Editor Interview: Subtropics

Imaginative writing.

Journals: Tin House, A Public Space, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, Noon, The New York Tyrant, The Mississippi Review, Boulevard, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, 32 Poems, One Story, Field, Pleiades.
Publishers: New York Review Books, Dalkey Archive, Other Press, Tin House Books, Dzanc Books, Open Letter Books.

Fiction writers we admire and have published include John Barth, Allan Gurganus, Roy Kesey, Eileen Pollack, John Brandon, Olga Slavnikova, Padgett Powell. Poets we admire and have published include D. A. Powell, Billy Collins, Idra Novey, Kevin Prufer, Lucia Perillo, Matthea Harvey, Richard Kenney, and Kathleen Rooney.
In our fiction pantheon: Grace Paley, John Cheever, Joy Williams, Penelope Fitzgerald, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme.

Though this might not set us apart, Subtropics is run and edited entirely by writers.

Submit work that you like, not work that you think we'll like.
Don't submit more than once during a submissions period.
Keep your cover letter short. Don't try to sell yourself. The writing is what matters.

A piece of writing so startling and memorable as to restore our faith in literature.

I see several recurrent missteps:
1. Work that, in its effort to seize our attention, comes across as exhibitionistic.
2. Work that, in its caution and taste, comes across as boring.
3. Work that reads as if it has been written by a committee. (This is particularly true of submissions from students in MFA programs.)

We prefer cover letters that are short and to the point. Email addresses are essential. If you have an MFA degree, that is worth mentioning, as are recent publications and awards. Also, if someone we know has suggested that you submit to us, be sure to mention this person's name.

We stop reading at the point at which we would stop reading if we were browsing in a bookstore and got bored.

If a reader is positively inclined toward a piece, it is read by two or three other readers before a final decision is made.

I am also a writer and a teacher so I usually read submissions only two days a week. As a rule we meet as a group and read aloud to one another from the submissions. Those submissions that survive this process are farmed out to be read more carefully. Those that are received favorably are passed on for second or third readings.