All Things Pankish

Ask the Editor: Johnathon Williams, Editor, Linebreak

[Roxane Gay / December 7th, 2009 / Interviews ]

1. I really love Linebreak and the choice to feature a single poem per week. How did the magazine come about and how did you make the decision to approach publishing in this singular manner?

Thanks for the props on Linebreak. The weekly format was an idea we had from the start, mostly as a reaction against the many online lit magazines that continue to publish issues in a quarterly (or even less frequent) format. Bundling content into infrequent issues makes a lot of sense in print but very little sense online. I and my co-founder, Ash Bowen, wanted a format that was frequent enough to be viable online, but paced enough to give each poem the attention it deserved. Publishing one per week seemed to fit both.

2.  Your design aesthetic is very clean, bold, and simple. Do you find that aesthetic mirrored in the poetry you publish and are drawn to?

To a degree, yes, insofar as I’m suspicious of complexity as a rule. When it comes to web design, I prefer minimalism because of how easily I’m distracted. Poetry is a different art of course, but I’m suspicious of complexity in any setting. Complexity must always justify itself

Of course, I’m only one of the editors at Linebreak. My co-founder Ash Bowen has an equal say in what we publish, as do our two senior editors, Ashley McHugh and Jennifer Jabaily. Our general rule is to accept any poem that gets a thumbs up from any two of our four editors.

3. What are the biggest flaws you find in submissions?

The single biggest flaw is the one that all editors mention: people submit who obviously haven’t read our archives. This is particularly annoying given that every poem we’ve ever published remains available on the site for anyone who takes the time to look.

That said, we get a lot of submissions from talented writers who have read our archives, and who, more importantly, have read widely and carefully throughout their lives. The bad submissions are easy to identify and reject. It’s the other submissions that take time to consider.

4. What kind of poetry submissions do Linebreak editors enjoy most?

This is a good, logical question — the kind of thing that I as a writer want to know before I send work to an editor — but it’s a question I can’t answer in any meaningful way. Every lit mag that I’ve ever seen (Linebreak included) tries to give at least a cursory answer to this in its guidelines, and all of them (again, Linebreak included) fail miserably. The best answers are hopelessly vague — “read what we’ve previously published, and then send your best work” — and the worst answers are comically absurd — [insert your least favorite guidelines here].

We want what all editors want — to find work that moves and delights us. If you look at our archives, I think (and hope) you’ll find a range of styles and approaches. We have few prejudices between us. We remain ready to be amazed.

5. How has editing influenced your writing process?

Editing has liberated me from the thought of publication while drafting new work. The reason is that evaluating incoming submissions forces you to admit something that most writers suspect: submitting work is a lottery in many ways. You read the magazines you’re interested in, you write and revise, and finally you send your best work. Beyond that, the particular circumstances that lead to a particular editor liking your poem on any given day are out of your control — and circumstances can go wrong in a hurry.

For instance, there are days when it’s raining and one of my kids is sick and my checking account is overdrawn and I get my ass handed to me in workshop — and then in the middle of all that need to go through and read at least a handful of submissions to keep us within a month of our promised response time. And on those days I try just as hard as ever to be fair, but let’s be honest — you wouldn’t want your poem to be in the group I read on one of those days.

It’s not quite so capricious as that at Linebreak, because at least two of us read each submission before a decision is made, but that isn’t true everywhere. And even if it is, who’s to say the second editor doesn’t hate and arbitrarily reject poems about firetrucks or eating disorders or dolphins?

I don’t want to discourage anyone from submitting their work — whether to Linebreak or any other magazine — but as a writer it’s helpful for me to remember the role fortune plays in rejection and acceptance. For me, editing has reinforced the importance of taking the long view, of trusting that good work will out over time, and of remembering that I do this because the daily practice of writing is a good and necessary thing.

