Editor Interview: Read Short Fiction

Short reads that pop.

The Battered Suitcase, Word Riot, Barbaric Yawp, State of Imagination, Shock Totem, Shroud, ESC! Magazine, Toasted Cheese, Mipoesis, The Smoking Poet, Morpheus Tales, Vagabondage Press Books, Dark Opus Press

Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Junot Diaz, Sigrid Nunez, Carlos Fuentes, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Timothy Zahn, Alison Lurie, Jeanne Mackin, Shirley Jackson, Koji Suzuki, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, José Saramago, Daniel Pearlman, Paul Tremblay, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury

Our take: Good story spans genre and form, which is why we publish in every genre (except erotica--but we do like spice within the context of a story); in addition, the characters that speak in our journal are those rarely represented--the tornado-chaser's wife, the anti-hippie, the inconvenienced deity, the adulterous academic. We do a cover image for every story and set it prominently on our home page. We believe short stories are stand-alone entities and don't need to be part of a collection. We're jazzed by reader-response theory and express that by allowing feedback on each published piece.

We're pretty approachable--feel free to write to us if you have questions about anything. We love odd characters and out-of-the ordinary situations, but we're not limited. We know that our submission guidelines are lax, so we do reject stories that don't follow them.

We love stories that we finish reading and say, "Wow!" We know this sounds vague, but writers know when they've potentially created these pieces and we want to be on their short list.

Including attachments. Please no attachments. Paste into e-mail only.

Don't bother with a heavily-crafted cover letter -- a brief "hello," a couple of details (word count, was it published anywhere else), and a bio are just fine. Please ensure, however, the bio you send includes some previous credits, if any.

Each submission gets our full attention; because of the sheer volume of submissions we receive, however, we do check after the first few paragraphs to determine if the piece is a good fit for us before finishing reading.

We're on the two-thumbs-up system: both of us need to enthusiastically say "yes!"

We do things the old-fashioned way: meet over dinner, although it's all pretty informal.