The Prestige of Ploughshares*

Can you please describe your history with Ploughshares, your role as Managing Editor, and what a ‘typical day’ entails?

I started working at Ploughshares in graduate school, as a volunteer poetry reader. Ploughshares was actually what brought me to Emerson College. I remember discovering the journal at Bulldog News, a little newsstand café in the University District in Seattle. I was looking for places to submit and I wasn't satisfied with any of the journals I was flipping through until I came across Ploughshares. It was the Mark Doty issue, from Spring 1999. I was taken with the quality of poems I found inside and, later, when I was applying for grad schools I thought to look where it was published.

Being a reader for Ploughshares gave me the skills and confidence to start, with a couple friends, my own online journal after graduating, and that experience, in turn, gave me the skills that made me a natural choice for the managing editor job when it became available.

A typical day? That's hard to describe. Literary journals have small staffs, so the duties are varied for any staff editors, especially so for the managing editor, which is often a catch-all position. On a given day I might be negotiating contracts for distributors, coordinating renewal campaigns, arranging for contributor payments, or typesetting the magazine. I also supervise all of our interns and assistants, and our volunteer reading staff. And occasionally I read manuscripts too. It really is a multitasker's job.

Of meeting writers for the first time (at the ripe age of nineteen), Zadie Smith has said, “It was a party full of people from my bookshelves come to life.” If you could have a dinner party tomorrow with anyone from your bookshelves—spanning continents and centuries—who would you invite and why?

That's such a huge question! Even if I were to limit the list to living writers, there'd be so many. I think what's ideal is a good mix of young and old, emerging and venerable. It's like, in essence, an issue of a literary journal. You want the conversation to be lively and diverse, and you'd want there to be room for spirited disagreements. With that in mind, a very non-inclusive list might have Denis Johnson, Charles Wright, Bill Knott, Hannah Tinti, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Haigh, Cate Marvin, Li-Young Lee, Carl Phillips, Adam Zagajewski, Terrence Hayes, Kevin Young, etc. etc. etc.

As an admirer of literary magazines—and perhaps someone who admittedly romanticizes this behind the scenes world—my own experience interning at magazines (including Ploughshares) has shaped a new perception of the work that goes into shaping any given issue—mostly the fact that there is a TON of work that goes into every issue. Can you share some of your own insights in this regard over the years?

My first duty at Ploughshares was opening and sorting the mail, and fulfilling subscriptions. Intern work, basically. But to me, it was immensely educational because I was opening and sorting the mail for one of the top literary magazines in the country. I think a lot of literary work is part romance and part grit. You do the gritty stuff because you're working for a higher power, in a way.

What do you find is the compelling reason for continuing an enterprise that in effect has such a limited audience?

I think it's less about the size of the audience than the make-up of it. I think of literary journal editing as the cutting edge of publishing. It's where a lot of work is seen for the first time, but not necessarily for the last time, and the readership for the journal can partly determine the post-journal lifespan, especially if that readership includes agents and book editors.

For us, the cause is about finding, and bringing to the world, the best new writing. Sometimes, though, our avenue to the rest of the world is through a book editor or agent. Thousands might read the piece in Ploughshares, but thousands more will hopefully read it later, when it comes out in book form. In other words, the pleasure of literary editing is largely the pleasure of discovery.

What are some of your fondest moments during your experience working for Ploughshares? Or, put another way, what has been the particular pleasure of editing a literary magazine?

Beyond what I said above, I think the lasting pleasures for me are the small ones: feeling satisfied with a cover design, or receiving a nice comment about the journal from a reader. Or seeing that a story or poem we selected has been included in an anthology. The guest editor policy means that the composition of each issue is something of a surprise for us, as well. So we have a similar anticipation to each issue as our readers do, and I think that's a fortunate position to be in. It keeps us on our toes, and I, for one, enjoy that sensation.

