 My name is Liz Harris and I translate exclusively fiction, so I feel lucky to be up here with all these editors and almost all of them I've actually published something with, so I asked them to come and talk. Oh, that's much better. To my left is Ellen Elias Borsak, did I do it? Yes. Okay. With Asunto, and Jim Hicks is with Massachusetts Review, Susan Harris is with Words Without Borders, Minna Proctors with the Literary Reviews, and Scott Esposito is with Two Lines, and they're going to be introducing the various journalists and what they're looking for in fiction. They'll talk briefly and then we'll open it up to questions. I just thought maybe I'd introduce, for me it was really a godsend to have the journals to start beginning to publish at presses, so I was a fiction writer before translating, and I used to actually shoot for publishing my translations with the journals that I knew to be the places that I wanted to get my fiction published, and I initially had thought that getting, I got them in like Canyon Review and Missouri Review, and I was really happy with those publications, but I've come to the places that are really probably the most important for international literature, the ones that really focus on international literature, that everybody is linked in with one another. So why don't we go ahead and just go along and you all can introduce yourselves in the journal and anything else you want to say, and then we'll open it up and speak loudly. We'll start with Ellen and just move down. Okay, I work as a contributing editor with Asunto. I checked against the list of people who are here at the conference, and I could see at least 12 people who've either contributed or are working as one sort of an editor or another at the journal. As a contributing editor, I'm not a commissions editor. I don't actually, there are categories like criticism, poetry, fiction, and so forth, and each one of those has a dedicated editor who chooses things, but I have had now a year and a half of experience there, and I think quite a few of you know quite a lot about it. Is there anybody here who's either published with Asunto or had worked with them in one way or another? Okay, so quite a few. That was my impression. That's a pretty large number. There are several things that are interesting about it. They're just entering their fifth year, or we are entering our fifth year. We've worked from 95 countries, 67 languages, with 75 volunteers from 27 countries and 16 guest artists. So the art is very important, and I spoke with Yu Leong, who is the person who started the journal and sort of has given it its profile, and he had the following just to say about how he curates, because he feels very strongly about curating each issue, and he feels that the individual texts are interesting in and of themselves, but he also is really interested in the ways they work together. So that's something that he's working towards, and he says I curate for diversity and try to pick pieces that speak to each other and resonate thematically, and I try to look beyond Europe. I find we get a lot of submissions from French, Italian, Spanish, so if we just relied on those, our World Literature Journal would really be a European Literature Journal, so I impose a quota of sorts on my section editors. They have to get content from outside Europe, and they made a really concerted effort to bring in all sorts of world languages. And if you want an interesting key, if you're thinking about publishing with Asymptote, go to the website and go to the map feature, and you have lots of filters, so you can just see where poetry is being, what country's poetry has come from, what country's fiction has come from, and so forth, and you can get a nice idea of the range. I noticed, for example, that there is no fiction in the regular fiction section from Russia. Once you see that, you can begin to gauge some things and take a look at what they have and think about it. It's a great journal. They generally do current writing, but sometimes they do really old pieces, sometimes ancient pieces, so there's kind of a range, but always up to 5,000 words and sort of edgy, sort of lively and engaging would be... You know, all of you will take that as you do, but anyway, so that's, and if you're interested in submitting, look at the submissions page. Oh, and just a quick word. They have special features. There are two special features in each issue. For example, one is coming up on the Vietnam War, and it's legacy 50 years on for April 2015, and they are inviting both translated and original English work for that, and they're just about to come out in January. We are with a Danish fiction issue, but the deadline for that just... And we have an interesting feature called Writers on Writers, where it's written in English passionately, fewer than 2,500 words about a relatively unknown writer writing in a language other than English. So that's another thing that translators might consider contributing. I'm taking notes, too. So I'm Jim Hicks, and I started editing the Massachusetts Review about five and a half years ago now, and when I did, I basically had two goals. One was to get back some of the political energy that the magazine had when it started in 1959, and the second one was to publish more in translation. And I actually thought that the second was the way of achieving the first. And I got a feeling I'm probably preaching to the converted here on that score. But if you don't know the magazine, I mean, it was always internationalists in scope. I mean, we published the first translation of Roberto Fernández Retomar's Caliban Essay. We published