Quotes by Editors of Literary Journals and Small Presses
~~ Quotes by Editors of Literary Journals and Small Presses ~~
“I love it when I come across a submission that I wish I'd written myself. In a way, I think being an editor has made me want to push my own writing further because I can see there are so many people out there who care enough about words to use them well.”
-Ian Chung, Eunoia Review
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SQF: What most often turns you off to a submission?
BLR: Redundancy and over the top artsiness that makes no apparent sense, and use of vocabulary to try to impress the editor. WE ARE NOT IMPRESSED.
- Diana May-Waldman & Mitchell Waldman, Blue Lake Review
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“[…] it's been really important to me to try and cultivate a space that feels genuinely welcoming, vulnerable and approachable.”
-James Diaz, Anti-Heroin Chic
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SQF: What are the top three things you look for in a submission and why?
SJ: The number one thing for poetry is whether or not it’s pleasing to the ear. Originality, freshness of images and ideas all comes after the initial question of “Does the language work?”
This holds true for prose to, although it’s much more quickly followed by the question of is the story interesting? Does it present anything new? Am I startled? Kept involved in unexpected ways?
Beyond that I often look for a sense of historical continuity and awareness. Does the piece enter into a dialog with past writers and artists? Does it follow or elaborate upon a tradition? If not, does it do so purposely?
Art is a very big and very old conversation. Does the piece actively add to and participate in it or is the writer writing from a void into a void. It’s very important to me.
-Seth Jani, Editor, CircleShow
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SQF: What major mistakes do authors make when pitching their books?
GM: When the pitch goes on too long or is too flowery in its language. This bores me. I want straight and to the point. I think most editors would agree with me on this.
- Gloria Mindock, Editor and Publisher, Cervena Barva
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“There are plenty of perfectly good poems in the literary universe, but I’m looking for work that’s not merely good but also memorable.”
-Kelly Davio, Tahoma Literary Review
“Heavy abstraction doesn’t do much for me. I also like to remind poets that experimental forms are termed “experimental” for a reason—experiments don’t always yield desirable results.”
-Kelly Davio, Tahoma Literary Review
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“We see many submissions that appear to be drafts, work that has the potential to be amazing if the writer would take the time to revise one or two more times.”
-Barbara Diehl, Founder and Senior Editor, The Baltimore Review
“All of us get rejections. You can’t take it personally. I take my lumps with the rest of them. I note the date of the rejection on my Word doc table of my submission history and forget about it. I’ve had work rejected that ended up in more prestigious journals; I’ve had a story rejected 15 times and accepted on the 16th try. The BR loses work regularly to other journals. That’s the nature of simultaneous submissions. Send your work to a number of publications you admire. If the story or poem is worth its salt, eventually it will find a home. As mentioned, editors don’t think with one mind. In Submittable, two editors may say a flat “No,” and another will gush about how great it is.”
-Barbara Diehl, Founder and Senior Editor, The Baltimore Review
“I can’t respond to “Can you tell me why you didn’t accept my submission?” emails. Think of this like job interviews. What would the HR person do if she interviewed 5,000 individuals for 80 job slots, and the 4,920 who didn’t get the job emailed to ask why they weren’t hired? Exactly. Feedback should be provided in the classroom, in workshops, etc.”
-Barbara Diehl, Founder and Senior Editor, The Baltimore Review
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“When I first started writing poetry and sending it out, one of the first things I had to accept was rejection. If you write poetry and send it out to be considered for publication you must accept that 90% of the time you are going to be rejected. The best way to get feedback is to join a poetry workshop. Online workshops are ok but face-to-face workshops are better as you get to build a rapport with fellow workshoppers. I've been attending a monthly workshop for the last twenty five years and I get very helpful advice from the other poets. So accept rejection and move on. There are hundreds of magazines out there waiting for submissions.”
-John Murphy, Editor, The Lake
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SQF: Why did you start this magazine?
James Penha: When I am moved by events in the world, often issues of war and peace and justice, to write a poem, I need it published immediately! Figuring that there were other poets like me, I created a space in 2005 for current-events poetry.
“What's the worst part of being an editor? When I know I've experienced it, I'll retire. Until then, the pleasures outweigh the pains.”
-James Penha, The New Verse News
“What's the worst part of being an editor? When I know I've experienced it, I'll retire. Until then, the pleasures outweigh the pains.”
-James Penha, The New Verse News
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[…] the work has to be something only you can create.
- James Rawlings, Chesnut Review
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[…] every time we state what we like and don't like, we inevitably receive a submission that completely upends our prior thought.
- Emily Wojcik,The Massachusetts Review
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Tim Green (Rattle):
[on] most admired other publications
POETRY comes beautifully packaged and, though the poetry itself can be dry at times, I devour the commentary each month. AGNI and NEW ENGLAND REVIEW are equally gorgeous productions. NINTH LETTER is a book to behold. VQR is great for prose. When it comes to poetic tastes, though, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW is probably at the top of the list, followed in some order by 32 POEMS, MARGIE, NEW YORK QUARTERLY, PANK, WILLOW SPRINGS, and TIN HOUSE. I'm sure there are others I would love that I've never read; with so many submissions to read, it's hard to keep up with what other magazines are doing.
Tim Green describes an ideal submission as:
“Any poem that I can still remember the next day.”
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: To quote George Bernard Shaw, "You don't need to eat the whole egg to tell if it's rotten." We tend to read until we find ourselves daydreaming about something else, then we skip to the end to see if it goes anywhere surprising, and if it doesn't we move on to the next poem.
-Tim Green, Rattle
“Foremost, Rattle is a magazine that tries to show prose readers that they're missing out on something if they're not reading poetry, too.”
-Tim Green, Rattle
“My job as an editor is to read thousands of poems a week, and pan for the golden few that work some magic. Gold is gold; a rock is a rock. No amount of polishing will change that.”
-Tim Green, Rattle
“Poetry isn't a commodity -- and that's one of the beauties of it.”
-Tim Green, Rattle
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“I’m looking for a writer who doesn’t know where her sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love; a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones with the power to condemn in the blink of an eye. It’s all right that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she’s arrived.”
- Sy Safransky, The Sun
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Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: Depends on the genre, but usually, the ideal submission does a few things:
1. Makes us wish we wrote that
2. Makes us wish we could have a whole book of that
3. Makes the class of readers talk and talk about how good it is. Keeps them talking at the bar, after class.
-Sally J Johnson, Ecotone (2012)
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“Send us your queerest, bravest, strangest work, the work that scares you a little as you write it.”
- Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Foglifter
“I put literary quality first and political "message" second.”
-F.J. Bergmann, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change
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“When we read our submissions, we're looking to find some kind of human connection, even if it's a subject that one wouldn't necessarily think was "poetic." Mainly, we want to read poetry that knows what it's doing and takes us along for the ride.”
-JC Reilly, Atlanta Review
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“No cat bios.”
- Christopher Crawford, Joshua Mensch, Stephan Delbos, B O D Y
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[on] a good submission
“From the first line, it announces itself. It teaches the reader how to read it. It stakes out new territory in form, style, or subject matter. It knocks our socks off with surprise and delight.”
-Lee Sharkey, Beloit Poetry Journal (2012)
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