After this conversation took place, Moon Milk Review, edited by Rae Bryant, was absorbed in the new Johns Hopkins journal, the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, where Rae Bryant serves as Editor in Chief. 

> kill author: When Portal del Sol paired us with you for this feature—not just flattery here—we were really pleased. One of the things we’re struck by with Moon Milk Review is its “personality,” the sense that you’re always consciously striving to try new things with it. It feels like a “magazine” in the truest sense of the word too, rather than just a journal of fiction and poetry, because you’ve put things in there that a reader wouldn’t typically expect to find in a lit-mag. Did you have this in mind when you started MMR? Did you have a clear manifesto or particular aesthetic in your head, and has this changed much as MMR has progressed?

Rae Bryant: Yes, the pairing is a mutual pleasantry, for sure. > kill author has been a consistent artistic presence for us at MMR and for me personally. We really enjoy what you do with the author issues, the focus on the work, not to mention the curious anonymity of the editors. We fantasize at MMR that one day we will open the “whodunit” envelope and find you on a card with a spiked espresso in hand, sitting in the library. If you feel a need to divulge, we promise not to tell…

On the question of manifesto, yes, the eclecticism of the magazine was an initial vision, something for which we continue to strive, along with a sense of movement and so the “change” element was of utmost importance. Hopefully, we’ve been able to keep the vibe going to some success. We like to think of MMR as a “village” atmosphere, like walking through the East Village or Brooklyn and experiencing a juxtaposition of artists and artistic forms in an “other worldly” way. This is what we endeavor to create through our editorship. We’re merely the ring masters.

So the obvious question for you is how and where and why the secrecy, but you’ve been asked this before, and we respect and applaud the veil. So let’s take it into the future. Where do you see the veil next year or the year after? Will > ka keep its anonymity and if so, are there any plans for “secret” readings? A > ka masquerade would be amazing.

> ka: “We’re merely the ring masters” is a great way to describe your role. We’d never thought of it like that, but it’s how we see ourselves too. You’re right: the how, where and why have all been discussed, but the ring master metaphor is such an apt one to explain why we continue to do the anonymity thing. We’re just the organizers, creating the atmosphere of > kill author (and the atmosphere and aesthetic is very important to us), and obviously selecting the work. But we don’t > kill author to be about us. That’s not to say we’re against personality editors—it’s just not our particular thing. We’re the same when it comes to musicians (where the boom in home recording has meant a huge growth in “faceless artists”), to actors and, yes, even to authors. We prefer those who speak through the creative work they do, rather than feeling the need to be a big personality out front.

For the future, we’ll keep the anonymity going, certainly while we’re still editing > kill author. We couldn’t do anything else, considering all we said in the previous paragraph. If we stop the magazine and move on, then who knows if at some point our names won’t slip out? Maybe, but it would be less important then. Our only dilemma comes when we wonder what might happen if we wanted to hand > kill author to new editors—would they be willing to remain anonymous too? Could they be trusted not to reveal themselves? As for readings—heh, masked readings sound like a cool idea, but we’ll probably just keep to producing the magazine. For us, that’s the focus—those virtual pages every two months illustrating the > kill author approach.

Can we move on to the subject of reading submissions? We’ve both talked about the manifesto and the vibe of our publications. When you read through all your subs, do pieces which fit your aesthetic immediately leap out at you? They tend to for us, and we sometimes feel guilty about it. We’re like “Yes! This writer just completely gets what we’re about!” We’ve been known to punch the air. It’s exciting, but because of that we always take care to examine those stories or poems in particular detail, reading them over and over again, to check we’re not being blinded by the original thrill. At the same time, we don’t want everything we publish to feel similar. We’ve featured work that’s consciously different for us—what many editors would call “not a good fit” in normal circumstance—but which succeeded in wowing us. Rightly or wrongly, we always give this information to the writer too: “this isn’t normally the kind of thing we’d publish, but it just grabbed us so much we have to feature it.” Does any of this match your experience of reading subs?

RB: Honestly, I have to say MMR tries to keep an open aesthetic. We do look for edge and character-focused storytelling. We like to be pulled into the story with character and language right away and with such a grip as to not let us go, but this doesn’t mean we’re looking for a “hook.” But yes, in terms of aesthetic, we do like to mix it up. Personally, I have an appreciation for anything Modernist-Minimalist to Postmodern and beyond, whatever it is we’re supposed to be calling the “new” wave of styles, so I’m constantly open to structure and what seems to be the author’s intended direction. What I don’t go for are stories that spend less time on character and language and more time on other things. What I especially go for are stories with character and language that is hard to distinguish from each other because the narrative voice is so entwined and necessary it’s impossible to imagine any other voice.

Speaking of language and character, let’s move into recent issues. I’m particularly moved by Josh Collins story, “I Am a Man with a Fractured Skull.” (Issue 14: The Joseph Heller Issue) The structure of the story plays an important role. The reader must pay attention to paragraphing and imagery in a more active way than most prose: i.e., disembodied axes, a mirror ball in the narrator’s stomach. The story takes on something of a poetic direction with this structure and imagery, a style not always comfortable for many editors. How does this style play out editorially when > ka reads submissions?

> ka: How does this style play out editorially? Carefully! That’s to say: if a piece like Josh’s—with, as you say, a poetic direction, a more difficult structure—grabs our imagination, we register the fact we liked it and it made an impact on us from the start, but then put it aside a little while to think over it before approaching it afresh with an even more critical eye so we can fine tune our opinions of it. We think about what the piece is saying to us—an important question is: is it also entertaining us to read it?—and hope it will have the same effect on readers. If it’s what might be called a “difficult” piece—we don’t really like the term “experimental” because how experimental something is really depends on your frame of reference—then we may very occasionally delve into a little of what the piece is about with the writer, but we admit it’s rare for us to do that because a piece needs to have an effect and an emotional resonance on its own terms without necessarily bringing the writer’s backstory and explanations on board.

It’s very easy to be wowed by explosive language, innovative structures and challenging ideas, but we do stand by what we say on our “About” page—we value work that knows how to tell a good story and can take the reader from A to C via B, but which makes that journey in extraordinary ways. Josh’s piece definitely fits into that category.

Talking of different forms of work, Moon Milk Review’s seasonal Prosetry Contests were a great idea and have used compelling images to inspire some equally compelling work. Going out there and inviting submissions with a particular challenge in mind is something we’ve considered—we’re especially interested in inviting writers to “remix” the work of others and perhaps have a whole issue based around such an idea at some point—but we’ve not yet dipped our toes in the water. Do you like the idea of a literary magazine putting an idea or theme out there and inviting responses, as a way of occasionally doing something a little different from a wide open submissions policy, and is there more to come from Moon Milk Review in this area?