Jean-Paul Sartre's Review of M.S.E.S.A. We published, and for a while this was the one cash cow we had Chinoise Chebe's Conrad's Image of Africa Essay. So it's always done that work, but when I was coming in, it was the fading years of the Bush regime and deep-reventionalizing this country that seemed like a reasonable step that we could maybe take a few, you know, at least baby steps in that direction. As I said, preaching to the converted, well, it's not the wrong thing to do, of course. I mean, part of the reason for having Alta and having an annual conference is that, you know, you get to come together, you know, it's a pilgrimage. You know, the things you most deeply value, you see the people who share those values, you know, you're affirmed in your values, you can go out and suffer in the world where people do not share necessarily the truth, as you know it. But so that's good. I did think, though, that I'd also say at least one thing about what we're looking for in terms of fiction as well, and maybe this might be a little more challenging, because, and I'm not sure I entirely believe it myself, but because like you, I do some translating, and a lot of it comes from falling in love, usually with the work and the author that you're working on. But I also wonder whether, especially because what we're most interested in is the political potential of translation, whether author-centered is really what we're most after. And I think at some level it isn't necessarily that or only that, that it's perhaps, you know, translation as a performative intervention into what's being thought and said, particularly in the context of, you know, the discourse in this country. And really, to some extent, I'm just rephrasing something that I heard Amiel Alcalay say when he was a keynote speaker at a conference organized by our graduate students who are always way ahead of us at the University of Massachusetts. And he was basically saying that. He said, look, translation can be a political action, and there are times when it has to be. And I'm not sure there are other times. Anyway, thanks. I'm Susan Harris with Words Without Borders. And one thing about Alta every year and looking out in this room, I've been with Words Without Borders for 11 years since the beginning and was in book publishing for 16 years before that. And my professional life is passing before my eyes because I've worked with so many people in the room and on the panel. We publish monthly. We're an online magazine of literature and translation. We publish only lived in translation and we publish only first English translations. Every issue has a theme, either a language, a country or a geographical region, or a topic. Every year we do a graphic novel issue. Every year one of my colleagues manages a queer issue. And we also do every year an issue of literature from the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which this year was Finland, which was a terrific issue and a new language. I wanted to pick up on Jim's point about translation as a political act because our first three issues presented literature from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, which you may recognize as three of the seven axes of evil used in quotes. And one of the reasons that we wanted to start out that way is that there are so many parts of the world that particularly in the U.S. we know only through a political prism. And if all you know about a country and its people is war and government and politics, we're missing a crucial part of culture and humanity. And without sounding naive, it is not that we think that... it's not that politics and war should be ignored, but the literature of a country and the everyday life of a country sheds as much context... sheds provides as much context on conflicts and culture and beliefs that any kind of nonfiction reporting does. And the other advantage of publishing literature from specific countries is that as opposed to having western or U.S. writers essentially parachute into an area, do their reporting, file one article, and leave, we are getting the inside view. That was one of the huge... I think huge values in the issue that we did a couple of years ago on the Mexican drug wars, which was written by people living in Mexico talking about what health the country had been turned into by the drug cartels. To talk about statistics, as I mentioned, we just celebrated our 11th anniversary, we published monthly, so to date we've published more than 2,000 pieces by writers from 128 countries in 105 languages. And now, every issue, again, as I mentioned, had a theme, but we also have features every issue, which are many, many issues in a way. Three to four pieces on a theme, usually with an introduction. We also published book reviews. We have a blog, Dispatches, which we update not quite daily, but that's where we publish other critical writing. Again, the sort of writing that is perhaps more pegged to the news cycle. We've always made a point of providing access. We want to be a source for writers and readers to come to find out about the rest of the world, whatever the rest of the world means for them. And of course, final word, I know I'm really pontificating here, but the other advantage, we're online and we're free, so we're accessible to anyone with access to a computer anywhere in the world at any time, any day. And I think that also is very crucial in this very highly political, I think, matter of publishing work in translation and trying to connect cultures. I'm Minna Proctor. I'm from the literary review, and I'm very grateful that you pontificated because I seem to have gotten sick sometime between