"I Don't Care About Your Journal, Publish Me Anyway!"...and Other Bad Submitting Habits
Kelly Davio is a poet and teacher in the Seattle area. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (Whidbey Writers’ Workshop), and works as an instructor of English as a Second Language. She currently serves as Managing Editor for The Los Angeles Review , and Associate Poetry Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. She also reviews books for Women’s Review of Books. Her poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and her debut collection, Burn This House, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
Interview by Katherine Hunt
Tell me about your role at the Los Angeles Review. Do I have it right that you’re the managing editor and also help edit poetry? How involved are you in reading submissions, and what makes a poem stand out to you?
In addition to my role as managing editor--which runs the gamut from accounting and budgeting to working with contributing editors and ordering each issue's manuscript--I have the pleasure of helping our poetry editor, Tanya Chernov, read submissions and make decisions as to which poems will go to print. Tanya and I split the task of reading submissions, and we make decisions on poems jointly. Our tastes are quite different, so selecting the work together keeps our selections diverse.
For a poem to make its way from the slush pile to the journal, it has to not only have a fresh take on its subject matter, but also excellent craftsmanship. Any time I read through our slush pile, I'll come across a number of poems that are interesting and lively, but that have inexplicable line breaks or that lack attention to rhythm. Other poems may be immaculately crafted, but lack substance. When I see a poem that's captivating and well made, I know right away that I have to have it.
That's not to say that we never work with authors on poems to polish the craftsmanship; when we find a poem that's riveting but not quite finished, we'll work with the author until we're all happy with the result.
You mention that you and Tanya Chernov have very different taste in poetry. How so? What kinds of things do you disagree about?
Tanya often tends toward narrative poems, whereas my first love is the lyrical poem. And while Tanya has a keen appreciation for the quiet, the serene, and the nature poem, I tend toward the loud, the in-your-face, and the gritty. She often brings to the table selections in a blue-collar voice, and I often bring in the cerebral and epigraph-laden. And what we end up with is, we hope, an eclectic assortment of the best of the best. As different as our tastes are, I cannot remember a time when we were ever ultimately split on a decision about a poem. After long consideration and debate, we've always been able to say "okay, I see what you see here."
The Los Angeles Review is particularly interested in West Coast writers and writing. How would you characterize literature from this region? What about it intrigues/appeals to you? Any specific examples?
There's a perception among some people that nothing of much substance happens on this side of the Mississippi River. As an independent West Coast journal under the umbrella of a West Coast press, we're absolutely interested in proving that notion wrong.
What fascinates me about our region is the fact that so many writers here embrace outsider status. They're not all writing from the academy or to the academy. They're not battling over schools of thought or waiting by the phone for an invitation to a coterie salon. They're writing politically conscious, socially aware material, and they're not going to apologize for it.
I'd characterize literature of the West Coast as tremendously eclectic. For example, there's Ishmael Reed working in Oakland, producing some of the most controversial, incisive political commentary today. There's Dana Gioia working in Los Angeles, writing gorgeous, stately poems. And there's Bruce Holland Rogers, one of the giants of flash fiction, working in Eugene, writing science fiction and fantasy. And we at LAR embrace the range of interest, style, and form that exists in our region.
Of course, as a nationally distributed journal, we're not interested only in West Coast writing. We think of ourselves as an inclusive publication, and we have many wonderful writers from all over the country, and from as far away as Singapore, Israel, Poland, and Kuwait.
You dedicate most issues of LAR to a specific writer. What is the purpose of those dedications?
One of the features that makes LAR unique is that we do, as you mention, dedicate each of our issues to a West Coast writer who deserves to have wider recognition. At LAR, we see our mission as one of literary citizenship: giving something meaningful back to our community rather than just publishing work we like and patting ourselves on the back for having done so. We want to use our venue to showcase the work of a writer who has made a significant contribution to American writing and who deserves to be more widely read. Including several pieces from and a full-length profile on that writer is a way we honor the rich literary tradition here in the West.
