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Editor Interview: The Toucan

This interview is provided for archival purposes. The listing is not currently active.

Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.

A: writing that soars

Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?

A: Toasted Cheese, Logan Square Literary Review, Two With Water. I also really liked Blithe House Quarterly when it was around; almost every story in it was a winner.

Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?

A: Prose: Kurt Vonnegut, J.D Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Jon Kraukauer, Joe Meno. And I can't lie, no matter what you think of me or if you stop reading this interview the second you see her name: Ayn Rand. But in general, I have ecletic taste that often leads me to only like one book by an author.
As to who influences my writing and editing, I'd say Jackson, Salinger and Vonnegut (and Virginia Woolf, I'll grudingly admit). Ayn Rand inspires me, and the others I just marvel at and enjoy.
Poetry: T.S Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Nikki Giovanni, Adrienne Rich, David Ignatow, and Gertrude Stein. Eliot, Stein and Giovanni have influenced my personal poetry. A parade of poetry professors have influenced my editing style.

Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?

A: The fact that we're named after a bird. No, just kidding. I think my co-editrice and I are very receptive. We like a variety of styles, we're willing to take a chance on things, and we're willing to work with authors if we see a spark of something in their piece. We have a very fun sort of ethic, we're not entirely serious but we take the work we get seriously. And it's a two-gal show, if that means anything. We print work WE REALLY LIKE.

Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?

A: Make it personal. Read some of our previous issues and see what it is we seem to like. Hint: we go gaga for humor and creativity, daring structure, tipping a sacred cow, or as we like to say "putting Groucho Mark glasses on the Mona Lisa". But we also have a softer side--and if we can keep reading your submission all the way to the end, you're halfway home.
Take note of our personal quirks (the fact that we have entitled ourselves "Editrices").
Don't submit something you're not satisfied with. Check for typos at the very least. And don't feel that you need to convince us by listing a ton of publishing credits. If you do that and the piece makes us snicker in an unkind way, we're going to wonder why all these other places took your work.
Nothing else off the top of my head, except for the obvious Follow Submission Guidelines!!!

Q: Describe the ideal submission.

A: Arrives addressed "Dear Editrices", with a moderately witty cover letter that does not try to showboat by listing publication credits.
Has a memorably good first line. "I figured there would be a brawl after I dropped the avocado on the sidewalk." Some action, a unique statement that might foreshadow some of the story.
Characters want something, and want it enough to make me want to keep reading. It seems like a lot of times we have stories about dinner parties and then another character walks in and then the story gets distracted and even the dinner party conversation wasn't very good in the first place. Or the story's about a character and suddenly a dinner party spontaneously appears. Look, I love getting sidetracked in my life and intellectual pursuits, but when it doesn't seem intentional, that means you have a bad story.
Make your ending an ending. Don't just stop. I don't care if there's no resolution, but don't make me wonder if the last paragraph somehow got deleted in transit.
For poetry: a strong diverse vocabulary, a unique premise or way of stringing the words together. Say it like no one else has. Make your abstracts concrete. Don't use the words peace and love and loneliness unless you're 1,000% percent sure you're going to couple
them in a way no one has ever done before. But at the same time, don't try too hard. Three adjectives is probably too much.
And if we weren't email only, any submission would be vastly improved by the addition of a 5,000 check...

Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?

A: Honestly, not much. I hope that means our guidelines are decent. Occasionally we've had a little trouble where someone submitting simultaneously hasn't notified us. I'm also not fond of people sending 5 poems when submitting poetry. 4 is usually sufficient, especially since we only use 2 pieces in a given issue.

Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?

A: It helps if you include a bio because it saves us the step of asking for a bio upon acceptance. And I suppose it's fine if you want to list a few (3 max) places you've been accepted before. But not a huge long list. Unnecessary. We're looking at this piece of writing, not where other pieces have been before. Though I'm not going to pretend my eyes won't bug out if you've been published in The Paris Review.

Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?

A: We do read every piece until the end, except that sometimes we can't make it down that far. But we try to read every piece pretty thoroughly at least twice. You tend to know brilliance right off, but I find for me, maybe because I'm an incurable optimist, it might take a reading or two before it really sinks in that this piece is bad and unsalvagable. But, if the latter isn't the case, we might have some suggestions for improvement, so we don't ever like to bail on anything.

Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?

A: We hold its head under water for a minute and if it's still breathing after that period, we take it to be weighed on a state-of-the-art titanium scale. Before that though, my fellow editrice and I have a conversation, and if we're really stuck we'll send it out to trusted friends for a third opinion. One of them feeds it to his pet raven and if it is not excreted within fifteen minutes, it's printable.

Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?

A: I slip into my velvet smoking jacket and adjust my turquoise beret. I type the 32-letter secret Vedic password into our gmail account and the retina scanner gives me access. While sipping my exquisitely carbonated Dr Pepper, I read new submissions for a general gut reaction, and reread older ones to ensure my opinion hasn't changed on them in the last 24 hours. As the moon rises and the silver hair lengthens on my forearms, I activate the vocal mindlink with co-editrice Laura Rynberg and we have a pun-filled rendevouz often lasting until the wee hours of the morning. When we reach a decision I note it with my finely crafted Siberian pencil on a sheet of bone-white vellum, and within a day or so I will send out the personalized acceptance or rejections (or editing suggestions) I also might take care of other correspondence such as procuring cover art or answering submission questions during the day.

Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?

A: Very. If we didn't have email, Duotrope or Blogspot, we wouldn't exist. The Facebook group is a nice touch because we know how many people we might be having an effect on. We haven't found a use for Twitter yet.
But all the same, we still have a print edition, because without it I would feel as if I weren't really producing anything. My first experience with lit mags was entirely print, and when I wanted to start one of my own, it was that frustration I craved. How hard is it to post text online? And how many things do you want to read online? It feels so ephemeral. The magazine is tangible proof that you exist(It's also an easier commodity to sell, but profits are a silly thing that we don't concern ourselves with) And the worst thing that happens if you read the print Toucan in the bathtub is you have a soaked Toucan, not a fried Toucan and reader.