Editor Interview: The New Guard

Innovative writing

The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Story, Granta, Bomb, Zyzzyva

Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, David Foster Wallace, Jim Thompson, Ralph Ellison, Junot Diaz, Allen Ginsburg, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Carver, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Nami Mun, Denis Johnson, Earnest Hemingway, F.T. Marinetti, William Faulkner, Ben Okri, James Joyce, Alden Nowlan, Scott Wolven, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Hoagland, Cormac McCarthy, Olena K Davis, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Mary Gaitskill, Wallace Stegner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Anton Chekhov,Theodore Roethke, William Blake, Yukio Mishima, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, George Bataille, Stephen Dunn and on and on...

We are excited by innovation and experiment; those forces at work when creating deeply felt and articulate writing. We turn out print books only, and they are big and bold. Our judges and contributors are well-known, and we're proud to showcase newcomers as peers alongside our established writers. We publish in print, with the exception of our online feature, BANG!, a feature page on our site that we devote our time to, so that three short works by a single writer run for a full month at a time. We also run a conference, The Writer's Hotel, every June in NYC, and we mentor writers online. We're writers ourselves and we work hard every day to support our fellows and earn our slogan, 'Writers for writers' sake.'

Being innovative or experimental doesn't mean that you need to create a new form. Form is not as important as substance, and tinkering with form often ruins a piece. It's like missing the mountains for the trees. Show us the forest, the world, the universe. Don't get stuck on trying to crack a new form. We are looking for substance and depth.

The ideal submission is one that has been carefully edited and tended to. A submission that reads clean. Sure, we'd like to be surprised by your fresh new work. Try to make the narrative yours by getting rid of cliches and common themes. We get a lot of submissions. Make yours count.

Please do not submit work that has been previously published online or in print. We research--and many writers ignore this rule. It is disappointing to have to reject a writer for not following the rules. This one is serious. And the work also needs to be the right word or line count. So silly to not follow these rules! Let us accept you!

Cover letters are not necessary.

We are honored to read the work we get in. We read our submissions carefully--even aloud, sometimes. That said, the first few pages need a lot of love. Those first pages are very important, and guide the reader throughout the piece. As a writer of prose, I always read those pages aloud and edit them before my story goes anywhere. As a writer of poetry, I read each poem always before sending out. Poets are more used to the fact that reading aloud is part of the writing process. It might seem like overkill, but it isn't. It helps. Try it.

All work goes through several rounds of editorial attention. Each piece is different, and must be treated on its own terms. We spend months and months turning these pieces over and over.

A lot of work. Some good food. Great people. More work than seems possible. But it all gets done. The designer Stefan Sagmeister talks about how he only works with people who are nice. This is key. We work together behind the scenes and love what we do and are nice to one another. It's a good environment all around, and I can say that TNG is a good place for a writer to send their writing.