6. What is Swindle?

Swindle is, I suppose, a poor man’s Digg.com — only not as well programmed, and focused solely on contemporary poetry. Technically speaking, Swindle a daily aggregator that scrapes the RSS feeds for a dozen or so poetry sites and posts links to all of the new poems it finds. As of a month or so ago, it also allows anyone who registers for an account to post links to poems and save poems to their favorites list.

Basically, Swindle is a way to see most of the poems published by web-savvy journals and magazines on any given day. (Here, web-savvy means those publications that produce valid RSS feeds.) I coded version 1 several months ago, turned it on, and then promptly forgot to tell anyone about it, aside from a few emails. Eventually I’ll do some proper marketing for it, right after I redesign it and add a bunch of new features and … you get the idea.

7. I really enjoyed your essay on zombies for The Morning News. Have you seen Zombieland yet and did it satisfy your taste for flesh?

I’m glad you liked that. Getting something published in The Morning News was a high point for me — they do such a good job with that magazine.

I did see Zombieland, and I thought it was a lot of fun. American zombie movies, you know, have a real problem when it comes to extending plot in a believable way. We’ve got so many guns that the survivors of a zombie plague could rally pretty quickly. Zombieland plays with that by emphasizing how unfit for survival many Americans are. Rule number #1: Cardio.

8. Congratulations on your inclusion in Best New Poets 2009. How did you react to the news? What does it take to become a best new poet?

Thanks. It was very surprising news, and I reacted to the email by immediately jumping from my chair and screaming several obscenities at no one in particular. Good news makes me momentarily hostile, for reasons I’ve never been able to explain.

Best New Poets is a fantastic contest to enter, in that the fee is only $3, it’s open to any poet who hasn’t published a full-length collection, and series editor Jeb Livingood does a great job of keeping everyone informed throughout the process. In my case, my MFA program nominated me, so I didn’t even have to pay the $3.

Beyond that, getting selected takes the same as any contest, I suppose: a good poem and some good luck.

9. I read a really interesting post on the Linebreak blog where you assert that online magazines mimic print magazines too much. Do you believe that all online magazines have print aspirations? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Should we even bother with distinguishing the two mediums?

No, I don’t think all online magazines have print aspirations. In fact, I’d argue that most of the best online magazines, by which I mean the magazines best adapted to the web, have no print aspirations, and that the lack of print aspirations (by which I mean the desire to produce a regular print edition of the magazine, rather than an annual anthology or some another less regular print product) is one of the common denominators of success on the web. The reason — and forgive the Biblical reference — is that it’s difficult to serve two masters. Producing two separate editions and claiming to be equally dedicated to both is specious at best, especially given the very limited resources of most lit mags.

For one thing, how do you divide submissions between the editions? If you’re not saving the best for print, then you’re saying that some kinds of text work better in one medium over the other, and I disagree with that generalization. Secondly, lit mags that produce online editions rarely allow their online efforts to be a genuinely separate edition — rather, they tend to simply paste a print product onto a web server, without even stopping to consider whether a different format might work better given the different medium.

That said, there are a few publications that produce both print and online editions and do a good job of it (PANK comes to mind), but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

And finally, yes, I believe we should and must distinguish the two mediums. Print is a fixed form — that’s what provides its beauty and resonance. Online publications are always in flux, and you have to embrace that — you have to be filthy in love with it — to do well online.

10. You discuss design, publication frequency and RSS feeds as some areas where online magazines can start to demonstrate a different aesthetic than print magazines. Are there other ways online magazines can innovate?

I suppose we could add the use of multimedia to the list. And allowing some kind of interactivity — whether through comments or other kinds of contributions from readers — is another way. But going back to what I said above about flux, one aspect of that is the endless number of alternative formats that online publications can produce: syndication formats such as RSS, mobile formats for devices like the iPhone & Kindle, etc. Part of producing a first-rate online magazine is realizing that you no longer get to determine the format through which readers enjoy your content. (Linebreak, coincidentally, renders poorly on the iPhone — a problem I hope to fix over the holidays.)