last night. Mill Walkie made me sick. So I don't know if I'm contagious, but I'm really stupid today. So I have all these, my brain is not entirely functioning, so I'm going to formulate some sentences and know that I have more to say and one day I'll say it better. And I'll do my best. So the literary review is a quarterly magazine. We've been publishing since 1957. We've got two years on you. And I've been there for six years, so I'm winning in this competition. Just a little bit. We were started with a global mandate, which is a word my university uses. I'm not sure what they mean by it, but we mean we like to publish literature from all over the world, just with the idea that literature doesn't have borders and that the whole point of literature is to open minds and explore other worlds. And that could be the head of a sick person or the head of someone from North Korea. And so what we have done, historic, we've handled our international mandate in a number of different ways over the years we've been publishing. Before I came on, there was a long period in which we would do regional issues where we would publish Danish literature or French literature. And that would, the whole issue would be dedicated to that language. We did away with that because I actually thought it was more expansive in our context to have interesting literature that didn't have any kind of restrictions on it. And I didn't like the idea that the way we were doing it in our magazine it kind of almost ghettoized. It was like the translation will be in this issue. So what we decided to do was bring in translation to every issue. One of the reasons I came to ALTA and like to come to ALTA is because we actually don't get as many submissions from translators as we would love to get. So I'm kind of coming to pitch you guys. It's a very interesting thing. I'm a translator myself and I think from the very beginning my thought was that when you grew up to be a translator you would publish this book. And it didn't occur to me until after I had sort of sold the book that you could then take pieces of the book and send them to magazines. But I could have started the other way around and sent it to the magazines and since I was working on short stories also if you're working on poems. And so as having been in that situation I think translators don't always think of journals as a place to bring their work. It's a wonderful place to publish especially if you're working on a little bit of something like you're in progress on a book and just want it to get exposure or if your book's about to come out it's a way to reach more people. Even once you publish your translation book sometimes it's with small presses and it's just a little bit of expanding of the audience through literary magazines is a wonderful way to just hit more readers since that's the mission. Just get to more people. So we publish translation we publish poetry and fiction in translation we do look for short form meaning we don't take excerpts it's very hard for us to take excerpts of novels or longer works but we do essays and short stories maybe work that's sort of organized in vignettes or very episodic that's very excerptable might work in terms of what we look for in fiction and the easiest thing to say which all editors I think of magazines say is read the magazine and see what we like so we are available online we have featured work it's not the entire issue but a great deal of it is available online and so you can get a sense of what we do like it's hard to describe since it's based on taste usually mine which on some days might be one way and on other mornings might be another way but we do tend to like work that is this is an expression that I kind of come to rely on work that really has the courage of its convictions I don't really have anything more than that I don't like very self-conscious work I don't like overly labored work it's interesting when you apply those terms to certain continental literature I think where overly worked is a form of reaches a higher form of art than it might in English original language work so we like kind of aggressive strong forceful fiction generally and you can get a sense of what I mean by that because that's a little abstract so it may not mean anything concrete I'm going to stop there I'm not sure if that actually made sense but you can ask me questions about that Hi, my name is Scott Esposito I come from Two Lines that is published by Two Lines Press which is a program of the Center for the Art Translation we're based in San Francisco and we promote translation with the Venn series with in-school education and with the press that we do, Two Lines Press So Two Lines has been around for 20 years it was founded in 1994 it started out as an annual now we do it twice a year we tend to publish in the fall and in the spring we have year-round submissions so you can just do that easily online at TwoLinesPress.com you get all the information right there what else can I tell you? We do fiction, poetry and we also do essays these can be kind of a mixture we do just kind of like essays that are around not necessarily translation theory but kind of more like the practice of translation or trying to put things into like new frameworks like in issue 21 we did an essay by Johannes Gorinzen who was kind of laying out his ideas about what translation is we do stuff like that we also do stuff that might interact with the translation in the issue like in issue 22 we're going to have something where it's kind of the translator talking about her relationship to a translation that she's also publishing the issue so we do those essays