Posts Tagged: editors

5 Writing Hacks for Surviving Submission Season (Again)!

It’s that time of year again when nights get a bit colder, pumpkin becomes the go-to flavor option for just about everything, and cardigans become a necessity instead of a choice. Its fall—and you know what that means—submission season has officially begun (again)! This year, instead of cursing your computer and fearing the dreaded “form rejection”—get pumped!

Find the drafts you swore you wouldn’t touch again and remember these tips when the submission drag has you wondering why you wanted to be a writer in the first place.

“New writers to shake us and take us out to sea”

I’d like to introduce you to IR‘s dynamite new staff: Jennifer Luebbers takes the helm as Editor, and Katie Moulton is Associate Editor, Joe Hiland is Fiction Editor, Michael Mlekoday is Poetry Editor, Justin Wolfe is Nonfiction Editor, and Doug Paul Case is our first-ever Web Editor. I’m sad to leave my post, but I’m absolutely thrilled about the incoming team. I can’t wait to see what’s next for IR—it’s going to be a phenomenal year.

1. Why are literary journals significant?

MM: Tons of reasons! Literary journals are the vanguards of literature—they are where readers and writers first meet up, where our community comes together. Without journals, we’re just a bunch of rugged individualists, carrying only our own poems and stories and essays with us. Then we’re just landlocked, because it takes more than one branch to build a boat. Is that true? I don’t know. The great variety of journals being made and read right now means we can always find new inspiration, new writers to shake us and take us out to sea.

JW: I don’t know. In historical terms, I can understand their importance, but in terms of right now, I’m really not actually sure? I know that, in my experience, IR has been an important center to our literary community in Bloomington, but outside of that, I can’t say much else. I’m sure former and future editors will be able to mount a rousing case for the continued cultural relevance of the literary journal, but I come from a blogging background and have, since I’ve been familiar with them, been resistant to what I perceive as the insularity of little magazines, the walled garden effect. One of the reasons that I’ve taken this position is to try to break down or at least inform that resistance of mine, to better understand what a magazine like IR really does and what it means to our larger literary culture. In other words: hopefully I’ll have a better answer this time next year?

DPC: Because they’re the future! It seems like everyone is bemoaning the death of literary journals, but while print might be fading, there are many, many online journals thriving and doing the same things literary magazines have always been doing: showing us the future of literature. Find me an important poet or story writer who wasn’t published first in a literary journal and I will buy you a cookie. If you’re interested in the trajectory of literature, you should be reading journals.

Indiana Review Editors Showcase

Indiana Review is sponsoring another reading: this time featuring the work of our lovely editors! Join us Monday, April 23rd from 7-8:30 P.M. in the Great Room at the Honors College (when you enter the building, take a right and then another right immediately and you’re there). Deborah Kim, Jennifer Luebbers, Rachel Lyon, Cate Lycurgus, and Sarah Suksiri will read selected works featuring a mix of fiction and poetry.

Deborah Kim is the Editor of Indiana Review, and she writes about magical creatures, food, and home. She would like a DeLorean one day.

Jennifer Luebbers serves as Associate Editor, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Cream City Review, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, and Washington Square Review, among others. Most recently, Marie Howe selected her poem, “Barn Elegy,” as the recipient of Washington Square’s 2012 Poetry Award.

Rachel Lyon is the Fiction Editor. Her fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in Toad, Hobart, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Arts & Letters. She was this year’s recipient of the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony Fellowship. She also volunteers with the Bloomington Writing Project, a free community resource for help with writing, and does art features for the NPR station WFIU.

Cate Lycurgus is the Poetry Editor. Outside of her IR duties, she remains busy spreading her love for literature. Like Rachel, she is also currently working with the Bloomington Writing Project. In addition, she teaches creative writing to second and third graders in The Project School in Bloomington.

Sarah Suksiri, the Nonfiction Editor, gets excited about creative and journalistic nonfiction, but spends her time writing poetry. She has also published several restaurant, art, and book reviews.