RB: “Is there more to come from Moon Milk Review in this area?” Yes. We like the idea of multimedia and collaborative art. I took a long trip West recently and on the trip, I spent a good deal of time thinking about music and composition and how it might relate to text. When I was at the VCCA, I met composers and visual artists also in residence. In fact, my studio was a composer’s studio with a baby grand, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother who had attempted to teach me piano, though I studied clarinet instead. I studied very badly. Didn’t practice, was bored, but I’m glad I had the musical involvement, and now, as a writer, I find myself enthralled with music and musicians and the craft of putting rhythm and melody and words together. Anyway, this all makes me obsess about the “album” and how the concept of musicians coming together in a group might translate into writers coming together in a “group.” I’ll not say much more about it as it’s still sort of floating around my head, but yes, MMR is always considering the alternative and the progressive. Though, what you’ve stated is tantamount. The story. It’s always about the story. For me, if it’s prose or poetry or painting or music or film, it’s always about story. And I’m always happy to stretch my mind within a story’s structure and landscape, but if the story doesn’t come through, first and foremost, I find myself asking whether the piece was masturbatory—a writer getting himself or herself off—rather than artistically centered.

On the note of remixing, I love it. Truly, as writers, readers, editors, we are a culmination of what we’ve read. To engage in this amalgamative craft so transparently is a lovely practice, and I’m all for it. >ka is such a perfect publication to do this, too, as it pays tribute to literary greats with each issue. To continue the practice through a remix issue would be something I’d like to see. Playing with the voice of a loved author within the landscape of your own work, while paying tribute to said author, is fun and pays a compliment, I think, as long as the tribute is made clear.

On the topic of “difficult” or “experimental”—which I agree, experimental is definitely a relative term—who does >ka see as the more boundary pushing and story-centric writers today? The writers who have left the boxed idea of what a story “should” be but still keep the necessities of story? I guess another question might be, what are the necessities of story according to >ka? Hmm, necessities. Even as I write the word, I’m thinking how much I love stories that create their own necessities.

> ka: We’re going to skillfully sidestep the question about specific writers—though obviously not too skillfully, since we’re mentioning it at the same time as doing it—because we’re a little reluctant to put the knowledge of out there about who we admire for fear it’ll perhaps influence people too much in their submissions to us. We want writers to submit work because they genuinely feel they’re on our wavelength and inside our thinking, rather than because we admire the same authors. But—and here, again, the parallels with music are maybe significant—you’re right in your analysis that we definitely admire those writers who have stepped beyond the rigid ideas of what a story should be, while never forgetting how important the necessities of a story are to the reader. As you mentioned music in your previous response, it’s the same with that too. We tend to admire those musicians who hear and then interpret sounds in a unique, startling way, but—crass and simple-minded as it might sound—also don’t forget their audience sometimes wants a damn good melody and a few hooks too.

As for those necessities of a story and what they are for us: practically speaking, well, we’ve hinted above at the idea that we’re concerned with a writer not losing their readers. Take apart the story’s structure and the form, turn it inside out, shake up every convention you want, do whatever you want to it, but do keep in the back of your mind that there’s an audience out there too. Remember to take them with you. If you decide to push them down alleys, kick them in the guts and leave them gasping on the ground, at least drop couple of crumbs for them to see where you’re going. Otherwise you may as well just massage your own literary ego in private.

More intangibly, an absolute necessity for us, when it comes to both stories and poetry, is to be completely immersed in the world the writer creates through their words. We’re not talking about the people, the places, the ideas they’re writing about, all those specifics, but more the author’s own belief in what they’re saying and the way they’re saying it. In a way, it’s back to that favorite idea of fiction and poetry being forms of escapism (even if the subject matter often isn’t an escapist one). The story can be a one paragraph piece of micro-fiction or a full-blown epic, but if we’re not completely immersed in the writer’s world as we read it then it’s very unlikely to go any further with us. There’s no doubt this means we’ve rejected perfectly structured, expertly paced stories, full of mesmerizing writing, in favour of pieces that were ragged, uneven, sometimes with language that didn’t quite hang together, because we were completely sucked in by the latter rather than the former.

RB: Yes, we like grit in our stories, too. And refinement. Refinement is lovely, and when the two come together, it makes us swoon. Gritty refinement. Yes. That story stays with us. A pleasure to chat with you, >ka.

> ka: It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks for making us think about what we do, and good luck to you and Moon Milk Review for the future.

Rae Bryant’s short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, released from Patasola Press, NY, in June 2011 and has been nominated for the Pen Hemingway and Pushcart awards. Her stories have appeared in BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), Gargoyle Magazine, Opium Magazine, and PANK, among other publications. She has work forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Ampersand Review, and other publications and writes essays and reviews for such places as Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Portland Book Review, and Beatrice.com. Rae has received Fellowships from the VCCA and Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a Masters in Writing and the Outstanding Graduate Award. In summer 2011, she attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she studied with Alice McDermott, and the JHU Conference on Craft in Florence, Italy as a JHU Fellow, where she studied with and assisted Jill McCorkle. She teaches multimedia and creative writing in The Johns Hopkins University, Master of Arts in Writing program and is editor in chief of the program’s new literary and arts journal, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.

The Editors of > kill author choose to remain anonymous.  See http://killauthor.com/about/anonymity/ for more details.

Review by Eric Tanyavutti
Kartika Review’s Spring 2011 Issue establishes its intent as an Asian-American literary journal quickly.  The cover displays a lovely photograph of two girls wearing hijabs, their hands and forearms shrouding their eyes.  In the first few pages Kartika describes itself as a journal that “publishes literary fiction, poetry, and non-fiction that endeavor to expand and enhance the mainstream perception of Asian American creative writing.”  Later, in the mission statement, Kartika declares as striving “to create a literary forum that caters to and celebrates the wordsmiths of the Asian Diaspora.”  In this, the terms of the journal are quickly established to the first-time reader.  Comprised of equal parts fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction (as well as two interviews), this is a journal whose first and foremost goals are clearly communicated to the reader as wishing to explore the issues and lives of Asians and Asian-Americans.

With this expectation, it is then unsurprising that Kartika Review’s strongest offerings are pieces that grapple with issues of identity, duality, place, and community; themes that are highly germane to Asian-American literature.  Katie Hae Leo’s essay, “My Life in Hair,” is a wonderfully complex piece, which follows the author’s personal relationship with her hair through a series of short, spare vignettes.  For example, in the very the first scene, Leo uses her thick, black hair as an infant as a marker; it is that which separates her from her adoptive American parents, who “were shocked by all that hair.”  From there on, Leo’s hair takes on a more and more complex role in her life, constantly changing and evolving as she does.  She adopts “The Dorothy Hamill” hairstyle.  She perms her hair.  She goes natural.  She cuts it all off, as a way to wound ex-boyfriends.  And later, when in Korea, she tries to take on the popular Korean hairstyles, but is, despite her attempts, still very American.  Within the narrow confines of “hair,” Leo mines a wealth of personal history that encapsulates a dizzying array of identities and roles.

