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Editor Interview: The McNeese Review

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

A: Human moments, told well.

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

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

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

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

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: Like it or not, technologies not only change quickly now but have a huge effect on who gets to have their say, and in what format, length, tone, etc. Overall the digital revolution produced a democratizing effect, allowing just about anyone a platform from which to speak. The trade-off is that any particular medium (blogs, FB, online journals, self-published POD books, Kindle texts) eventually becomes a welter of voices competing for limited audience. Publishers will always have choices: Accept (for instance) reduced readership and publish for the love of process or the enjoyment of a specialized audience, attempt to become a dominant or at least audible voice on a bigger scale, or keep trying new ways of getting the word out. John Lennon said he was an artist first, so if all you gave him was a tuba, he'd make art on it. Publishers could also think this way about modern technologies.