"We Find Most of Our Stories From Unsolicited Submissions." A Chat With Anthony Varallo, Editor of Crazyhorse
Anthony Varallo’s short story collection, Out Loud, won the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). His first collection, This Day in History, won the 2005 John Simmons Short Fiction Award (University of Iowa Press). Varallo is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, and his stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Epoch, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa/Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Currently he is assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he is the fiction editor for Crazyhorse.
Interview by Katherine Hunt
Crazyhorse's mission statement says that its editors are looking for work from the "entire spectrum of today's fiction, essays, and poetry-from the mainstream to the avant-garde, from the established to the undiscovered writer." What are some more specific qualities of a story that stand out to you? What makes you want to keep reading?
I always know I’m reading a good story when I find myself saying “right” or “of course” as I’m reading it. That, or “nice move.”
I also like to be surprised by what I’m reading. Entertained, too. Possibly even thrilled—what’s wrong with thrilled? I feel a little bit terrible saying this, but since I get asked this question more than any other, I’ll say that the main thing I’m looking for in a story is to not be bored. That’s probably the number one reason I stop reading a story: boredom. Sometimes I wish I could ask the writer, What excited you about the story you submitted? What did you think might thrill us about it? What was it? Those are exactly the kinds of questions I know I wasn’t asking when I first started sending my stories out. What thrilled me back then was the idea of being published. Period.
Of course there are a million different things that keep me reading a story—language, style, elegance, characterization—but the best is the feeling that I’m not reading a story at all. That’s number one. Forgetting all about the other stories looming in the submission file and getting lost in the world of the story in front of me. If that happens once or twice a week for me, it’s been a good week.
I really appreciate that you mention how important it is to not be bored by a story. I feel like the more I read, the more I value the experience of being engrossed in something (and the more I write, the more I appreciate how hard it is to create that experience for someone else). What about a story makes it not boring to you? Is it as simple as a compelling plot or idea?
For me, boredom arises when I sense I’m reading a story that’s not terribly interested in telling me a story. It might be very interested in showing me how clever the writer is, how well read, how sensitive, how funny, how well-traveled, how talented, and so on—but the story has no real interest in telling me a story.
That’s why, for example, I was so drawn to Wayne Harrison’s “Storm Damage” from Issue #79. From the opening lines, I immediately sensed that these pages wished, above all else, to tell me a story. I felt like I was watching this couple argue. I could hear them and see them. Their problems felt real and recognizable to me, and I knew I was about to watch a story, rather than a Display of Prose Talent, unfold. Yes, “Storm Damage” is artful and well crafted, too, but it is primarily concerned with telling the reader a story.
I also love that you mention "elegance" as something that keeps you reading a piece of prose. How does elegance manifest itself? Do you have any particular examples of works that embody that quality for you?
I like a story that isn’t afraid to show a little good taste, if that doesn’t sound too much like something somebody wearing a monocle and a foulard might say. As a reader, I like to sense the writer’s presence in the story, without actually feeling their hand. I like a story that isn’t afraid to put real pressure on each and every line, in the manner of a poem. That’s elegance to me, something akin to care, thoughtfulness, and generosity, too. Taking care with words.
For example of what I mean, we were lucky to publish Karen Brown’s incredible story, “Galatea,” as the winner of our Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. The story was later selected by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in the 2008 Best American Short Stories. If you read the story, I think it’s pretty easy to see what Rushdie admired in Brown’s prose, which, although grounded in simple, declarative sentences, isn’t the least bit afraid to capture the feel of the breeze through an open car window, or linger on the quality of the weather, which, aside from being well-described, ties back to the story thematically and structurally. You feel Brown’s presence, yes, but the feeling never breaks the spell of the story. You are in the company of an elegant storyteller.
About how many fiction submissions do you expect to receive during this reading period (which started on Sept. 1 and ends May 31)? Who helps you get through them all?
We’re receiving approximately 500-600 fiction submissions each month, although it can vary. We switched to online submissions a few years ago, which seemed to increase our submission numbers, but it also made our reading process so much easier. No more UPS boxes stacked to the ceiling!
Unlike other magazines that use student interns to screen manuscripts, we have a small team of editors who read all submissions in their genre. I share the task of reading fiction submissions with our nonfiction editor, and then we come up with a short list of stories we’d like to consider for the upcoming issue. Eventually, the stories we like best find their way into Crazyhorse.
Out of the fiction you eventually publish, about what percentage comes from solicitations? What percentage from unsolicited submissions?
