Editor Interview: Bat City Review

Funny, sad, and strange

Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, McSweeney's, Ecotone, Crazyhorse, The Normal School, A Public Space

We are a large, diverse group of readers, but we agree on loving Kelly Link, Louise Gluck, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, Dorothea Lasky, WS Merwin, Roxane Gay, Ann Carson, Colson Whitehead, Carson McCullers, Dorianne Laux, Carmen Maria Machado, Frank X Walker, Maggie Nelson, Emily Fridlund, etc., etc....

Many university-associated literary journals aren't very attractive--I wouldn't want to display them on my coffee table. At Bat City, we pride ourselves on producing a beautiful object as well as one that you will want to read and reread. We also publish quite a bit of artwork. We're lucky to have access to the Harry Ransom Center. The Center's collections contain 36 million leaves of manuscripts, one million rare books, 5 million photographs, and 100,000 works of art, in addition to major holdings in theater arts and film.

Lately I've been reading a lot of stories that simply aren't finished. It's like the writer was tired and just hoped it would be good enough. Don't settle for good enough. Finish the work you start and don't send it out until it's ready (this usually involves putting it away for a few weeks).

The ideal submission follows our submission guidelines, has a BRIEF, informative cover letter, has been carefully proofread and edited, and gives us goosebumps because it's so wonderful and surprising.

Sending multiple stories at once. One sub at a time, please.

Cover letters are important. They add a personal touch to the submission and remind us that there are people behind the writing. It never hurts to mention previous publications, but it isn't necessary.

We read every submission carefully and do our best to give each submission a fair shot. We're looking for the best writing we can find and sometimes this isn't evident on page 1. That being said, it really should be. Each sentence should be well-crafted and draw the reader deeper and deeper into the world.

As a university-based literary journal, there are quite a few stages a piece of writing goes through before it's accepted for publication. It will initially be assigned to two readers. If both readers like the piece, the submission will go before the Bat City class (an actual class about the editorial process that's held every fall) and/or the editorial board. It's a very democratic process, and we try to handle submissions as we would want our own work handled.

I'm hopeful. With each submission I open, I'm hopeful that I'll find something that affects me, that I'll discover a new writer, that it will feel like the writer wrote the story with me in mind. It can be really exciting.

Prose pieces usually get some small tweaks. Poetry less so. We are generally not interested in editing pieces heavily, and we prefer to consider finished, polished submissions.

Yes, we submit nominations for Pushcart, BASS and the like.