We have a little secret: we have taken to picking and choosing literary journals to try based on editorial philosophy, believing that there is some sort of connection between editorial voice and journal voice (as opposed to just random voices in our head). As we have limited resources, we base our decisions on answers to a series of questions. This approach has worked well around Booksquare — we’ve enjoyed a bunch of new authors in the past few months and reignited our enjoyment of short fiction.
Of course, being lazy has its benefits. We could, in theory, go out and conduct these interviews on our own. Or we could piggyback on the work of others. We choose option B, especially since Dan Wickett is on the case. This month, Dan corrals Marie Hayes – StoryQuarterly, Jackie Corley – Word Riot, Michelle Richmond – Fiction Attic, David McGlynn – Western Humanities Review, Elizabeth Onusko – Guernica, Derek Kagemann – Halcyon, and Mitch Wieland – Idaho Review into his secret lair and forces them to talk about the important things in life. Or rather the important things as they relate to the care and feeding of a literary journal. In this episode, we learn that time is indeed hard to manage:
I had been spending a long time contemplating what I wanted to do with my time. Eventually, I started to realize that I was spending too much time thinking about it, and then completely overestimated exactly how much spare time I had available. (Derek Kagemann)
