Editor Interview: The McNeese Review

Human moments, told well.

We like Ninth Letter, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Narrative, Tin House, Black Warrior, the McSweeney's empire, Copper Canyon Press. For example.

Tatyana Tolstoya, D.F. Wallace, McPhee, Sontag, Didion, Hersey, Ford, Marquez, D. Barthelme, Heller, Mailer, Bellow, Woolf, Chekhov, Twain, Flaubert.

Have a sense in your work of both contemporary context and historical tradition. Many things sold as "new" or "experimental" are actually 100 years old. Also, learn to see in your work what readers will see, in all possible ways--not just clarity and coherence of image, scene, and character, but also allusions, political implications, comedy, self-pity. A healthy dose of irony builds the blood.

The idea that they must, at all costs, make a connection with us in the cover letter, that we need to be amused or impressed or have the submission explained in order to consider it.

We can tell within the first verse or paragraph, but we read to the end. Ever read Theodore Dreiser? Hopeless prose at times, but great books.

Submissions with mixed votes from editors go to an editorial meeting to be argued over. Generally what this indicates is that there are things working in a piece, and something that isn't. If we can't justify the time it might take to correspond with the author and do (potentially) several rounds of editing, it usually gets passed on in the end. But sometimes what's up for discussion is how many of the five poems submitted we'll be taking. That's a happy meeting.