First Person Plural (February 2010)

Looking at literature purely from an artistic point of view, I don’t see any doom and gloom at all: This is an incredibly exciting time to be a reader and a writer and an editor. There's so much talent out there right now, and so much great work being written and published. The indie presses like Dzanc and Keyhole and ML Press and Publishing Genius—all less than five or six years old—are, in my mind, publishing some of the most innovative and interesting work around, as are the independent magazines like Hobart, Barrelhouse, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. Plus there's the Internet, with its own plethora of literary magazines—1200+ online, when we did our search for Best of the Web. It takes an awful lot of writing to fill all those magazines, and much of it is very, very good. And those are just the newer magazines and presses. There’s tons of important and enjoyable writing being publishing by more established houses and journals, including the biggest presses and magazines.

Fictionaut (December 2009)

I get “stuck” like anyone else, but since the first day of 2008, I’ve been writing nearly every single day, for at least two or three hours a day. At the time I was working fifty to sixty hours a week, and so I would take my work schedule and schedule writing time around it so that I knew that if I stuck to my calendar I would get fifteen hours of writing in a week. That alone has been enough to break the wider kinds of writer’s block, and so the kind of stuck I get now is more often that of not being able to figure out a certain scene or sentence rather than not being able to write at all. If you honestly write a couple hours a day, you’re making so much language that it never seems hard to just make more, or to go work on something else while the stuck idea simmers.

Dark Sky Magazine (September 2009)

I feel like I’m being grumpy about this, but again, it goes back to what I mentioned above, about the doom and gloom forecasts that no one reads anymore, that no good books are being published, that there are no great young writers. Just like those arguments, this one is so obviously flawed, out of touch, and perhaps petty that I do my best to ignore the kind of people who make it. Much better, I think, to do what we can as writers and editors to build each other up, to elevate the literary publishing and emerging writer worlds together. We can spend our time tearing each other down in the hopes that the survivors will seem that much stronger, or else we can work together to broaden not just the reach of our own writing and publishing but also that of those around us, in the hopes that we’ll all rise together. I already know which I’ve chosen, and I think most people I know have chosen the same.

What to Wear During an Orange Alert (July 2009)

It’s an exciting time to be a small press writer, I think, just because there’s so much good will and also good writing and reading going on all around us.

The Short Review (June 2009)

For me, stories are always about entertaining people first, with "entertainment" being very broadly defined—I think there’s just as much joy in structure and form or well-crafted wordplay as there is in a finely crafted plot or a good joke or a tear-jerker ending. I want stories to be fun and welcoming, and only once I get readers sucked into the story itself do I feel I can try and work on all those other loftier goals we all have as writers. But entertainment first, at least as a goal.

The Scowl (May 2009)

What I like about the fiction chapbook is the way it can highlight forms that are hard to pull off in full length books. With the emergence of flash fiction as a popular form, there’s a need for a way to put together collections, but (generally speaking) short-shorts become less satisfying when too many of them are read in a row. A chapbook containing ten to fifteen shorts is much more palatable, and much more likely to have the kind of resonance that good books provide.  It’s also a great form for the novella, since they are so hard to publish in traditional literary magazines—I feel like that’s the biggest growth area for chapbooks, and I expect we’ll see more and more of them published in this format.

Recommending Reading (May 2009)

Is there such a thing as a guilty pleasure? I don’t know—I read what I like, and always have, so I’ve read a lot of books that aren’t very literary, I guess, but I don’t care for that term a lot. I’m not very interested in genre lines, especially as they’re used to exclude writers from some sort of “good writing” sphere. People should read what they like. I’ve read a Dungeons and Dragons novel that nearly moved me to tears.

SmokeLong Quarterly (June 2008)

What I'm trying to say is that as an editor, I wanted to publish not only the kind of stories I loved to read, but also the kind that emboldened me as a writer, that challenged my conception of what characters could do in a story.