we do interviews but it's mostly fiction and poetry insofar as that all goes I would say I think I would echo a lot of the things that I've heard here we go for linguistic and geographic diversity definitely we're most interested in living authors sort of in work if there's someone who's like a discovery definitely be interested in that we're not really so interested in translations of classics or re-translations of classic authors those are it's a possibility but those are going to be a little bit lower on the priority scale I think our aesthetic is mostly you know we just we're very interested in very kind of innovative for looking prose a lot of poetry submissions in particular we get you know they're really kind of conceptual and interesting I think that can be really good I think in issue 22 or 23 they'll be coming out next year we have something from The Olibo which is kind of a cool translation yeah I mean but also like it doesn't have to be overly conceptual we definitely want stuff that kind of hits you in the gut and has you know a real connection at the moment we're doing really well on poetry so I would say if you have really strong fiction or really strong prose you'd want to send that our way not to say don't send your poetry but at the moment that's kind of where our needs line what else can I say it's bilingual it's bilingual the poetry is bilingual on the prose we do the first page is bilingual and after that I think yeah just maybe one thing I would stress if you're committing your fiction or your poetry really revise you can give that thing 10, 20 looks from start to finish I think one of the things that gets on my nerves a lot and I think nobody has a whole lot of patience for it's just stuff that really feels like it's just a little muddy and it could be a little bit tighter that's for me at least is something that really distinguishes kind of the ones that are nice about this is really top notch so I would definitely encourage that if I may just before opening it up just to say something I mean you all wouldn't say this about yourself so I'm going to say it is how supportive it is to have these editors publishing your work that it isn't just it isn't just the author's work they support the translators and it's amazing how Minda did one of the very first things that I ever translated and I wound up with the book as a result of what she introduced me to and it wasn't just that she kept on suggesting my name for other things thank you so Susan has been with constant support and Jim I'll say did something that was absolutely lovely which is that he put the story that was accepted by Giulio Mozzi Mozzi's name was put on the cover of the journal and so was mine and I can't tell you what that meant and also because I told him this sort of humble you know thank you of course I know I'm just along for the ride and I got a lecture from him in the email no you're not you know it was so supportive so you know you're really pursuing it it really matters a lot let's go ahead and open this up yeah thank you for this panel my name is Faisal Sultan and I'm the founder of Dar Saffi where we translated books from every medium region into English and we have 11 books ready this year what struck me about what Jim said about poetry as a political statement is when I was standing close to my table there with the books and somebody approached and looked at one of the books which happened to be my poetry collection called let's give war a chance it's an irony I'm going to do a picture of Bumsville there and he picked the book and he looked at me and said you know I believe that poetry should be involved in politics that's for me it's no poems and he put it back and I was struck by his statement first I think he was in the wrong conference because there's poetry and translation second he didn't realize that since I was 8 years old in Iraq being from the Kurdish area and since the first time I hear the bomb from the siren that's always there and this would be even 18 years after I lived in the United States and I didn't realize how people think that politics should not be involved in literature for some nations the first thing you learn is a poem by a poet who starts a revolution who calls for the independence of his country and he's the hero of the whole nation my uncle was executed by Saddam's regime and he was a poet and on his grave what we put was his poems calling for the country of Kurdistan so I don't know how politics cannot be written does anyone have some questions in relation to fiction specifically or maybe non-fiction which we haven't talked about but it was a mention I just wanted to say this is the cover of the issue that will come out of the Massachusetts Review in December and it has a special Egyptian street art insert and the cover is a woman holding up a poster of Nefertiti wearing a gas mask in Arabic it says a woman's voice is a revolution yeah my question was about the sort of cover letter I mentioned that you said a lot about what kind of prose you're looking for so how important is it that the cover letter established that this person is the most important person writing in their country the least discovered person writing in their country the only person in their country who does X verses everything else so what do you actually want to know besides what's in front of you personally I I don't really want to know a whole lot more than just reading the text so I mean it's nice to have that and I might like refer back to that but really I'm just looking for something that grabs me that I feel like is really using language in a very interesting way and then I feel like it's