We've had the pleasure of featuring writers like Wanda Coleman, Judy Grahn, Juan Felipe Herrera, Bruce Holland Rogers, Ishmael Reed, and John Rechy is the past several years, and we're delighted to be featuring Ron Carlson in our twelfth issue.
How do you decide which authors to feature in that way?
We never have a shortage of names in the hat for our dedications. We editors each come up with plenty of ideas, as does Red Hen Press, and we work through the process of coming to a joint decision. Sometimes our decisions are based on the timeliness of a topic a dedicatee writes about. For example, our 11th issue, which will debut at AWP '12, is dedicated to John Rechy, an icon of gay literature. We felt particularly moved to comment on our position on equal rights in today's political climate of increasing anti-gay rhetoric.
You’re a poet yourself. How has your work as an editor influenced the way you submit your own work to journals/publishers?
Reading our submissions has absolutely influenced the way I submit my own work. As a writer just starting out, I was in the "let's plaster these poems around indiscriminately and someone will have to like something" school of submissions. I had terrible habits that I'm sure drove editors crazy: I'd submit a new batch of work to a journal the moment they'd rejected something, not stopping to actually consider why I'd been rejected. I'd send submissions to large numbers of magazines all at once, so I would routinely have to withdraw work as poems were picked up elsewhere. I didn't actually read, much less subscribe to, many of the magazines where I sent work.
Now that I'm on the other side of the desk, I can see why submitting that way was such a bad idea. There's nothing less appealing to an editor than submitting in a way that says "I don't care about your journal, but publish me anyway." Now I target publications, a few at a time, and read their magazines. Doing the work it takes to actually know a market and a readership is good for both the editor and the submitter. When I changed my submitting habits to be focused and editor-friendly, I saw the numbers of acceptances in my mailbox grow.
Perhaps the biggest change was in how I view rejection. I used to think that a form rejection (especially on a wonky, sad little corner of paper--the kind you need a microscope to even see) was a referendum on my ability or worth as a writer. I felt actual shame when I got those notes. Now I know that there are many reasons a good poem may be rejected; an editor may already have accepted something very much like it, or she may be looking for something in a different style. She might have filled her page count already. The poem may not fit the themes, either stated or emerging, of the issue. Good poems don't always find homes right away. Is that lousy for the poet? Sure. But a rejection isn't a judgement on the writer.
How many submissions does LAR generally get in a reading period? What staff helps you get through them all, and how do you do it?
We read about 2,000 poems, 600 short stories, and 250 essays during each of our 3-month reading periods. Each of our five editors reads as many of the submissions as possible, and we have a small but dedicated team of readers, all accomplished and well-published writers in their own rights, who help us make sure that not only is every piece read, but that many pieces are read by several people.
It's our goal to respond to each of our submitters in 90 days or fewer. It can be a challenge to consider such a large quantity of material in a timely way, but none of us feel that reading submissions is a chore; we all genuinely enjoy and look forward to reading the work our submitters have entrusted to us. It's our enthusiasm for the work that allows us to make our way through so many submissions with such a small group of people.
LAR started as an offshoot of Red Hen Press in Los Angeles. How did that come about? What’s your relationship with the press now?
AR was founded in 2003 by Kate Gale and Mark Cull (the editor and publisher, respectively) of Red Hen Press. Kate and Mark wanted to create a journal that would make a place for work that is often ignored by other presses or big-name journals, publishing the best writing from a diverse community of authors. In its first issues, LAR changed its editorial staff yearly to keep a fresh stream of new ideas, but a constantly rotating group of editors poses some logistical problems that eventually made that model untenable. In its sixth issue, LAR moved to the more or less permanent editorial staff that you see on our masthead today. We still work closely with Red Hen to maintain the vision and quality that Kate and Mark wanted to see in LAR, and we take very seriously our directive to represent a diverse range of voices, not merely to reflect the trends of academia or of other journals.
Katherine Hunt is a reader, writer, and editor in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Cranky, Red Mountain Review, Fringe, and Blood Lotus. A writing workshop she ran as a volunteer at 826 Boston is featured in the 2011 book Don't Forget to Write, published by 826 National.