Dena Afrasiabi’s short story “The Give and Take” takes a different tack towards issues of identity, but is similarly effective in its play with duality and stereotype.  In it, the “diaspora police” come to protagonist Soheila’s home to notify her of her inability to adhere to the expectations of her Middle Eastern background.  Soheila, a quiet librarian, is too ordinary, too dull for an immigrant living in the United States, something the diaspora police hope to correct.  Out of this, she is coaxed, prodded, and pushed towards a simple and singular identity from which she can be easily defined.  A witty and sardonic piece, “The Give and Take” pokes fun at stereotypes while challenging the often narrow definitions of what it means to be an American and an immigrant.  In contrast, Margaret Rhee’s poem, “Nectarines” is an incessant and weaving piece.  It is an exploration into the history of nectarines, but is also more than that; it dips into the personal and impersonal, the absurd and the realistic, knitting myriad threads and exploring concepts of duality and hybridity across the fruit nectarine and being a Korean-American.

Finally, the interview with Amy Chua (author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) near the end of the journal is a revelation.  Earlier this year, Chua was made popular by the Wall Street Journal’s release of a chapter from her book, titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”  The reception to the chapter was polarizing.  To some, the article was a reinforcement of many parental stereotypes, while to others, it was an authentic look into the cultural life and expectations of Asians and Asian-Americans.  What’s unique about the interview is that Chua is allowed the space and nuance to explain not only her narrative intention of the book, but also her perspective as a writer and memoirist.  For example, Chua explains how she utilizes an unreliable narrator (herself) at the beginning of the memoir.  She notes that, “I am not the ‘I’ that speaks in the opening chapters of the book (which were quoted at length in the Wall Street Journal excerpt under a headline I never saw and did not choose!).  The narrator of my book is a patently flawed character — initially obtuse, boastful, outrageously confident — who goes through crisis and transformation.”  Beyond this, Chua talks about her process as a writer, and deftly paints a picture of herself not only as an author and memoirist, but as an individual and mother.  The interview is an especially welcome one because it allows for an alternative perspective of an Asian-American writer whose reputation had perhaps already been decided by many who have never heard of her before.

From these works, one can see how Kartika Review strives to expand the notions of Asian-American literature.  Grappling with preconceived notions of nationality, identity, and stereotypes, the journal attempts to not only demarcate the expectations of Asian-American writing, but, maybe more importantly, expand and push against them.  In this issue there are tiger mothers who are more than they seem, adopted children exploring the character of their hair, the entomology and history of nectarines, diaspora police, and much more that couldn’t possibly all be covered in this review.  This issue is a taste of the Asian and Asian-American voice and experience, but more importantly, a chance to challenge and expand the notions of what Asian-American literature can and should be.

Eric Tanyavutti was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, and is currently earning his MFA at the University of Illinois for Fiction.  His stories have been published in the Potomac Review and Roanoke Review, and will be forthcoming in Cream City Review.

Designing the ePub: When Perfect is the Enemy of Great

The Unboxing

Getting Issue #1 of Midwestern Gothic ready to be released was a last minute flurry of activity. Even with a relatively easy-to-use POD solution like CreateSpace , designing and publishing a book yourself is a time suck.

But all the hard work, InDesign wrangling and non-stop tweaking of online settings was definitely worth it when the final book came in the mail. It was beautiful and glossy – I wanted to tuck into bed and sleep in late on a Sunday with it.

Then I opened the ePub.

Lost in Translation

While we hurtled pell-mell towards getting paper with words out the door, the ePub fell a couple rungs to a lower priority. I’d read a couple articles about how to export an ePub and I was relatively confident that whatever looked good in print would look at least decent on an eReader.

It didn’t. It looked broken. Text ran off the screen, nothing was aligned and our table of contents was a shop of horrors. All the joy I’d felt just a few days ago with that beautiful book in hand was erased. I almost didn’t want to put the ePub up on Kindle or Nook. And I didn’t see how Apple would ever approve it for the iBookstore.

But most of the problems were in the first six or seven pages. Once the actual fiction and poetry arrived, things weren’t perfect, but they were passable. So we rolled it out, selling a fair amount of eBooks, but not as many as their print brethren.

The Second Time Around

So for Issue 2, I had a plan. We made a detailed timeline based on how long it’d taken us to set up Issue 1. The submissions period was based entirely on the actual time I’d spent on design. There would be no more rushing around at the end to make things happen. There would be time to focus on the eBook, and I thought time would be enough to solve the problem.

Again, I was wrong. While my second bite at the ePub apple was definitely better, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. Even with the hours to look up tutorials and read articles about formatting, the pieces just weren’t coming together. Again, we were faced with the decision of, do we put out an imperfect product, or do we hold back to make it everything it should be?

The answer came as I stumbled over a sample tutorial put out by Lynda.com. Basically, the eReader market is so fragmented, and even with the ePub standard, your book can be interpreted in as many ways as there are eReaders. Much like web design, there are best practices to follow, but to a certain extent you’re at the mercy of the device displaying your content.

Sure, you can spend a hundred hours making it absolutely perfect on every possible device, but is that worth it? Is perfect going to be the enemy of great?

Doing it Right From the Beginning

I’d had enough of doing it halfway. For Issue 3, I decided I’d better learn those ePub best practices. Lynda.com has a nice little series about creating ePubs from print documents, and it’s jam packed full of information.

Our design template was rebuilt from the ground up to be more ePub friendly. I also have a checklist of what to do to make sure all the T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted. There were even a few tricks I picked up to make laying out the print version of the file more efficient.

So now, after the third issue, I think we’ll finally have an ePub that’ll give me that same awesome feeling when I load it on a device. And maybe it’ll make it inside the iBooks walled garden. Now the only question is – should I spend the time to go back and redo Issues 1 and 2?

Jeff Pfaller is co-founder of Midwestern Gothic, a literary journal that aims to collect the very best in Midwestern fiction writing, cataloging the oeuvre of an often-overlooked region of the United States ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales.

No money for vacation this summer? Look no further. 322 Review, appropriately named for themes of route and journey, broadly explores the cartography of human relationships and internal landscapes. Publishing both two print issues and four online issues a year, 322 Review invites submissions of poetry, fiction, CNF, and mixed media. Hop in the passenger seat blindfolded because 322 Review has the adventure and experiment already taken care of.