just a very beautiful and good translation and you know with Google and such these days I feel like if you want that information if that's an important criterion you can get that maybe at some point in the editorial meeting it might come down to that would be a relevant factor but I think that would be a much lower consideration than just how is this moving me how is this working it's the rest of the stuff and the issue of those sorts of questions anybody disagree with that I want to say actually two things about it I mean generally speaking because our project is you know sort of pro literature we don't have and we don't have like an anthropological position it actually doesn't matter to I mean we're not doing that kind of work right and so it doesn't matter really as Scott said how important somebody is and it we really are judging on the merit of the work that in a lot of times in at least when the work comes to me to read I don't look at the cover letter I might see a tag that says it's in translation but I'm going to go right to the text before I look at the cover letter which isn't to say that the cover letter shouldn't include a little bit of information that's helpful for us for context for the for the maybe the readers who are reading before me and I don't know if we can talk about this now or later but we in our submission guidelines we ask for the translators to tell us that they have the right to be sending this out and I know that's kind of a I think that's a controversial position um that we ask for you to for the translators I don't know I've had moments where people have said no the publisher should be finding the rights but as a small with our resources we do ask for the translator to say I have the author's permission or the state's permission to be sending this out for publication so that we won't run into if we accept it then we won't find we're not able to publish it for technicality so that that's important to say on the cover letter any other comments on the cover letter I'd sort of disagree that the work is just because I don't really trust that anything stands on its own that all discourse takes place within some kind of frame but I don't also have set policies either for cover letters or for explanatory footnotes or anything else but it made me think of your story again the title of the story is F but what it tells is the story of a judge from his point of view the day he's assassinated and anybody in Italy who reads that knows who F is and you remember we went back and forth on this a little bit it's like what should we do should we name him in the title and we can't change the title of it so what we ended up doing was was putting a quote from him as an epigraph brilliant that's really good as I was going to say Liz must have liked it because I noticed it in the publish I can't remember exactly what it was it was basically they were going to kill me sooner or later it doesn't matter the office would have killed me whenever they wanted to and they did that's a really interesting point because I'm not talking about cover letters but there's always the question of how much you need to tell your readership for something to make sense I think probably for all of us that's a constant editorial concern or consideration I think does the cover letter in some ways you're also dealing with the possibility that someone's not they could be a decent writer but they're not necessarily a very effective translator you might not know the original language very well is there any way that that's considered do you want original language submitted with the work how does that work speak to that actually they publish the original text on the side on a margin you can click on it and a recorded version if they can get it the original text and then there's a translator's note but all of this is sort of under a link except for the bios on the side you don't see any of that unless you click on it and open it up but you can both hear the text read it in the original and then the translator's note which can explain some of the context and we publish wherever possible we publish everything in the original language as well and we have a wonderful feature on our site where you can read only the English only the original by clicking only the translation only the original text or side by side which is quite wonderful I think it's also quite crucial particularly for poetry where interpretation is so much more perhaps more flexible we ask for both to be submitted the original and the translation we haven't gotten into publishing the original at all we don't want to have to bother with rights in all over the planet but we also won't consider you for our translation prize if you don't send the original a little incentive by the way with we talked up here very briefly that it seems like sometimes in these roundtables that the conversation winds up almost exclusively about obtaining copyright and I wonder if we could try to limit that since other things to talk about too are there some I should just address but we don't actually ask for the original and we give you the totally separate I mean it's just a different kind of agenda but we have to give you the benefit of the doubt so we assume that we don't check we don't have the resources we really only based on the English and because of the nature of our aesthetic we like work that stands on its own in terms of context so that if it needs a great feel context is harder for us to publish and that's just about the aesthetic of the magazine kind of a minimalist like here's the work and that's all we do but it also means that you could be lying and we won't