SUBMITTING work to a literary magazine can be an intimidating experience. Who exactly are those faceless people issuing scores of rejections, a smattering of requests for revision, and the occasional glorious acceptance? These gatekeepers can too easily become an all-powerful screen on which writers can project their insecurities. So how did they come to occupy their influential positions, and what do they really think of our writing? How do they approach the work of assessing our beloved submissions and editing our work?
We reached out to five editors at some of the most innovative and finely curated literary journals around—Billy-Ray Belcourt, poetry editor of Catapult; Denne Michele Norris, editor in chief of Electric Literature; Lynne Nugent, editor of the Iowa Review; Laura Pegram, editor in chief of Kweli; and Ladette Randolph, editor in chief of Ploughshares—and asked them to pull back the curtain. They told us about the joys and difficulties of their work, from supporting new writers to sending more rejections than they’d like. And as award-winning creatives themselves, they all understand life on both sides of the editorial desk.
How did you get started editing?
As an instructor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, much of the work I do with students is editing—refining, questioning, encouraging. When I teach poetry I’m interested not just in the making of poems, but also in living a poetic life. Might that constitute a kind of editing? I hope that in my seminars students come to an understanding of literary work as bound up in struggles for freedom. In a sense I ask them to revise their points of view in order to grasp that decolonization is a goal we can all write toward, for example. I started with at the end of 2021 when the previous editor, Tommy Pico, moved on to other amazing projects—see on Hulu. He had published a poem of mine during his tenure; I believe