Following their readings, we’ll have a Q&A session to discuss publishing and the future of creative work. If you have questions about the publishing industry or the writer’s world (ranging from print vs. digital literature, making it in a world saturated with voices, how to handle rejection), we’re happy to answer them. We hope to have an honest conversation about both the joys and the difficulties of thriving in these communities. Above all, we’d like to celebrate the value of creative work to society and to the individual.

We are also excited that two of IU’s undergraduate literary journals are co-sponsoring the event with us: Crimson Umbrella Review and Labyrinth.

The Crimson Umbrella Review is a self-run and self-directed online literary journal that is published monthly during the academic school year. The review’s goal is to provide every writer or artist with an umbrella to protect and shelter them as they develop their work and writing skills. The Crimson Umbrella Review believes that each writer or artist should have a safe-haven that allows him or her to publish his or her works freely, in a supportive, stress-free zone.

Labyrinth is a literary magazine sponsored through IU’s Hutton Honors College. Labyrinth’s goal is to publish outstanding undergraduate work in poetry, prose, and visual arts. They accept submissions in photography, painting, poetry, and prose (up to 1000 words). They hope that by having a magazine that displays the best of students’ artistic achievements, they encourage others to share what they have to say with the rest of the student body.

Inside IR: Meet the Editors

This week, we finally hear from our marvelous Nonfiction Editor, Sarah Suksiri, who shares with us her delight for innovative nonfiction.

Where is home?

A little suburb in the Silicon Valley where there is plenty of good Vietnamese food and rush hour traffic.

Favorite issue of IR?

Our Winter 2011 issue. It has a good haul of nonfiction writers — possibly the most IR has ever published!

Tell us about what you’re reading right now.

I’m reading Scott Russell Sanders’ latest collection of essays, Earth Works, which I have to put down between every other essay because it makes me want to go for long walks.

What are you excited to see in nonfiction?

I get excited about creative and journalistic nonfiction exhibited in elegant, accessible online forms that do the work justice, like Wave Composition, The Junket, and The New Inquiry, or even blogs as a form of creative nonfiction, fused beautifully with other multimedia, like Ian Coyle’s Edits. I’m excited that there seems to be a very hungry audience for nonfiction, and that there are so many people who want to participate in other people’s experiences by reading about them. I’m also excited for our new Nonfiction Editor, Mal Hellman, to take the reins and make IR nonfiction even better.

Are MFA Student Editors Legit?

Recently, a friend and colleague drew my attention to a blog post on Passages North’s website. In this post, editor Jennifer A. Howard makes a point of assuring submitters their manuscripts are never, under any circumstances, accepted or rejected by MFA students at Northern Michigan.

Here, at Indiana Review, our editors, genre editors, and associate genre editors are all MFA students. We, as a journal, are committed to ensuring that our acceptance process is as painstakingly meticulous, exhaustive, and democratic as possible.

What does this process look like? Well, each week, our staff of MFA student editors spends hours combing through hundreds of submissions—reading, re-reading, and making difficult decisions as to which poems, stories, and essays to select for further consideration. Then, graduate students—first-, second-, and third-years alike—are responsible for reading and giving careful consideration to the work selected for discussion. At the end of each week, we gather together to engage in a thoughtful, thorough conversation about this work. After a piece has been discussed at length, each reader casts his or her vote as to whether she or he would like to see the piece in Indiana Review. Majority rules.

While Howard does emphasize the importance of a collective readership at Passages North, saying that, no submission gets “sent back (or accepted) based on any one person,” she makes it clear that those who have the final say are the “actual editors,” rather than those MFA “kid[s].”

As someone who is so fortunate as to meet each week to listen to the intelligent comments and questions contributed by a group of invested, passionate, and informed readers, I can’t help but take issue with the notion that graduate students are incapable of making informed decisions. I believe our ideas, aesthetics, and opinions matter; I believe we can—and should—play a significant role in shaping the contemporary literary world.

Readers, what do you think? We’d love to hear what you have to say!