Literature as Dialogue; Fiction That Takes Risks

How long have you been working at American Short Fiction?

I have been with ASF for a little bit over two years now, and I actually interned before that, so in total three years, with a little time missing in there. When I came on two years ago I was in the position called editorial fellow, which was newly created, and I started learning about the magazine, and over time was promoted to associate editor. There are two of us on paid staff, me and Jill Meyers, the editor, but we have a huge group of volunteers and a lot of us have worked up through the ranks, which is great because we all work together.

How big is the staff?

We’ve brought on several new readers in the past couple months, which is very exciting for us. There are five editors — the editor, the associate editor, two contributing editors, and a web editor, and then we have about 12 or 13 editorial assistants, so it’s a pretty big group of people, and then we have other positions — a production manager, an art director. ASF is part of a nonprofit, a writers in the schools program in Austin, so those people work in our office but they aren’t part of the staff.

Where do your readers come from?

They come from all over the place. There are people who are associated with the University of Texas creative writing or English programs, and people who’ve moved to Austin and looked for a literary community. It’s a great group; we have meetings where we talk about stories for two hours. It’s a really comfortable way to sit with other people and think about fiction. We have a reader application we use; we learn a lot about our readers before we bring them on, so we can really trust their decisions.

What goes into that application process?

We ask what they’re reading, and how they think about literature as a dialogue, how they think about talking to other writers. We always want them thinking about those connections.

We don’t require them to have MFAs —if you’re thinking about fiction and reading it and loving it in kind of an ecstatic way, you don’t need a degree for that. We really want our readers to genuinely love fiction; we really want our writers and everyone around us to love fiction to an unhealthy degree sometimes. And I think you can tell that when you talk to someone.

How does that love for fiction translate for the writers you publish?

All magazines say the thing about reading the magazine before you submit, and knowing the aesthetic. We’re looking for well-crafted stories, but we’re also looking for stories that have heart. We get thousands of stories that are very well-written and well-crafted, and move in the right ways, but don’t have the energy we’re looking for, don’t have the heart we’re looking for. I think writers that take risks, with voice and character, those are the stories we’re looking for. We don’t want stories that feel like they could be published anywhere. We want stories that knock us out, and you can feel that from the first page. When we discover those in unsolicited submissions, it’s the most rewarding part of doing this.

How many people will see a piece that comes into the slush pile?

Each story that comes in gets at least two reads. If a story gets good feedback it could get anywhere from between four to ten reads before it comes to the higher editors. We want to give as much focus to every piece as we can. Our response time is pretty long at this point, which is not a great thing, but we really want as many perspectives as we can get with every single piece that comes into us. We want as many pairs of eyes on them as we can get.

What’s the process from the slush pile to publication?

We only take online submissions via submission manager, so the story will come into that slush pile, and it gets passed around this big group of volunteer readings. If it gets good feedback, what happens is that we pull it out of the manager, and we have editorial meetings in the office, but we also take those stories to our readers meeting, where we’ll discuss them for a very long time. There was one story, “The Wrong Chemicals,” by Matthew Baker, that we talked about for over two hours, considering it from every angle, what the project of the story was, and whether it succeeds in that goal.

If we do decide a story is right for the magazine we’ll contact the author; it goes through an initial round of edits and back to the author or the author’s agent. We’ll go back and forth over two or three weeks to get the story into the tightest and cleanest shape, so that’s the story that comes out in the magazine.

And once it goes in the magazine, we do everything we can to promote the new authors, to get it out into the world. We really want ASF to be a magazine that’s not just for writers, to be just something you can pick up and love, not necessarily something you can think of as just a literary magazine.

We also pay our authors quite well, and that’s important to us. To be a professional writer is one of the hardest things, and you deserve to be paid for your work. It’s one of the things we stick to and are proudest of.

What’s the established-versus-emerging breakdown in each issue?

I would say usually we have one or two people in each issue that I’d consider more on the established side — not necessarily Joyce Carol Oates, but winning major awards and publishing collections. Over half of each issue comes from unsolicited submissions, and we’re really proud of that, finding writers who are just sending out to magazines by themselves.

I admire magazines that commit to only publishing authors once, but we have a couple authors who mean a lot to us, and whose work moves us in a really spectacular and unique way, and we’ve been able to publish those writers over the course of their career — I’m thinking of Laura Van den berg, who we’ve published three times, or Susan Steinberg, whose work keeps coming to us and it’s just fantastic; and her story we published a little over a year ago won a Pushcart for us, so that was exciting. But it’s the emerging writers we really focus on; we like to think of ourselves as a launching pad.

How do you choose which pieces work together as a whole?

That’s one of my favorite parts about working at ASF, these conversations about how the issue fits together, and these pieces talk to each other and bleed into each other and jump off each other. I love talking about what it would be like to come to one issue of ASF, if you didn’t have a history of ASF.

We talk about basic things; we don’t want two stories next to each other with similar aims or plots or voices. But we also want each issue to be diverse; we want to publish as many women as men, we want to publish people who aren’t necessarily getting love from major publishing houses. But for the most part we look at the ends of stories and the beginnings of stories and how they come together, the best way for a reader to come to each piece, and what surrounding stories would make each piece the strongest. It can take hours and hours to make those decisions. Sometimes it’s harder when there are fewer stories than many. We don’t have a word limit, which is super-rare, and we’re really proud of that too — we published a novella in last winter’s issue and it was 94 pages — but we’re always negotiating in the order with length and voice. It’s kind of a puzzle, and I love that part of this.

When you’re reading submissions, when do you know it’s not right for ASF?