Here’s the rub. Most every competent online publication is the product of a database-driven system. The content is saved into a database, and then some kind of software, some content management system, renders it into web pages when a visitor requests something. (This is opposed to manually building web pages in something like Dreamweaver and then uploading them in static form — a bad idea for publications that hope for longevity.) But the trick to understanding how the Web is fundamentally different than print (one of the tricks, anyway) is understanding that the output of a database is never fixed.

At Linebreak, we use WordPress as a CMS, and WordPress automatically produces our content in multiple formats: standard web pages, an RSS feed that contains the text of each poem, and a podcast-friendly RSS feed that contains the audio for each poem. Soon I’ll add an iPhone-optimized format that serves a separate set of web pages to mobile visitors. Oh, and we also send out a weekly email newsletter scraped from our RSS feed. What is that — three, four different formats? And like I said, we’re behind in iPhone support and haven’t even looked into making a Kindle edition. So endless derivative electronic formats is another innovation.

Finally, though, I’m not persuaded that writing itself needs to innovate much online. For all the harping I do on those magazines that drag ill-fitting print conceptions into online publishing, I’m remarkably traditional when it comes to content. I like poems (and short stories, novels, etc) just the way they are, just the way they’ve always been, and have no interest in what some folks call e-lit, those annoying Flash mashups that, more often than not, provide little more than choose-your-own adventure navigation coupled with animated text. I refuse to believe that people won’t read long-form text online, because I do it all the time. If your visitors refuse to read long pieces, it’s probably because your web site is poorly designed, or festooned with ads, or doesn’t play nicely with Instapaper. [instapaper.com]

The bottom line: Whether it comes from a printed page, a web browser, a mobile device, or an RSS feed, I want something I can read.

11. Other than PANK, what are your favorite magazines?

When it comes to poetry, the online magazines that I most admire for their technical competence & conception are 42opus and No Tell Motel. Design-wise, Fou is always inventive and playful, although its use of mystery meat navigation bugs me. That stuff aside, I generally enjoy the poems I find in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Unsplendid, and Rattle. Oh, and A Public Space is a beautifully done print journal.

12. I too am a member of the cult of Apple. Which products are you currently enjoying? Are you excited about the rumored tablet?

Right now, my main tools are a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 3GS. My handwriting is illegible, so I compose all my poems on one or the other, using a full-screen text editor called WriteRoom. (Drafting a poem on the iPhone is easier than you might think.) For programming and web coding I use another text editor called TextMate.

The mythical tablet sounds cool, but all Apple rumors sound cool. I suppose I’ve learned not to get too excited until that moment in the keynote where Steve says “And one more thing.”

13. Linebreak and PANK meet at a bar, have drinks, hit it off. Do they a. go to a sleazy motel and have a one night stand or b. make out in the bar but leave it at that or c. exchange phone numbers, start dating, and live happily ever after? Show your math.

Linebreak and PANK get drunk together in a hurry, so drunk that any romantic liaison becomes quickly impossible. Instead of hooking up they wander the city shouting poems from memory at fire hydrants and light poles until the wee hours of the morning, when the inevitable blackout ensues. They wake in a ridiculously expensive hotel, having passed out on the floor, and, as the light of a new day shines along the golden carpet’s finely combed nap, hold each other and weep.

14. Are there any new projects on the horizon either for you or Linebreak?

We’ve got several things planned for Linebreak in 2010, but it’s a bit too early to talk about any of them. Half my ideas die in the design or prototype stage, so I’ve learned to keep mum until launch day.

As for me, my immediate project is finding a publisher for my first collection of poems, which I started sending out in September. I’m finishing my MFA in the spring, so I’m doing my best to plan for post grad school life.

15. What question should we have asked?

You should’ve asked how I intend to support myself and my family given the massive amounts of student loan debt I incurred getting first a BA in English and now an MFA in Creative Writing. You should’ve asked what the hell I’m thinking starting all these nonpaying web sites when I should be writing. You should’ve asked what my parents did wrong.