry, we admire the work of poets such as Mary Oliver, Heather McHugh, William Stafford, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. For essay and creative nonfiction, we look to writers like Wendell Berry and Joan Didion.

Our guiding principle at Saint Katherine Review is "Inquiry Seeking Wisdom" and by that, we mean that we want to publish work that is enduring, well considered, fully developed, and redemptive.

Please take the time to read a full issue (or two) of Saint Katherine Review before submitting. This is the best way to see the scope of our journal and to get a feel for what we like to publish. Be sure to check your work before sending. Poorly formatted documents, whether it is grammar, spelling or font size and use, distracts from what we're reading. Polish it beautifully so that your words come through! We recognize that it takes courage to send work out to be considered. Please know that even if your piece is not accepted, we are grateful for the opportunity to read it. We hope you'll continue to share your work with us.

Our ideal submission is one that showcases the work. If we don't get hung up on format, grammar, or spelling errors, it means we can focus on what is before us. We like to hear the voice of the author clearly in the work. Please include a cover letter that tells us who you are, but stay away from trying too hard to be clever. Your writing is what ought to make you stand out to us.

Our most frequent reasons for rejecting work are:
1. The work is not ready (whether it's not polished enough or not developed enough) or 2.The work is simply not right for our journal. For this reason, we always encourage authors to read an issue of SKR before sending us their work.

Cover letters (included in the comments section of our submission manager) give us a peek into the background of the contributor, but it's worth mentioning that it's the work that sways us ultimately. We love to see previous publication credits and any other pertinent educational or work experience, but we're always happy to publish work from up and coming writers as well. Send us something beautiful, true, and enduring, and your previous publications (or lack thereof) won't really matter all that much.

We try to read every submission in full before deciding on the next step. If we cannot get through a piece, whether it's because of the content or the execution, it usually means the work isn't ready, or it's not right for our journal. Though we can usually tell if the submitter has some familiarity with SKR within a few paragraphs, this won't automatically mean a rejection, but the work has to be excellent in that case. It must grab us and not let go. In the end, we have read many pieces that are truly excellent that are simply not right for our journal even so. We try always to let the submitter know if that's the case and to encourage them to try again.

After a submission is received, it is read by our Assistant Editors and Readers. Recommendations are then made to the Department Editors who will then decide if it is a good fit for our journal. Pieces that the Department Editors want to include are then read by the Managing Editor and discussed at our monthly Editorial meetings. Final decisions are made by the Department Editors in conjunction with the Managing Editor and the Editors-in-Chief.

We hope to receive work that is ready to publish, or as near as possible. Once in a while, though, we get a piece that we see has tremendous potential, something that pulls us in. We don't often ask for a writer to do full revisions on a piece of work, but it can happen. In terms of poetry, our editor is particularly keen to see that the lineation is efficacious, that each line does work as a line. For the most part, however, please expect that we will do copy edits on the work and proofreading. The content should already be there and ready to publish. You will be sent the edits to approve before it goes to layout. You will also be given a proof of the layout to look over for any errors before it goes to press.

Yes.