We Like It Wild

What was your first encounter with Black Warrior Review?

I was thinking about applying to grad schools for a long time before I actually did, and around 2008 I thought, I’m gonna get serious. I went to the summer writer’s workshop at Tin House and they had a copy there. I was really blown away by the wildness of the content, how interesting it was, and that’s how I found Alabama and decided to apply. I was really interested in the journal’s aesthetics and content.

When you’re applying to MFA programs, they wag their finger at you and say you want to go to a place where you’re well-funded, and that of course was a big thing for me, but when I chose Alabama, the BWR was definitely one of the reasons why.

Do you remember that issue?

It was 35.1, and it’s this wild one with this crazy robot on the cover, very brightly colored. It’s fantastic.

What does “wildness” mean in a literary journal?

It’s not necessarily just innovative content, because we like traditional stories, but they have to do something very new for us inside our brain or heart or stomach. It’s something we discuss at length, and I think a sonnet can be as wild as anything else. I think it’s super-important to everyone who works with or for BWR. We’re looking for work that is pushing us to do work as readers.

What’s a typical day in the life of the editor of the Black Warrior Review?

Being editor takes up all the days of my week. In the morning I’ll be getting back to contributors and inquiries and withdrawals, and sending out to genre editors and interns. There’s a lot of paperwork, contracts, spreadsheets, money things. And then when we get close to production, we’re just finishing our regular content. I’ve got here on my desk about 600 pages of potential feature content that I’m going to read through, and then we have this massive seven-hour meeting where we choose the feature based on our chosen theme. Then the poetry editor and I solicit poets for a chapbook for every issue, so that’s a lot of reading, and meeting, and talking, and thinking about how it measures up to the rest of the issue, how things are going to cohere and be in dialogue. This is actually a really exciting time.

How does a writer make it to that 600-page pile on your desk?

I think that the best way to do it is just through regular submissions, actually. Our genre editors all read their slush first; two out of three genre editors read slush exclusively. We get such a high volume that our fiction editor reads slush and then sends it to assistant editors to re-read and rate. We don’t have any sort of preference for age, race, sex, anything. It’s a blind reading process.

The genre editors do most of the work in terms of selecting pieces that they think are going to be good, and they take them to the assistant editors, and they talk it out. I implicitly trust my genre editors’ tastes; I get a one-third vote, the editor gets a one-third vote, and the assistant editors, collectively, get a one-third vote.

Have you ever been outvoted?

Yeah, that happens all the time. I feel like it’s a great safety net and makes our journal really diverse and high quality — that sometimes I get to just be wrong, or the genre editor gets to be wrong. At every content meeting, I am routinely surprised and excited by the observations my assistant editors are making, which always run far afield of the observations I am making myself. I think it’s a really good thing.

Within that process, what are a new writer’s chances?

We really like to publish new writers; it’s our favorite thing to find a writer we don’t know about who’s doing something exciting. We have a writer coming out in 38.1 who’s doing this stuff with Middle English that’s incredibly beautiful. We haven’t seen anything like that anywhere, and it really got our engines going.

Better-known writers will show up in our features, because those are solicitation-only. But in general, what excites us the most is getting an unknown writer who’s completely blown the top of our heads off.

How do your goals for the magazine affect what you strive for in your own poetry?

Maybe my work is in a similar sort of vein, but I’m always trying to be very careful to be the custodian of the magazine, and what the magazine does, and be a writer separately. Looking at the work that comes into the magazine influences me, but the stuff I write has got to be sort of separate from what I do at the BWR, and what sort of stuff I’m trying to promote in literary conversation.

I don’t get nearly as much writing done in my editorial year as I have in other years, which I find frustrating, but I knew it was part of the job, the trade-off. I try to submit to a whole bunch of places every several months when I have a crop of new work that’s ready to go. But primarily the work I have on a day-to-day basis is the editorial stuff and there’s very little of my own work as a writer that I get to do right now.

Has the Editorial role been worthwhile for you, as someone who’s primarily a writer?

I love reading as much as I love writing, and I really love reading things that just completely floor me and make me so excited. And there’s a part of me that loves, and always has, to put a book together, sit down in a room with people and discuss narrative, what’s in front of us, how these can interact to make a beautiful thing. Part of the writer in me corresponds to that in a shitty Venn diagram kind of way. The editorial thing, and the privilege of getting to make the book, is a different kind of gratification for me than when I’ve written for five hours and I have this gorgeous thing that’s a huge mess and I can’t wait to pull it apart and make it better.

Let's say a writer is working on a piece and s/he desperately wants it to be published in BWR. How would s/he know if it’s right?I will say one thing, which is that I’ve had this conversation numerous times about how we’re so much more interested in an experiment that doesn’t completely succeed, but is sort of spectacular experiment, than we are in something that is really polished and successful and perfect. A familiarity with the magazine is really key, because I think what we do is something really really specific. But, in terms of “right,” I think a familiarity with the magazine and knowing what we’re looking for, which is pretty explicitly outlined on our website. In terms of “ready” — oh my god, who knows? We’re pretty active in terms of making edits, as editors, so I think we’re looking for something that makes everyone in the room either really angry or really excited. “Ready” can be worked on.

What was the last story that made your jaw drop?

I’ve mostly been reading Homer for the past several weeks, which does that. But we have a piece coming out in 38.2 which is a five-page poem and it’s got these strikeouts, which is a major conceit of the poem, which seems extremely gimmicky and even mildly annoying, but this writer reveals the mind at work in this way, and the constant process of trying to get in right in this way, to make it organic and inorganic at the same time. It’s this harrowing, amazing piece that was mind-bending. I’m so excited about it. It’s really incredible. Unfortunately, no one will see it until February, but I’m really excited about it.

Your tenure as editor is up after the February issue. How will you be different as a writer after this? What will you avoid and re-think?

I’ve been doing a little bit of reflecting, but not a tremendous amount, because it makes me very sad about being done. I think that being an editor has given me a sharper eye for what’s good, and what I like as a reader, and what to avoid and re-think in my own writing.

I think a lot of times what I see in writing is perhaps something that’s really executed quite well but there are these glimmery moments where it starts to get really exciting for me as a reader. I want to go to that place and blow it up. I think I have a better understanding of how to identify those moments. When I’m doing my own writing, which usually starts as an amorphous blob, to say, that’s where the spark is, and to go back and say, what can I do with that, how can I push that even further. I definitely think that’s spilled over into my writing.

 

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.