Angela Gentry

by Heather Frese

Heather Frese: Hello, and thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview!  Let’s start with something fun—what are you reading lately?  How about some of your favorite books to read and re-read, and why?

R.T. Smith: Right now I’m reading three books about Mary Todd Lincoln, biographies by Clinton and Burton, and a little book called The Madness of Mary Lincoln, which focuses on her insanity trial.  I was first drawn to Mrs. Lincoln by her interest in spiritualism and séances, but I soon discovered that she was an often pitiable and sometimes noble character whose life after the war was akin to Job’s.

The books I read over and again include Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Huckleberry Finn, Flannery O’Connor’s stories, Warren’s Audubon: A Vision, the poetry of Dickey, Heaney, Boland, Rodney Jones, the stories of Pinckney Benedict and Mark Richard, King Lear, The Odyssey, Owen, Donne, Stafford, Coetzee, Erdrich, Angela Carter.  That’s a sample.  I spend a lot of time reading submissions to Shenandoah, and pretty soon I resume reading the work of my fiction students.

HF: Holy cow, R.T. Smith.  You’ve got the kind of career those of us in the midst of our graduate degrees dream of—you’re the editor of a prestigious literary journal, and you also teach at Washington and Lee University and Converse College.  Your work has appeared in countless journals, you’ve published books in poetry and fiction and won practically every award a writer could wish for—Pushcart, Best American—not to mention the fellowships, Pulitzer Prize nomination, and winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  What sort of advice can you give to us burgeoning writers?  What’s the ride been like in getting where you are now?

RTS: It’s like dog-sledding uphill; it can be done, but you have to keep cracking the whip and yelling.  It’s really been a steady, modest career which has allowed me to make a living and keep indulging my compulsions.  Not much glamour or fanfare.  It’s really hard anymore to gauge the careers of anyone but those who’ve made it to the fast lane with National Book Awards, laureateships and prestigious chairs at universities.  If I were beginning today, I’d be flustered and bewildered by the abundance of magazines, presses, websites, writers, editors, blurbers—Lordy, but it’s a multitude, and many “successful” writers publish texts that either evade my understanding or leave me cold.

Here are a few simple rules I try to cling to: 1. try to write some every day, or as Frank O’Connor put it, “Get black on white.” 2. From the pen of Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.” 3. Re-write with a cold and clinical eye, as if you’d been given a chance to take a red pen to work by somebody you despise. 4. Don’t try to seem smarter (or more compassionate) than you really are, though your characters might. 5. Tell all the truth but tell it slant.  6.  Follow Dickey’s lead to be “precise and reckless.”  7. As Flaubert said, “The true end of style is clarity.”

We live in an age of literary gamesmanship, fragmentation, puzzle-mongering and very fancy dance steps.  Although I admire some of the writers who believe in the mysterious gestalts and post-structuralist experiments, at heart I’m a neoclarificationist.  Of course, we all want to make uncommon sense, but I believe it’s also important to make some common sense first.

HF: During my cyber-stalking/research on you, I ran across a talk you gave on Updike, and how incredible it was that he was able to write in every genre, except, perhaps, “military manuals.”  You are also adept at the genre-crossing game, having published both poetry and fiction.  Do you write in one genre at a time or switch back and forth doing both at once?  Does the genre you’re reading impact the genre in which you’re writing?

RTS: I haven’t written a real story in almost two years (a time occupied primarily by the re-imagining of Shenandoah), though I have done several prose monologues, “fictions” that don’t fully satisfy the range of needs we try to fill in our shaped and extended stories.  However, I live on that threshold where narrative and lyric overlap, like estuaries where salt and fresh water meet, and I’m likely to veer one way or the other according to how sweet my coffee was that morning or how soon the doves spoke.  And when one genre seems more accessible, I follow it till the trail goes cold, then try switching paths to ward off the Lost-it Blues.

HF: What are you working on currently?  Plans for any military manuals?

RTS: My new book, Sherburne, is a set of stories about a family of law enforcement officers in mountain Virginia, but it’s not indicative of my current hobby horses.  A year ago I was deep into a collection of poems about Flannery O’Connor, but I hit a snag.  The editor who’d been encouraging me suddenly changed her mind, at least on the tack I’d taken.  I’m sure the collection is fully realized, all there, but it probably needs to be trimmed, undone a bit, before I try to find another publisher.  That’s what I should be doing.  Instead, however, I’ve written a couple of poems about the Civil War, a topic I’ve often returned to and hope to expand on.  That’s what’s drawn me to Mary Lincoln.

I have also accumulated a series of short prose pieces, each one the slightly-archaic and tongue-in-cheek exploration of some oddity or strangeness, like spontaneous human combustion, birds falling from the sky, divining, hermaphrodites.  They’re called “Col. Othniel Sweet’s Mysteries of Nature,” and I have no idea what to do with them.  I started last December, and I’ve never shown any of them to anyone.  I don’t plan to write a drill or maneuver textbook, but I’ve read a couple, and who knows what Col. Sweet will turn his attentions to next.

HF: Let’s talk about Southern Literature.  To my chagrin, I was born and raised in Ohio, and thus cannot claim to be a Southern writer, despite my affinity for the region and its writers.  The big guns of Southern Lit—Faulkner, Welty, O’Conner, etc.—with their emphasis on place, family, and history seem to encompass Southern Literature in many ways, but how would you define contemporary Southern Literature?  Do you think the earlier delineations of Southern Lit still hold water?  Do you see the face of Southern Literature changing, and if so, how?

RTS: The giants are pretty much gone; McCarthy has transformed himself into Hell’s Cowboy, and even the talented Loyal Followers like William Gay and Tom Franklin know to leaven their Faulkner and allow a Marquez smile at the corner of the canvas.  Shadowy local gothic just isn’t enough anymore.  Collectively we still have our two old shames – we held people in bondage and we got whipped – and our continuing ones – we love NASCAR and the literal Bible too much and education and art too little.  And we still love to walk forward into was, but I think Southern writers today are all products of more complex identities, and the recognition of that.  Think about those poets from the highland South who call themselves Afrilachian (I have no idea how to spell this), or the Latina writers in Birmingham, the mystery writers of the Killer Nashville conference.  Maybe such a broad term as Southern Lit is the wrong instrument for investigating a house with so many mansions.

The country mice have often gone to the city or at least to graduate programs, and we’re as mobile and media-bedazzled as folks from Gotham City or Seattle.  My generation is probably the last to grow up with a mule, and by the time I was walking, it was retired, kept as a pet and a symbol.  Family, history and place are shiftier now, less predictable.  It’s pretty complicated for me, as I know there’s a whole school who claim that “Southern Literature” is more a construct than a useful descriptive term.  Define it?  Not in less than a full-fledged essay.  I will say this: standing on the shoulders of giants provides us with a long way to fall if we slip.