know yeah we might do that but that's the risk we run I was just wondering maybe the cover letter might also be a place to establish the translator's credentials or does that not maybe that doesn't matter it's probably cool and I think ultimately a text has to work in English and that's where I think all of us are going some other questions out here I was going to ask about permissions if you could just briefly talk a little bit more about that yeah very briefly I'm going to like put my this down I can tell you what we do we don't ask the translator secure rights because in many cases publishers will not work with an individual they will only work with an organization we do ask that anyone who is submitting something to us ascertains that the rights are available we're somewhat unusual in that we buy rights we buy English language rights even though we're a magazine and not a book publisher we buy the rights from the original publisher or author and we have contracts with both publisher we have contracts with the publisher or author and the translator but we are very careful about that we would never publish anything intentionally without the proper permissions in hand basically the same with us that we we ask you to get the rights if you can make sure the rights are available in the end the publisher is legally responsible so we understand that too and as for paying for rights we've done it we don't have the money to do it so it makes it tougher Asunto just says let us know that you've worked out the question of the rights so they put it all on the translator I don't think that as far as I know they don't maybe somebody working with Asunto you might know more about that but as far as I'm informed at least for me when I submitted a work to them that's what they asked me to contain people here sorry I was sorry I don't want to talk to you it's a publisher who sold rights to Asunto No I'm teasing sorry about that everybody I'm sorry I apologize I felt my phone was off it's so rude we can move on right? let's move on in the back there Susan I wonder if you might share the upcoming themes that can be looking for submission to anyone else who has themes coming up we plan our issues quite far in advance and at this point we have our agenda set through December of 2015 and what's coming up is almost entirely language and country driven some years just are more so than others but what we I think what we we have two annual theme we always do a graphic novel issue in February and we always do a queer issue in June so you can and those are always drawing from all languages all countries otherwise this year everything is pretty much wrapped up in specific countries and languages and most of those issues we are working with guest editors who will make the selection so we don't have as much flexibility and acquiring but obviously I certainly am interested in hearing about possible projects yes and show interest in the publishers but I actually don't have any of those I can I'll go first but we actually have an industry newsletter that we send to publishers and editors not only in the US but abroad in which we recommend books that from which we might have published either extracts or other work by an author that we do think would be successful in translation being very careful to consider the market as well as the quality I know that at this point about 20 books that we've published extracts from have been picked up for publication I think it depends a lot on I certainly think that anybody who's publishing translation any book publisher who's working in translation is reading the magazines and I think it is excellent exposure I would agree with that I mean for everyone at this table I think these are publications two lines included that are being looked at by people in the industry I mean I haven't done a count or anything but definitely I do take note when I happen to see something that we originally published that go on to be a book somewhere and I mean it does it does happen with some regularity and I think there is some kind of correlation there you can also use if the publisher doesn't happen to find you in the journal as a translator you can use the publication as a credential and I think that that kind of pre-screening of being in the literary magazines makes it much easier to get into the door of most of the presses I really think that's true it makes it easier to get into the door of the other magazines too at some level it's just kind of common sense that magazines can take chances that presses especially small presses that they publish one book that doesn't make its money that could be in trouble so we can take the chances but then you get the cred for having placed it and sometimes we work with the small presses that we see as fellow travelers really closely say Archipelago sends us something that's coming out we publish a story by Tabuki and then the book comes out after it's good for both of us but it works the other way too I mean we published an excerpt of a novel by an Indian author, well Danish Indian author he lives in Denmark and I liked it so much I kept talking about it with a friend of mine who runs interlink books and he published his next book so I mean it works that way too and I just add actually a book that we did it came out in October called Baboon by Danish author and I am already eight we got the idea to do that because we published one of the stories originally in two lines and we really liked it so we asked the translator to see more so I mean I don't want to create expectations that if you publish in two lines we're going to take your book but that has happened in general