It’s always hard to talk about what turns you off in a piece of fiction because it’s so personal. When I read, I’m looking for risk. If I can tell from the beginning of a story exactly where it’s going, that’s not the kind of story that’s right for the magazine. I want to be surprised by the voice. A lot of magazines talk about voice-driven fiction, and there’s a reason that’s so cherished. Every story is told by a person, and I’m looking for an interesting, new voice.

Other things: I don’t want to say your opening has to be the best part of the story, but we’re looking for stories that get us immediately, make us fall into something. I think you can really tell on the first couple of pages whether it’s earth shattering, and we’re looking for earth shattering.

You’re very clear in your submission guidelines that ASF has extremely high standards. How much of the work you receive qualifies?

A lot of the work we get comes from people who really do understand the magazine. We also charge a reading fee; we’ve gotten some pushback on that, but it’s just $3, and we’re a non-profit and it keeps us going. I think that’s kind of a filter — if you care enough about the magazine to put a little bit of support behind it, it’s likely that you know the magazine better than someone who presses a button and sends a story to 70 journals. I know it’s hard for writers to understand sometimes, but I think it means we get the best work. I think the quality of work has improved greatly since we began doing that in January of 2009.

What other journals do you read?

I love McSweeney’s and Tin House, but I don’t think those magazines need any more love. I really love Hobart, and One Story is one of my favorites; the staff is so bighearted and they care so much about what they’re doing. A Public Space is amazing. Online, I like The Collagist, and Wig Leaf. I kind of gravitate towards magazines that publish only fiction; I have great respect for other forms, but if a magazine is publishing only fiction it means they’re putting all of their resources behind that. I also like Smokelong Quarterly and Pank a lot.

How does your own experience as a fiction writer influence your work at ASF?

Knowing what it’s like to submit to a magazine and watch your work be sucked in and not know what’s going on with it, I really want to give every piece the time and focus and energy it deserves. I’m a writer, too, and I know what it’s like to just not know what’s going on with your work, and I think everyone who submits to lit mags deserves your utmost respect. I want to give writers the most encouragement and the most help that I possibly can.

How about ASF’s effect on your writing?

My advice to all writers would be to find a lit mag to read for. I think reading submissions and seeing the trends, what works and what doesn’t, in a slush pile, is the best thing for your own work. It’s the best thing to be able to step back and have that editor’s perspective on your own stuff, which is always hard. But to practice doing that, to see the other side of the whole process, couldn’t be better for someone’s own writing. It’s really helped me out a lot.

What are some of those trends you’re seeing?

We noticed last year we were getting a lot of stores about babies: weird babies, tiny babies, just surreal baby experiences. I don’t know where that came from. You kind of realize that the themes — we get a lot of cancer stories, a lot of dead mother and father stories, a lot of struggling children stories, stories that are told from the point of view of the child who thinks about the world differently, and you kind of start to realize that those are the stories that are hard to tell in a new and interesting way. The ones that do are the ones that get published and anthologized and talked about forever. It’s seeing the seams, and realizing which ones are taking those to a new level.

I think we get a lot of stories that are really well crafted, where you can feel that people know the motions a story is supposed to take. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a story that’s going to change the way you look at the world, and what I want is for every story to change the way I consider myself and the world and being a human in it. That’s what fiction is, and what it does. There are very few stories that do that, and realizing how a story can be well written and do what it’s supposed to do, but still not hit an ecstatic level — I think you only get that from reading a lot of stories, reading the slush pile, basically.

I think reading unsolicited submissions can do so much for the way you think about fiction. There are a lot of magazines that I really respect that don’t do a lot with unsolicited submissions, and I really respect those, but I’m really glad we get to support authors who are just doing those on their own. Finding one that really does it for me is the best part of my job.

What author do you wish you’d discovered in slush?

I’d like to say I wish I’d been working for lit mags in the 1920s and 1930s. I think about the editors that first got to publish Fitzgerald and Salinger, who first got to find those stories in The New Yorker and Story. But I think now is an incredible time to be doing this too. I wish I had been one of the first editors to published Barthelme — I think his work is so innovative, and discovering him for the first time must have been rewarding and fascinating and bizarre.

What’s your ideal line-up for an issue of ASF?

Our summer issue. We have a piece by Kevin Moffett, "English Made Easy"; it’s kind of traditional in its trajectory and its arc, and the language is shocking and unbelievable. It’s so true, and the dialogue is biting and incredible. The word that comes to mind is flawless; it has a huge heart and it’s so well-crafted. That, and the story that comes immediately after it, speak to what we’re looking for in ASF: it’s by Chris O’Connor, "Under the Big Night Sky". It’s really innovative, it takes a lot from post-modern fiction, and reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace, who I love. These are totally different stories, but when you put them together, you’re getting close to what ASF is all about.

What’s your message to writers to want to be published in ASF?

People do make mistakes when they submit stories; I think some of the biggest are sending too many stories at once. We don’t have a rule about submitting more than one at a time, mostly because our response time is pretty long, but if you send ten stories at once we’re not expecting that you’re sending your best work.

But, as a message to people who are sending to ASF: I don’t want to fall back on “read the magazine,” but I would say read as much as you can. I think it’s no coincidence that the people who have really succeeded are the ones who are reading the most, and the ones who are active, and editing, and working on all different parts of the story and seeing all the angles. I think to be a good writer you have to be a good reader. When I see a story from a writer who borrows from different things and is doing innovative things, you can tell that they read fiction and they care about it. That’s the most important thing to me about submitting your work: being aware of the rest of the world.

Jessica Ullian's fiction has appeared in Upstreet, Slice, and Meeting House. She studied journalism at Columbia University and creative writing at Boston University, and lives in Boston.