Lately I’ve been thinking about just the contemporary literature of the Southern Appalachians.  You might imagine that’s a manageably small congregation, but it’s not.  Consider Charles Frazier, Ron Rash, Kay Byer, Denise Giardina, Pinckney Benedict, the Pancakes, Don Secreast, Lee Smith, not to mention Charles Wright, Bob Morgan, Fred Chappell, Lynn Powell.  Wendell Berry to Maurice Manning.  Mining backgrounds, farmers, academics, furniture stainers and loggers, gays and wounded vets, bikers and greeners, Asheville lawyers and Kentucky wind farmers.  Highlanders were never as monochromatic as outlanders imagined, and now a gathering of Appalachian writers would be as varied and unpredictable as any AWP session could provide.  Even when they choose to work in a particular tradition, they are a ramified and unstable crowd, so the old categories now exist less as definitions than as questions, which is probably healthy but confusing.

HF: Do you consider yourself a capital “S” Southern writer?

RTS: Why not?  Though I find myself leaning pretty strongly against state-( or town-)sponsored  flying of Confederate flags, I know where I’m from and where I’m located.  I’ve kept to the South most of my life, and since I believe that a writer’s most important tools, besides a loose-cannon imagination and discipline, are his abilities to watch and listen, I know most of what I’ve heard and seen has been in one geographical zone.  Even when I don’t share beliefs, practices and values dominant among my neighbors, their way of life influences mine more strongly and unavoidably than people I don’t see and hear on a regular basis.  Driving a pick-up with no CD player last Sunday, I listened to one static-y local preacher after another exhorting and scorning till their little stations faded.  I am compelled to do so neither from technological deficit alone nor just for their cadences and often-accidental humor, but for their mother wit and because what they say has to be reckoned with, even if opposed.  It will never not matter to me what these zealots believe and preach.  That said, Melville, Frost, Dickinson, Trevor’s stories, Dubliners, Marquez – all have been vital in the sculpting of my imagination’s landscape, wordscape, dreamscape.  The Bible got there first, but these relative newcomers carry weight.  And it’s of no small consequence to me that my wife Sarah Kennedy is a poet who’s not from down here.  She’s a substantial facet of that hybrid imaginary reader whom I hope will see what I’m doing with language beneath what I’m ostensibly doing with story and shape.  The allegorical element in my work and the social criticism seem not to be evident to many readers (if I have many readers), but she gets it every time.

HF: You founded Cold Mountain Review when you were at Appalachian State University—what did that process teach you about literary journals and their place in both academia and the literary world?  What did you learn from being in on the process from the very beginning?

RTS: I learned it’s useful to cast a wider net than my own reading preferences would dictate, and I learned that everything quantifiable is going to be a headache sooner or later – readership, funding, your own time limitations.  An editor who’s going to survive as a person, especially if he or she doesn’t have a lot of canny and committed assistance, is going to have to learn how to decide very early into reading a prose piece or a poem whether or not it merits full exploration.  That gives rise to an uneasy feeling that never goes away, but certain kinds of errors early on do not bode well, and it’s time to act like a doctor sentenced to perform triage at a field hospital—identify the hopeless ones, genuflect and turn your attention to the others.  I know I have to be ruthless on behalf of my readers.  One other lesson I did pick up early—many editors are more self-sacrificing than I am, willing to give up their whole imaginative lives, and it’s a pleasure to know and converse with those folks.  Running a journal will infuse your life and infect your dreams, especially if you don’t have staff continuity and skill.  The other lesson that editing a newborn journal teaches you can be picked up lots of places, as Heller’s Yossarian learns—you’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected.  You’ve got to jump.  Every time I remember that CMR still exists after almost forty years, I take heart.

HF: You’ve edited Shenandoah since 1995.  Can you describe some of the changes that have taken place over the years?  What’s the most significant change?  Other than a tradition of excellence, what’s stayed the same?

RTS: The big change—news flash!—is that as of September 1 Shenandoah exists exclusively as a no-fee online journal located at shenandoahliterary.org, joining Blackbird, TriQuarterly, Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, How a Poem Happens and others,  which means the graphic and audio aspects of the journal are new muscles for me to learn how to work.  We’ll publish two full issues a year (Sept. and Feb.) but we’ll have a monthly feature, a poem of the week, a series of streaming quotations which will advance or can be changed with a mouse click and a blog that might have new posts at any moment.  Although I rejoice in the Bible’s claim that there will be no end to the making of books, I’m excited about this new venue and format and hopeful that it will reward the hundreds of hours that the designer and I have put into it.  I’ll never tire of the physical book format and celebrate as fully as Christopher Smart did his cat Jeoffry, but I enjoy shorter works online and love to hear the author’s voices and learn what others have to say.  I’ve long been a fan of the sites listed above, as well as Terrain, StorySouth, Per Contra and others.  Every item on our online version will be sharable and printable and will provide a space for reader commentary.  I’m eager to see how that turns out.  Now that we’ve got a first issue, a prototype, I’m also keen to see what my Washington and Lee interns will do to outreach my aspirations.

I believe the journal will not much differ from its earlier manifestation in content as long as I remain in the saddle.  I’ve edited Shenandoah since 1995 and think I’ve created a distinct identity for it, though I’m in the worst position to describe that identity with objectivity.  We will have more reviews and interviews, and the blog (which we’ve christened Snopes) will obviously be unlike anything in previous years.  There’s also a viewable section which describes the internship course, shows photos of interns at work and displays the comments from my interns who helped with the journal last winter.

HF: How do you and your editorial staff go about putting an issue of Shenandoah together?  What do you look for in a submission?

RTS: Since I’ve seldom had any assistant editors other than student interns, I make all the final decisions, but students read and write comments on the work that comes in and pass on to me the ones they want to argue for.  At the same time, I’m the first reader for over half the submissions, and I read them with an eye for error, sameness, sluggishness.  On the first round, I want to eliminate the obviously unsophisticated and unoriginal; I want to get rid of 80% of the options because I want to devote my time to the real possibilities.  I meet with the students and discuss their favorites, and we start ranking and debating, pointing to specifics, identifying clichés of phrase, situation, character.  I have no set number of works I need to select, though the budget plays a role here, and I want the amount of work to approximate what we’d print in an actual published volume.

As you can probably guess, I like (among other things) poetry with lots of narrative and fiction with a lyric pitch.  The following is a list of attributes of fiction to consider which my winter 2011 interns came up with: lack of excess (not overwrought), strong sense of setting, inventiveness of style, sensory details, credibility, character development, characters unique without being far-fetched, action, wit and ingenuity, wisdom, surprises, sense of shapes, tension (timing), energy, economy, humor.  Although there’s a bit of overlap here and there, you can see how with these parameters before us, a discussion might go.  With poetry, we have a similar list, but at the end of both we ask, “So what?”  For our interest to continue, there should be a rousing answer to that.

