Editor Interview: Flyway

Place-based writing & art

Tastes differ among the editorial staff, but we have admiration for Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly, Tor.com, Adroit, Ploughshares, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Glimmer Train, The Michigan Review, Electric Lit, AGNI, Granta, Tin House, Copper Nickel, Flash Fiction Online, Shimmer, Black Static, The Iowa Review, The Black Warrior Review and Ninth Letter.

E.O. Wilson, James Lovelock, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Patricia Smith, George Saunders, Jeff Vandermeer, Kim Stanley Robinson, Geoff Ryman, China Mieville, Carmen Maria Machado, Matt Sumell, Ambrose Bierce, Kei Miller, Thomas Ligotti, Lewis Thomas, Paolo Bacigalupi, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Kai Ashante Wilson, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Junot Diaz, Elizabeth McCracken, Jennifer Egan, Brenda Shaughnessy, Alice Walker...

It's right in the name, but names can be deceiving. We're a journal concerned with the intersection of writing, the arts and the environment in the broadest possible sense. We do publish traditional environmental works, but we're also interested in work that provides a fresh and unpredictable take on what it means to be place-based. Send us pieces concerned with the urban environment as well as the wilderness and everything in between. We're especially interested in speculative fiction that leverages the tropes and conventions of horror, science fiction, fantasy and magical realism to illuminate the strange new reality of the Anthropocene.

Don't hold back. Send us work that frightens and exhausts you. Be bold. We're not easily offended.

The ideal submission is like nothing we've ever seen before. Place-based writing is lousy with its own set of cliches and tired tropes. Some topics have been essayed to death. Familiarize yourself with what's out there, then write something that only you can write.
And read the guidelines before you submit.

Simultaneous subs. One at a time, please. You can send a couple poems, but package them in one file.

We're interested. Most editors read them after giving the piece an initial pass. Credits are nice, but every piece has to stand on its own two (or four? or six?) feet. If you're writing CNF and you have some special expertise that is germane to the topic, we definitely want to know about that.

Unless the grammar is so bad that it interferes with comprehension, we read to the end.

Every piece is read initially by one of our genre editors. 90% of submissions get rejected at this phase. The top 10% get passed up for our monthly roundtable. Every member of the editorial staff reads the pieces for roundtable. We deliberate at length over these pieces. Tears are shed. Blood is spilled. In the end, if the sentiment isn't overwhelming in one direction or the other, we vote.
Pieces rejected at roundtable usually get a high tier rejection letter that solicits future submissions. Genre editors have the discretion to attach a personal note or not.

See above.

In rare cases, one of our editors will work with a writer on a substantial rewrite. In most cases, editorial feedback is minor. We proof every manuscript ahead of publication, but this process only includes copy editing.

We submit to dozens of national, local and environmental awards. Work published in Flyway is regularly considered for Year's Best... and Best American... anthologies.