Editor Interview: pacificREVIEW

West Coast Arts Menagerie

Kweli, F(r)iction, Barrelhouse, Weird Lit Magazine, #Ranger Magazine, ANMLY, Taco Bell Quarterly, All Existing, Booth, Poetry International, New Letters, Driftwood,
Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Story Unlikely

While it has always been part of our mandate, this particular issue strives through our theme of Errant Mythologies to both blur and welcome the divisions between literary and genre writing and art, to be true to all the work that jumps off our shelves and gives us joy, to seek the type of work that troubles the author in its making, work that is at once urgent and worth returning to. We combine our deep commitment to craft with our deep commitment to support marginalized literature and art.

Offer us the tensions that bind your truths to what you deny, to the lies you love, to what you find undeniable: work that asks, in large or small ways, the big questions: work that is curious about the mystery itself: the errant mythologies that move you, trouble you, call you to experience and imagine them...
We love work that comments on the now and how we got here. We love work that imagines alternate pasts, presents and futures...
Above all, we want you to offer the work that you wish existed but did not quite until you wrote it. And, we want the struggle of choosing between pieces that make us jealous of you for being their authors.

The ideal submission would move us with its precision and its languor. It would give us memories we do not or cannot possibly have. It would realize a contemporary urgency by imagining or reinscribing personal or cultural mythologies in fresh ways: it would be an act of learning and transformation. We would say to ourselves after, "wow, this is a piece that has listened to the mystery."

The most common mistake is to attempt to cram too much into a single submission, whether it's poetry in which poems may not begin on a new page or some of the work feels less resonant or less attended to, whether it's in prose in which the word count is exceeded, or whether it's in graphic narrative or art in which the page or image count is exceeded.

We want, first and foremost, compelling work that resonates with the theme in fresh ways or challenges it in equally fresh ways: cover letters are secondary, though not useless.
We are happy to publish first-time authors with compelling work alongside emerging and established writers. We are also interested in supporting voices from marginalized communities and perspectives.
What we are looking for is a short bio as close to publication-ready as possible, one that lists up to a maximum of five publication credits, though less is fine.

With poetry I tend to get a feeling earlier than with prose, but my motto as a reader has become, "whenever possible, handle once." This means that I try to read a piece until I am fully committed to a decision either way and am able to defend it to my co-editors.

When a piece is an outright Yes or outright No, usually no additional evaluations.
Anything that leans between Yes and Maybe will lead to a conversation.
The most common evaluation, especially with a themed issue, goes like this: are there multiple pieces (whether by a single or different authors) that seem to be carrying out similar work? If so, which are most powerful, most unique?
We also have, I believe, an ethical dimension to our work as publishers: whenever I have a question about the ethics of a piece, I ask if the work contains an inherent interrogation of its own problematics or not. The answer is, and some might find this surprising, usually a direct yes or no.

When in actual editing mode, that is, when I've bracketed time to edit this journal, time usually separate from my other commitments and concerns, I try to deal with administrative tasks first and then set aside a specific window of time for reading. At my best I set a timer. I try to read a few in a single genre, then take a break and switch to a different genre. Unfortunately, breaks usually now involve other commitments or still being on the computer, but each time I set down to do the work, I try to change that.

I attempt to do minimal editing, but I have definitely read pieces that I feel have potential to grow and, in rare cases suggest substantive and even line edits. We copy edit and proofread as a group. Within the available deadlines, the author gets final approval.