HF: You teach in the low-residency MFA program at Converse—what do you see as the benefits of a low-residency program versus a traditional one?  Drawbacks?

RTS: I’ve been a visitor and in some way involved with several creative writing programs, but I was never a student in either a graduate or undergraduate creative writing class, so I come at all this a little strangely.  The benefits of low-residency seem primarily practical and logistical—students don’t have to quit their jobs, relocate, see each other often enough to develop antipathies or remain in a distracting collegiate atmosphere.  The last of those is important to some students and anathema to others.  I see going back for a low-res degree as a very private pursuit.  One asset of low-res programs is that a student will often get to participate in workshops led by three or four completely different sets of writers.  However, since low-res students don’t have the opportunity to teach, they’re unlikely to negotiate their degrees into a university position, they seldom get to work with literary magazines, and most of the visiting writers who come in for the benefit of the undergraduates don’t show up in those summer and winter holiday residencies, so the grad students miss out on a lot.  I don’t think the scholarship programs in many low-res situations are very strong, either, but there are exceptions.  The crucial answer probably lies in the relative commitment of the directors and various teachers, as well as the quality and determination of the students.  If the director works in concert with her faculty and is dedicated to steady improvement, the resulting stimulating atmosphere will be one of the assets of a program.  I think it’s important to have some sense of shared standards and to create and cultivate a program as a team.  If the workshop leaders prepare like fiends and bring their most resourceful selves to the activity, if they deliver professional craft lectures and bring substantial experience, energy and cunning to the situation, a low-residency program can be amazing.  If the teachers don’t prepare before class or drowse off during discussion, don’t fully participate and attend most of the various (and admittedly exhausting) activities, then you’ve got a one-winged duck.  So the value and success of a program, low-residency or high, will depend on the quality of commitment by all—administrators, faculty and students.   I don’t know much about full residency programs these days, but I believe many applicants to low-residency programs should be encouraged to attend conferences like Sewanee and Kenyon and to work hard with local mentors, then apply to an MFA program in a year or two.  It’s not just a matter of location, location, but timing.

I suppose I should address the question of whether or not creative writing workshops tend to homogenize the work of their participants.  This is one of the old saws – “the ‘products’ of programs look like apples off the same tree.”  It seems unlikely that real power of mind and heart, authenticity and originality can be smothered, so I don’t think even the sometimes regimented and often distracting nature of writing programs can defeat a talented student who’s not lazy or prissy or arrogant.  The strong will survive.  Iowa did not reshape Flannery O’Connor.  It just fed the fire and gave her room.

R. T. Smith is writer-in-residence at Washington and Lee University, where he has also edited SHENANDOAH since 1995.  His dozen collections of poems include Messenger (LSU) and Outlaw Style (Arkansas), both recipients of Library of Virginia Book of the Year Awards.  His fourth book of short stories, Sherburne (Stephen F. Austin Press) is being released this fall.  Smith’s work has also appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Poetry and several editions of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.  He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Alabama Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.  In 2008 he and Shenandoah were presented the Governor’s Award for Achievement in the Arts.  He lives in Rockbridge County, VA.

Heather Frese received her MFA from West Virginia University and her MA from Ohio University.  Her work is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly and The Southeast Review, and has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Fiction Weekly, and Front Porch.  Her essay, “Fatigue,” received notable mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2011 and Best American Essays 2010.

Versal, an international English-language literary and art journal published in Amsterdam, is the editorial labor of expat poet Megan Garr, Utah fiction writer Robert Glick, and an extensive editorial board composed of North Americans and Europeans. Decisions are made democratically by the group, in good Dutch fashion, and the contents reflect their diversity of opinions. Although Versal typically leans towards what in this country is often called “experimental,” one never knows exactly what that will mean in any given issue.

Issue number 9 begins more playfully, even whimsically, than past issues. In Carmen Petaccio’s “Tornado,” the eponymous cyclone writes a note: “Hello. I am your tornado” (11). Or take Nate Liederbach’s “Demonstrum”: “Despite the sawdust and cigarette butts, despite the wretched fumes like so many regurgitated oysters, her golden snout was a velvet cloth upon my shattered brow . . .” (27). Jacqueline Vogtman’s “Letter from a Suicide to a Troll” has everything one would expect from the title. Brandon Betz’ “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” is (yes) a comic game of chess between God and the Devil. “Literaturization: An Introduction to Miniaturism,” by Benjamin Van Loon, is a thoughtful, meticulously researched academic article about something that doesn’t exist.

There is also lots of semi-figurative, sorta-surrealist, or quasi-symbolist lyric poetry, as Tony Mancus’ “Where the Water Comes from and Gets Together with Its Friends”: “Look at the way the smoke comes alive, lifting/ the river clean up over our bed, how it unmakes our mess.// You listen to shivers through February./ No fires there in the coal or the coil.” Many of these lyrics are tone poems written in beautiful music: “Wings of thorn, ocean of pine, tassels,/ timeless rot. Here bends the ocean trench, bound in yarn,/ your all-in-all consuming watch. Wash, a photograph in // reverse does not repeat” (Jane Wong, from Sea of Trees).

But none of this really prepared me for Alice Notley’s Voices (at least the opening pages thereof), which is placed in the center of this issue of Versal. Eudora Welty once said that being a novelist in Mississippi is like living next to a mountain, and perhaps the same could be said of being published next to this poem. Very few writers capture the terror and despair in the present moment more acutely than Notley:

You entered this hall in your moonlit unconsciousness pleading

for a different life. You’re here without knowing it; therefore

attentive. Where did we really come from, the horizon, or nowhere?

We come from sleep, where we are now. We come from the district

of  tissue: from details that obliterate design like seafoam. Forget them.

You can’t ask for money where we are; you’ll watch your pain without hurting. (75)

This is relatively simple language that evokes rather complex thoughts and feelings. Voices, written in both prose and verse, seems to take place in a dystopian dreamscape/underworld and is spoken by a pre- or post-historic woman, an oracle who channels all the voices in the world. Notley has trodden similar ground in The Descent of Alette, but Voices is a more meditative, discursive poem with longer lines, looser sentences, and a more implicit narrative.

After that (because of it?), Versal 9 starts to seem a bit heavier, as in Rob Cook’s “Hunting for Statues Missing in their Own Stories”: “A man notices many silences: // One when he says good things to himself as he lets the dark out of his body. // Another that gives him the courage to pay attention to where/ he abandons each breath” (106). Or Steven Salmoni’s elegiac “Landscape with Clouds” with

“clouds, as they move, in their image as the problem of the ground, beneath. // So as to pass, these names, their qualities, mark a revenge of the whole. // I mean that passage, once expressed, always has an afterlife, the solution in small regions to the one that has just been implied” (124).