we like your submissions we see you're doing really high quality work we're going to remember your name I'm interested in publishing creative nonfiction in translation I would agree with that I don't know if it's going to happen or not but I know that we were interested in a submission that was kind of creative nonfiction around the concept of translation so I mean there's like that there's this other piece I mentioned before where it's kind of the author she has an interesting kind of approach to her work of translation so I would say it's more creative nonfiction than a translator's introduction it's just more kind of voice and narrative driven there's also just like if you have a really great piece of translated travel literature or translated nonfiction actually there's a piece we're going to be doing on the online portion of the journal it's nonfiction writing about it's kind of this autobiography set in the Balkans and it's really cool so we definitely wouldn't look at that stuff seriously Assumtoad also has published creative nonfiction and I'm sure they'd be in translation making if still and I'm very partial to literary reportage particularly Polish but I've done features and issues on that so yes and we are open to including it in our issues where appropriate for us I'd actually even say more so because nonfiction in general is what we have to work the hardest to get what we want and we're as interested in translation in nonfiction as in fiction or poetry but really nonfiction on the one hand it's also a way to say maybe more directly what you believe in a way that's immediate and recognizable for your readers but again it's for us it's what we receive the least of that we're really interested in and if you want to know what we're not interested in it's the third memoir by a 25 year old that's what we mostly get some other questions so you shut down the copyright stuff this might be slightly controversial but I always think that the slipperiest thing to get right is the taste question and whenever I speak to editors about what are you interested in they always say I often find it interesting to ask editors to compare their publication to other publications as a way of teasing out this question of taste and I was wondering if the panelists would be interested in because I'm presuming you all read one another's magazines and it's a little bit about your publication and the relationship to one another and what differences you see and what commonalities you see that's a good question that's a very good question I just want to start by saying I can't do that but but but we had a we just published an issue called Glettin's Kitchen and there's not a lot of food in it but there is this one story by a wonderful writer named Robert Lopez called Big People Everywhere in which the narrator talks about how much he loves getting sashes from fat women and it's interesting because it's really kind of like very much like a the way that it's written it's very much a character piece and doesn't have a strong plot or anything like that voice and this character and it fit in so beautifully with our foodie theme and he's such a marvelous writer that we took it and my managing editor was reading the piece and she was like she said to me that she was a little baffled by the piece because nobody died and she said it's just that we usually publish things that are so grim that when this really strong voice didn't end up murdering his beloved it felt like it was wrong because the nature of ours she had so much suspense built up that he was going to kill because I guess we have a lot of murderers especially the first person fiction in our magazine so I think that that might speak a little bit to my proclivities we actually like there's always the points in the issue where we're like we just have a lot of really down stuff we need something to lighten this up so just send us your lighter stuff just like the murder is actually a dog just kind of like on the question of reading the magazine I totally understand where you're coming from I have piles and piles of books at home I do feel though like if you are contributing to the publication it's good to support it in some way subscriptions to two lines are ridiculously cheap some of these are free online so you can tweet about them I'm sure they'll take donations but I think it is good to be a good citizen in terms of like I believe in this place enough to publish my work in it so you know maybe I can also believe it enough to read it or just spread the word about it I mean I understand we're all busy people and not trying to like shame anyone and I myself publish essays in the journals and don't read the rest of the journal at all so I understand that there's also when you're talking to a room full of aspiring fiction writers it's very easy to say you want to send your work to the magazine that you love the work of it the magazine that you really love it's not even as if you're trying to see your work alongside it's like oh I would fit in there because it's hard to predict if you're going to fit in because my idea of fitting in is going to be different than your idea of fitting in it's more like I just love the work in here and that becomes that's your aesthetic you love the work so maybe your aesthetic matches mine it's interesting when you've got that extra kind of like shifting filter of the translation so you have to think like would my author love the work in here I kind of feel like maybe you don't have to see I love the work enough to be translating it and so you can behave at that point like you are the aspiring fiction writer do you love the work in