Grace Paley has been quoted: “Well, I love words—I love the language. It comes from poetry: every word is special. Which is hard to do in a novel, I know. But I feel that way. The wrong word is like a lie, jammed inside the story.” Have there been instances when a writer is set on a particular word or sentence when the editors feel differently? Concomitantly, how has working for Ploughshares influenced your own writing?

The one benefit to receiving thousands of submissions every month is that we have the luxury of choosing work that needs little in the way of line editing. So that problem doesn't come up very often. Of course, we've had to edit things, but usually the writers are grateful for the close attention.

Regarding my own writing, I think, more than anything, working for Ploughshares reminds me that writing is, simply put, a reality. For a young writer, that's often enough of a spur to action, and my own work is no exception. I've definitely "found" poems by reading other poems in the journal or even just my submission queue, just by seeing an interesting word or name. Working for a journal, if nothing else, increases the frequency of those kinds of serendipitous encounters.

In your opinion, what are the key ingredients in keeping a literary magazine afloat?

Dedication first, and money second. An important third ingredient is savvy. Which is to say that each journal has its own requirements and challenges regarding expenses and readership. But behind every successful and lasting journal is a crew of dedicated editors, who won't let the obvious obstacles of money and declining readership prevent them from producing.

Literary editing has always been a humble endeavor, a labor of love. And like most similar endeavors, literary journals are doomed to failure as soon as the love is gone.

In what ways do you see technology affecting the fate of the literary magazine? Ploughshares specifically? Or, do you have any predictions about the future of literary magazines in general?

I think technology does change the landscape, but not in a fundamental way. I think the immediate impact of technology is that we'll see fewer new print journals, because the cost differential is so great between online and print formats. But the written word is the written word, and people will continue to value the object-appeal of printed words on paper for quite some time, especially since what we produce is more akin to an art object than to, say, The Christian Science Monitor, which just changed to an online-only format.

I think the publications whose only function is information dispersal are the ones in most danger, because dispersal is great advantage to going digital. And cost. More small magazines might switch to a digital format, which helps keep distribution and production costs down. But, as I mentioned, the audience for literary journal publishing is already fairly focused. And technological flashiness can't substitute for quality.

The very nature of our medium is the printed word, whether it's printed on a piece of paper or printed on the screen. So the way a reader accesses the content might change, but the content itself will likely stay the same, or won't be determined by the technology that distributes it.

What is next for Ploughshares? With a new editor, how do you see the magazine evolving and/or maintaining its signature?

Ploughshares, with its guest-editor policy, is really an experiment in humble editing. Nobody but the guest editor decides what goes in a given issue. So a change in editorial leadership might mean different guest editors, but the mission of the magazine stays the same. That said, we do have some ambitions to shake things up here and there, and we've looked to other major magazines who've undergone recent editorial changes.

Poetry [Journal], for example, got a lot of mileage out of a simple cover design change, and the addition of a letters section at the end. It's still too early to say what ideas might land in our pages, though.

As much as you are willing, I would be interested to hear about your own online literary magazine and how your experience as a poet, reader, then managing editor, has shaped the genesis and growth of Memorious?

Well, Morgan Frank and I started Memorious partly as a way to stay connected to the literary world after we finished grad school. We figured, if nothing else, it gave us a reason to talk to poets at readings. But the experience of putting it together really helped us both grow as readers and editors.

Again, the emphasis was on quality, and so it's not really a surprise that it's lasted five years so far, and continues to grow. I often said that our goal was to be the Ploughshares of online journals. Which is to say that our emphasis was on the kind of work we'd see in the best print journals.

Eventually the experience actually led to my job at Ploughshares, and so my active role at Memorious has diminished by necessity. The managing editor job definitely informs the side project to some extent, but it also creates a few ethical quandaries. For example, I never use my position at Ploughshares to gain access to writers for Memorious.

Still, I definitely wouldn't have guessed, when Morgan and I first started planning the concept of our online magazine, that it would have led me to my current position, and that Memorious would be earning the accolades that have come its way. So I feel pretty fortunate.