This is not to say that there are no ludic or aleatory poems in the second half, too – indeed there are, along with a theriomorphic transformation or two. The overall aesthetic here is arational, evocative, (sub)liminal, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy. The art work follows this pattern, as well: optical illusions, organic matter out of place, indoor rainbows, lost faces (and even a pre-coital contract).

Versal is well worth subscribing to, for those not afraid of the dark. The ninth issue confirms the journal’s reputation as a site of much trans-atlantic creativity and editorial acumen.

Joseph Harrington is an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan 2011) and Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002).

A Graceful Design

From our first meeting, a goal of the editors and staff of Beecher’s was to create not only a new literary journal run by students, and filled with challenging, inventive content, but also to create a beautiful object. Beecher’s One was going to be an artifact to hold and love, something that would leave an imprint on every fingertip that flipped its pages, something that stood out on a bookshelf. Something that kicked Kindle’s ass.

One of the first ways we tried to accomplish this was by creating Beecher’s Zero. Robert J. Baumann, our first poetry editor, created a handmade chapbook filled with short entries from the editors about aesthetics. This would be the reader’s first introduction to who we are, and what’s important to us. The craftsmanship that went into these led to the appearance of our first full issue. No matter how much turmoil went into creating the pages, when taking in the clean black and white book you feel the impact of the design.

We were lucky from the start, because we had a talented and experienced designer. Dan Rolf, our design editor, had a vision that fell onto, and in between, each page of Beecher’s One. When you discover you’re hungry after not realizing it, and then eat a really good meal—that’s how Rolf’s design makes you feel. Comfortably full, wanting to experience it again, and at the same time, not quite knowing all of the ingredients that made up the recipe.

Although I knew that we all wanted Beecher’s to be a beautiful object, I didn’t know how Rolf was going to go about accomplishing this. His answer reminded me that yes the design was important, but that it has to start with the writing.

_____

Dan Rolf, Beecher’s Design Editor, on creating the first issue:

“The first and most important aspect was to simply showcase the writing. Beecher’s is a literary magazine first and foremost, and we wanted the physical object to be a straightforward medium in which to experience the textual content.”

“But we also wanted the physical object to display a reverence for the interaction between a text and the reader. Because the act of reading from a physical book is also a tactile one, we wanted Beecher’s One to engage this fact. So, the second aspect was to make the physical object record this interaction.”

“The book has a naked spine and rigid, toothy, absorbent white paper that is meant to show evidence of the reader by literally absorbing and recording the reading experience: the hands holding the book, the fingers on the page, the bending of turned pages, the weakening of the unprotected spine. This recording of a reader’s interaction happens with every well-used book, but with Beecher’s One we wanted to lay bare this interaction, allow the recording of the interaction to become the adornment.”

 _____

We hope that to know Beecher’s One is to hold it in your hands, run a fingerprint down the thread in the spine, see the black typeface imprinted into the white sheets, leave a fingerprint on the pages. We hope that our greatest triumph was to create an intimate, unique experience through the combination of writing and design.

Caitlin Frances Thornbrugh was born and raised in Kansas City. She studied Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She decided to stay in Lawrence to pursue her MFA in Creative Writing, where she is now working as the Managing Editor for Beecher’s.

The Latent Print

This journal’s distinct flavor is hinted at in its name – its featured work attempts to reveal complexities that simmer beneath surfaces, the concealed emotions, hidden forms, and suppressed thoughts. Through both artwork and writing, the journal becomes the “home of unwavering creative spirits” it claims to be. This is a home for almost any kind of art, from graphic design to mixed media to simple drawings, some cartoonish in nature, others dark and surreal, but always colorful and textured, thought-provoking and strange. This is also the home to screen plays, experimental essays, poetry, short story, and flash fiction. The tone of each piece is conversational, gritty, sensual, confessional, sexual, often working to be seen as well as read, as some pieces sport colorful fonts and take over the page in new ways. Each work is preceded by an image (and sometimes homemade mini-movie) of the author, teaching us to read the work through their eyes, reminding us that each piece was once inside and has worked to find its way out of a dormant state and onto the page.

Mary Stone Dockery

The Penguin Aesthetic

by Jacqueline Vogtman

An Interview with Alessandra Simmons, Outgoing Editor of Indiana Review

Alessandra Simmons, originally from Los Angeles, is an MFA candidate at Indiana University where she is the outgoing Editor of Indiana Review. She has poems forthcoming in WomenArts Quarterly Journal and has been nominated for AWP Intro Awards in both poetry and nonfiction.

Jacqueline Vogtman: First of all, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I noticed while reading Indiana Review‘s blog [Under the Blue Light] that you’ll be stepping down as Editor soon. How soon? Also, I was wondering if you could discuss how long you’ve been Editor there, what the experience has been like, and what your feelings are as you prepare to leave the position.

Alessandra Simmons: I’ll be stepping down in May. [Interviewer’s note: this interview was conducted at the end of April, 2011]. I’ve been working with IR since 2008 when I first arrived as an MFA student at IU—but my role has changed each year. First I was an associate poetry editor, then the associate editor, and this year worked as editor.  It has been eye-opening and rewarding to see the journal from so many vantage points. Especially in the year I have been editor, I’ve learned so much about the inner workings of IR—from the more administrative tasks of managing subscriptions and distribution to the editorial work of selecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that we think will be a good fit for IR. I’m sad to be stepping down and leaving such a wonderful literary circle but I’m also excited to be handing the reigns over to fiction writer Deborah Kim because I know IR will continue publish exciting new work.

JV: On a related note, I thoroughly enjoyed the Baudelaire poem (“Be Drunk”) that you included in that same blog post—it’s always been one of my favorites. That made me wonder: in a position that requires one to immerse oneself in what’s new in contemporary literature and offer up fresh voices to readers, what place do classic literature and classic authors (like Baudelaire, et al) play in your reading life?

AS: As a reader and writer of poetry, I think it’s important to important and necessary to read both contemporary and classic literature. Contemporary authors are more often than not in some kind of dialogue with classic authors so it’s helpful to keep the classics fresh in my mind.

JV: Staying with the blog for a moment, when did Indiana Review start this blog, and what was the impetus behind it? Do you think it has attracted more readers or has had any affect on your readership?

AS: To my knowledge the blog was started in 2007 to help open up communications with our readers and the writers who submit work to us. Since then we’ve used it to announce IR happenings, such as contests, the opening and closing of submissions, to share news about contributors’ or public readings and also general thoughts on the current literary world. It’s hard to say how the blog has directly affected our readership; we can see how many people read our blog, but not all the viewers correlate to subscribers.