Only a small percentage of our fiction comes from solicitations. I’ve been happy with the solicited stories we’ve managed to publish, though, and I hope to solicit more stories in the future. I don’t think any literary magazine can rely solely on unsolicited submissions. That’s a bit too passive. There are slow periods in any reading season, long stretches where you just aren’t seeing anything that grabs you. When I worked as graduate assistant at the Missouri Review, I remember going an entire semester without recommending a single unsolicited story. Not one. And I was reading dozens each week. And then the following semester I was recommending two or three stories a week. That just happens sometimes.
Still, we find most of our stories from unsolicited submissions. We’re getting a record number of submissions now, and I’ve seen more good stories in the past few years than I can ever recall. That’s good news because it means we can find stories we like, but it also means that a part of my job is saying no to stories that are really strong.
You mention that Crazyhorse is getting a record number of submissions, and a record number of good submissions. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's particular to your journal, or that it extends to other literary journals as well?
We’re getting a record number of submissions because we’ve switched to online submissions. I can’t really say why we’re getting a record number of good submissions, though, but I think it is probably a combination of factors that might include Crazyhorse’s strong reputation; the continuing proliferation of MFA programs with their attendant focus on the short story; changes in the publishing industry that have resulted in a surge of high-quality work in smaller venues like independent and university presses and literary magazines; and the truism that success begets more success, and Crazyhorse has had some success lately with reprints in prize anthologies and the like. Or maybe it’s just our covers. People really seem to like our covers.
I’m sure other journals feel the same way. I hope so, at least. I tend to be optimistic about literary journals, which have always seemed sort of exciting to me. I’m lucky to be part of one.
Does your staff have meetings to discuss submissions? What are they like? What kinds of topics, aesthetics, etc. cause you to have the most passionate or heated discussions?
Yes, our staff meets throughout the year to discuss manuscripts under consideration. We’re a small staff, which means we can usually meet in someone’s office or conference room. We bring laptops, and maybe some coffee, too. Coffee is nice. The prose editors discuss the stories and essays they’re considering for the next issue; the poetry editors do the same for poetry. We discuss where we are in the editorial schedule, how many pages we’ve filled, how many we have yet to fill. We talk about the shape of the issue, and begin to examine the way the stories, poems, and essays work together, even though we don’t “theme” our issues like some journals. More often, were just trying to get a sense of what the next issue will look like, how a reader might experience it. We also begin to review cover art options. We all vote on the cover art.
We have an editorial goal of dividing each issue of Crazyhorse fifty-fifty between prose and poetry, which seems like a good balance. So each group of editors is working toward finding half an issue’s worth of content. The meetings mostly serve as a checkpoint in that process. How’s the poetry coming along? Do we want to run an interview? What if we ran two short essays instead of one longer one? The meetings rarely get heated, but all of us are passionate about the work we do. We hope that passion shows in every issue.
You're quite a successful fiction writer yourself. When you were starting to submit your work to lit mags, how did you decide where to send it? And how did you manage the work of sending stories out, along with writing/working/whatever else you had going on?
I had no idea what I was doing when I started sending my stories out, other than having some vague idea of a “tier” system, whereby I’d start off sending my work out to, say, The New Yorker and Harper’s, and then start working my way “down” the tier. This is a terrible, terrible system, but I stuck with it anyway, until I realized my submissions were getting stronger as I revised them and revised them again, so that my first submissions were actually my worst submissions.
I published my first short story in Western Humanities Review in 1997. The story was a meta-fictional humor piece about a woman who forgets to wake up for the short story the writer has planned for her, and was as bad as that fairly flimsy idea sounds. I’m grateful to WHR for taking it anyway.
I’m the last person in the world to talk about time management. I’m pretty lousy at it. Sending stories out takes up an embarrassing amount of time, even though online submissions are helping to remedy that. I try to have something “out” at all times, even if it’s only a short-short, simply because the idea of having something out seems to help me with whatever I’m writing at the moment. I feel embarrassed admitting that, since it doesn’t quite make sense—why would it matter if I had something out or not?—but that’s what works for me.
But sending stories out is part of the job, really. Like everyone else, I receive a far greater number of rejections than acceptances, and I’m always grateful when an editor takes one of my stories. That’s a great feeling, to have reached a reader that way. I’m lucky that I can sometimes play that role as editor, too, accepting a story and seeing it find its way into print.
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 will be featured in the forthcoming book Don't Forget to Write, published by 826 National.
