Inside the Night Train

Don Lee, former editor-in-chief of Ploughshares wrote, “Nothing makes an editor’s day more than finding a great story by a complete unknown.” Do you agree with that statement? Why, if given the opportunity, wouldn’t a journal want to publish stories by primarily well-known writers with large followings?

Yes, I do agree with Don. I love getting great stories from people I don’t know. I assume by the time NT gets a story, it’s been through a couple of tiers of submission, so the writer’s faith in the work has been tested, and it’s really nice to affirm their own thoughts about the work via publication. I don’t want to run a journal that publishes only big names. It’s nice to have them occasionally, sure, if only as proof that the journal and its writers are indeed vita-worthy, but I like what we get: early-mid career writers on the verge of breaking bigger.

It’s exciting for me to think NT is part of that, and I have a couple of shelves worth of books by NT authors now. I try to get a copy of everyone, though I’m sure I’m missing a couple, now that I think of it.

You used to have a motto for the type of story you like to publish, didn’t you? Something like people-action-consequence?

Yes we did. That quote actually comes from interview Don Lee gave in the 1992 Emerging Writers issue of Ploughshares. Don said that one of the problems he was finding in fiction classes that he taught was that writers didn’t necessarily realize that a successful story – for him anyway – rose and fell on how realistic it was. Non-realistic stories didn’t always float his boat. In fiction workshops people were writing stories told, for example, from the point of view of a toilet. Don said – in his much more eloquent way – that literature concerns people and their actions and the consequences of those actions.

In an interview with Wayne Yang in Eight Diagrams you said that the single biggest problem with submitted stories is “sameness”. Can you elaborate a little on what you meant by that?

Everybody, or almost everybody, can learn to write a decent-sounding sentence, via their high school or their MFA program. Sentences are not the problem, stories are. I have read every dead baby cancer AIDS my wife left me my girlfriend left me and I’m sad, rough sex up against the wall omigod I’m a lesbian story I ever want to. Tell a good story and don’t get in its way with fancy language unless you’re really good at it. That’s what I like best, a good solid something-happens story told with freaked out language. That type of story doesn’t come often, but I love it when it does.

Why shouldn’t writers who want to see their stories or poetry published just send them out blindly to all the literary magazines they can dig up?

No, no, on the contrary. They should CC every journal they know and hope for the best. I’ll have an extra-special delete key just for them. Seriously, if you send to everybody, you might as well send to nobody. It’s like sticking your sexual equipment out the window and insisting that everyone that passes by have sex with you. Show a little discernment, people.

You responded just as I’d expect a publisher/editor to respond!

It’s awfully frustrating. When we first started up, before we had a submissions system, we would get emails that used to bcc every literary journal in the world, or worse, they didn’t use the bcc and they carbon copied everyone in this email so suddenly you had 400 addresses in this one email and it just got really frustrating to deal with them and their obsession with getting published. That’s just not a good way to go about things.

What do you mean when you say “It’s like sticking your sexual equipment out the window and insisting that everyone that passes by have sex with you?” Is it that writers should have enough self-respect to realize that there are magazines that they wouldn’t want their work to appear in?

Yes, and there are places where their work doesn’t belong. My work for example. I submitted things for a few years to Agni Magazine and it took me a while of reading their issues and reading what their editors said about themselves until I realized that Agni was just not a place where I was ever going to get published. They don’t cotton to my kind of story so I just don’t send things to them anymore.

I read that one reason you launched Night Train was that you had nothing else to do! But another was to provide better feedback to writers. How often do you respond personally to people who submit fiction/poetry for NT and what kind of feedback do you give (for example, if the story is both good and the kind of thing that fits with Night Train, but not quite good enough, do you let the submitter know?)

I try to respond personally a quarter of the time these days. We used to respond personally to everyone and though writers generally liked that, I would burn through six or seven associate editors a year, and it just wasn’t feasible if I wanted a permanent staff. Eventually I decided to shrink our staff anyway, so I was more involved in the day-to-day reading.

Now it’s just my friend and fiction editor Alicia Gifford and me reading stories, so I shoot for 25% personal responses and end up somewhere between 15 and 20%. If a story comes close to being accepted I say so, yes. I think it’s important to do so, before good writers give up on you as being too picky.

So you began with a mission of providing personal response to readers and found you couldn’t do that. At this point what would you say your mission is?

That’s a good question. I think our mission has more to do with getting as many people we can to as large an audience as possible. I guess that’s how I explain the mission now. It’s just trying to get the work out there and educating the masses as to what our aesthetic is – what we like – because I think it’s worthwhile…I say “we” throughout all of this, but it’s really my baby.

A few years ago, before NT became an online journal, you said that print journals were seen as somehow more respectable. Do you still think that’s true?

It’s still true. It won’t be in a few years, but it still applies now. I hope within five years or so you’ll see online journals become prominent in the major prize anthologies (BASS/BAP/O. Henry/Pushcart etc.). The online anthologies of ‘best’ work like Dzanc’s Best of the Web together with other anthologies and contests like the Million Writers Award have proven already that the best online stories are among the best stories period.

Why did Night Train switch to an online format? To cut down on costs?

Yes, because of the money, pure and simple. When we were doing our print issues we’d spend anywhere from $ 5,000-$10,000 per issue on distribution costs and trying to market it the way we wanted to. At first we paid writers, too. It very quickly became clear to us that it was an unfeasible working method. We ended up making enough money through the efforts of one of our associate editors, Tom Jackson, and our then-managing editor, Susan Henderson (author of Up From the Blue, Harper, 2010) but they’re no longer with the magazine and we don’t have the requisite skill set anymore to do what they did.

I imagine that most non-profit literary magazines are going to be turning to the online model. Unless you have your own print shop or lots of money to burn like, say, the Virginia Quarterly or Ploughshares who constantly and consistently get grants, the job becomes 90 per cent fund raising and only 10 per cent editing. And that’s no fun for anyone. We all get into it because we want to get into editing and find stories that excite us. Figuring out how best to word an application to a corporate sponsor you know is getting a thousand other apps that look just like yours seems like too much effort for too little reward.

Becky Tuch, editor of The Review Review, once said that literary magazines are so important for writers’ careers, yet no one reads them. Can you comment?

Becky is astute. When NT was a print journal, we never had more than 500 subscribers, but there was a time when we got 500 submissions every month. Clearly, something in the average writer’s mind thinks they don’t have to read the journals. Maybe they think their work ought to triumph wherever they send it.

Do you think there are too many literary magazines? How do you, personally, decide which ones to read?

It’s easy to become jaded when you consider the number of print journals and online journals out there, how the quality control has diminished, how anyone can publish anything, but I choose to think about lit mags entirely differently. Chances are, no matter how narrow your focus, no matter how risque your material is, no matter how slowly paced or fast-paced or experimental your story or poem is, you can find a home for it in the lit journal world. It may take time, but if your work is good, it’ll find an audience. I read the journals I’ve been published in, and those of my friends, pretty much. I follow my favorite writers wherever they go, honestly.

Is there any question you’d like to answer that you haven’t been asked? Any advice you’d like to offer to writers out there?

For writers who want to get published, they need to read the journals and subscribe to them, clearly, just to keep them alive. I would encourage people to do that inasmuch as it’s possible. And to not forget that the editors to whom they’re sending their work also wear other hats at the same time – husband and worker and writer so sometimes when we don’t get your submission back to you quickly it’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because there’s only so much time and so many hands.