JV: Getting back to your editorship, what is the impression of the work you’ve been receiving since you’ve been Editor? Have you seen any trends, or anything that’s changed in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction over the past few years?

AS: Yes, it’s funny the trends you start to notice when reading large amounts of work. Bees, they are just everywhere! It seems that poets are concerned with keeping bees alive on the page as news about the decline of the bee population is made known. Apples, clowns, space travel, these are a few other thematic trends I’ve seen in my three years on staff. On a larger scale, a trend I’ve seen is the move of narrators/speakers in fiction and poetry to be more and more self-aware or self-referential.

JV: You are a graduate student at Indiana, and the staff of the journal is made up of grad students. How do you think that informs the work you accept and your manner of acceptances/rejections? I ask because as a former assistant editor at Mid-American Review, I always felt a pang of empathy voting “no” against certain stories, especially those that showed promise but weren’t quite there yet, and it struck me as ironic that I was in the position to reject other people’s precious work when my own work was also out there getting rejected.

AS: All of us on staff at IR are students, which I think makes us generous readers. We want stories, essays and poems to succeed. Often when I vote no for a piece, I don’t only think about the journal, but also in terms of the piece itself—perhaps if the work isn’t quite there yet, it would actually be doing it a disservice by publishing it in its current state. I’ve seen a story we really wanted, but ultimately rejected because the ending wasn’t strong enough, published later in another journal with a new and better ending—so for that story, saying no was really in the best interest of the author and his story.

JV: But also, do you think because you’re staffed primarily by grad students, you include fresher work than journals staffed primarily by editors who’ve been in academia or publishing for a long time?

AS: As writing students, I think we do have a keen eye for work that challenges our notions of a specific genre can do. I think our next issue has some great essays that challenge the definition of what a personal essay is meant to accomplish.

JV: On a related note, how do you balance your work as a grad student, your writing, and your editing duties at Indiana Review?

AS: Balance—isn’t that what everyone is after. It’s hard! I’ve tried to prioritize my writing by setting aside time when I force myself not to check IR’s email or worry about IR related topics. One of the goals I had as I came into the editorship was to launch a new website for IR. (I think our website is using the same template it has been using since the invention of the Internet.) However, with all the regular demands of the editorship, being a student, and writing, work on the new website has been slow. But I have high hopes for the website to be completed during Deborah’s year as editor. I’ve learned I’ve just had to let some things slide.

JV: This is a rather general question, but one that needs to be asked: do you see Indiana Review as promoting any particular aesthetic, or do you simply publish the best work you read regardless of aesthetic?

AS: At editor’s meetings we often talk about how IR does have a certain aesthetic that is quite difficult to explain, but that you get to know as you read the magazine. High quality, well written prose or verse is a key ingredient, but I think there is something more–work that reaches beyond itself, work that is a little bit quirky.  At the end of each school year we get t-shirts for the IR staff. A couple years ago, the t-shirt pictured a group of penguins wearing an assortment of hats and t-shirts with the blurb: “This is our aesthetic.”  I think the drawing captures our aesthetic better than I could ever put it into words.

JV: On a related note, how much of what you publish comes from the slush pile, and do you have any advice for submitters?

AS: Most of the work we publish comes from the slush pile, but I’m not sure of what exact percentage. Advice for submitters…keep your cover letters simple and to the point, and let your writing speak for itself. Also, when you get a response from us on your submission, wait a couple of months before you re-submit, but do, do re-submit. Also, our Prizes are a great way to get a discounted subscription and your submissions read quickly because all prize submissions are considered for publication, not just the winner of the $1000 prize.

JV: Speaking of submissions, Indiana Review is one of the many, many lit mags that now use an online submission manager. Has this changed the amount of submissions you receive, and do you still allow mailed submissions? If so, what do you think the ratio is between people who submit online and people who submit through mail, and is there any advantage one way or the other?

AS: We’ve seen a trend shifting toward the online submission manager, but we still allow mailed submissions for people who do not have access or prefer not to use the internet. We try not to prefer one kind of submission to the other—we work hard to keep both groups of submissions read at about the same pace.

JV: Now, for a compliment: Indiana Review is one of the best and most long-standing literary magazines out there. What other lit mags do you guys tend to respect and compare yourselves to?

AS: Thank you! We are thankful for the years of support and growth. When Indiana Review first started in 1976 it was called Indiana Writes and was quite local and quirky–its fun to look through our library of past issues and see how the magazine has evolved into what it is today. We are lucky to have exchange relationships with many journals that are out there. IR has a lot of respect for all the journals that are working hard to showcase new writing, especially Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, and Gulf Coast, which are all student run as well.

JV: For the final question, I’m wondering if you’d discuss what you see for the future of Indiana Review—are there any changes coming up? For instance, I was curious: Does IR ever have plans to include an online component (besides the blog), where you’ll put a selection of the print issues online?

AS: At this time, we don’t put up selections online and we don’t have plans to in the near future, although we would like to increase the amount of bluecasts we have on our blog. We’ve had a lot of good time recording authors read their work, but we are still working on the technology of housing the podcast in archives that are user-friendly.

JV: Once again, thank you so much, Alessandra, for your thoughtful answers!

AS: Thank you too! It’s been great to reflect on IR with the help of your questions.

Jacqueline Vogtman’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Avery Anthology, Berkeley Fiction Review, Copper Nickel, Drunken Boat, and Versal, among other journals. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she served as an assistant editor of Mid-American Review.

A perusal of the Front Porch archives reveals a history of publishing strong fiction that tends toward narrative driven by a balance of character and action, nonfiction often poignant in its play between narrative and reflection, and poetry sharp in its (usually) concise illumination of the layers under everyday existence. Where the most recent issue’s poetry reflects some degree of consistency with the journal’s established style and quality, the prose selections are not quite as memorable as what’s appeared in previous issues. Front Porch’s general strengths include its utilization of multimedia elements, such as featured videos of author readings and a design that is neither plain nor so flashy that it distracts from the content. The journal’s name is highlighted as a unifying visual theme, with photographs of front porches used for cover art and as background images for individual pages. The universal front porch then becomes personal, as each published piece includes an author’s statement about a specific front porch in her or his memory. Expanding on that sense of personalization, one interesting innovation the new editorial board has made for the summer issue is featuring blog entries written by several members of the board on various literary topics in lieu of new interviews, reviews, and videos. Judging from the journal’s history and the new board’s obvious enthusiasm, Front Porch is a journal worth checking back with despite some of the lackluster selections in the current issue.

Jennifer Colatosti