Editor Interview: Permafrost Magazine

Boundary-crushers

We love the innovation of the Normal School and the pointedness of Brevity. DIAGRAM is also one of our favorites. Plume excites us and McSweeney's makes us hot. Pleiades inspires us and we read Tin House, too!

B.J. Hollars, Dinty Moore, Doug Kearney, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, C.D. Wright, Karen Russell

Our magazine is frozen to forty below to condense and preserve the writing within. Most of our staff live without running water, and so literature is our only creature comfort. We read huddled around bonfires, on moose hunts, and in outhouses. These things are actually true, so we're not looking for writing about that. We want things that get us hot and bothered from around the world.

Submit the things that excite you. We love to see work that is surprising and substantial. We want things that will feed us: nurturing, warm and tasty.

See above.

They send us Alaska stuff. They send us snail mail. They put their names on their submissions (We prefer to read blind!).

We read anonymously because we want to really see the writing -- no name, no credits ahead of time.

All of our submissions are read by three readers before they get to each genre editor. All of our readers and editors come together at the pub to drink local brews and make the final decisions about what speaks to us as a whole staff and what doesn't. This thoughtful consensus is part of what makes our journal unique.

As editor, my role is really just bringing the staff together. This is no one-woman magazine. It takes a lot of people to make this magazine and to put quality work out into the world. For me, a day in the life of an editor is thinking about what would make the publication better and who on our staff is best suited to do that job. It's a constant collaboration.