this magazine my author might love the work in this magazine I'm not a writer alive is that author so much easier to work I have a question do you all mind it when people submit to more than one place multiple submissions is that a problem not so long as we're aware of it I certainly wouldn't want somebody submitting letting us accept a piece and then telling us very close to publication it had already been accepted but I don't know I think that's I think it's pretty reasonable I would say asymptotes the same that they allow multiple submissions but request that if a piece is accepted somewhere else to let the journal know that way yeah same for us although I would also add that I'm sure none of the people in this room would have ever done such a thing but three times in a single year accepted a piece and then they notified the author or the translator or author I forget which they said oh I was meeting to write it was just place I'm going yeah so if yeah probably everyone does and needs to multiple submit but keep track and let us know I mean and also we take simultaneous submissions and that's because we take a really disgusting long time sometimes to respond but as I said we're looking for translations and my translation my translation editor just have furious over there we want translation so much that we might actually encourage a translator to approach us directly through email instead of through online submissions which is really weird but just for translation since we're interested in them we sometimes go cut corners if you are doing that and writing for example Jesse directly about something I would say in that case don't do a simultaneous submission but if you're going through the or writing me directly but if you're going through the online submission process then I would definitely say that we welcome it because we take so long we'd feel bad if we were holding you up I mean Slush moves at different speeds and different publications I think simultaneous acknowledges that yeah I mean basically all of our editors except our managing editor our volunteers so and everybody's overwhelmed they have real jobs so we also take an absurdly long time sometimes but we also do we close down our submissions manager but on the submissions guideline we say except for translation but obviously it's closed down but you can send it to us directly how long do you take we say three months and sometimes we've gone as long as a year is Sergio in here somewhere I kind of lost track of one just recently you accepted mine I think in two weeks and words about boards it was I said it one night and it was accepted the next day Lance just has a special power it's not that it's always slow that's all I think in general in translation we probably do better than three months yeah in the back over there possibly editors don't get enough pushback on that I mean I've heard a couple of apologies just now about absurdly long or terribly long but I think there is a point for us writers and translators in what average too long is really too long and how do you feel about being re-contacted say after six months which is kind of my mental deadline oh I'm cool with the balance his life is too short a year is really long no a year is a mistake it's not gonna be long and six months is absolutely you should contact I think that's fine too I'm happy with the query it helps I don't know exactly what we say on the website in terms of what to expect but yeah if it's been longer than that I think it's acceptable to politely cut just don't swear at us I mean you know I even feel like after six months you could think you can move on if you want to but sometimes people are really mad we'll have to ban on simultaneous submissions going away that was a real I mean there's also you know you have to realize that when all the submissions went online all of us got exponentially more submissions so there's a lot of like okay so now we have five times the number of submissions that we had two years ago to read and so we have to start accepting simultaneous submissions so everything kind of shifts along with it I really complain if I'm reading 4,000 yeah I mean a lot of magazines will have you'll get hundreds especially again with automated submissions in particular people get publications get hundreds of submissions a day and so if you think about oh you know I just you know I slept an hour later today so we're not here the slush is now pushed back a month or so you know just think you know I mean when you think about the you know it's important to keep in mind that everybody's dealing a day it's an excellent point about the you know just you don't have to get an envelope the way you use to so and it's you know if it's free submit if people aren't charging but it is something you keep in mind yeah in the back thank you I know that many of the many of you represent publications that work with minimal budgets and you know a lot of your editorial staff work on a volunteer basis and so this is in case there are other aspiring editors in this room are there are those who is it possible to make your living as an editor for a literary magazine in this country where do you find your editors where can they you know where can they continue to build their careers I thought you were going to volunteer we are looking yeah we're looking for readers the university jobs are nice except they're actually jobs they're real jobs yeah and the nice thing about the funny thing about universities is they think that editing a quarterly is the equivalent of teaching a class exactly so really is that it a course release which it isn't so much more work yeah it's quite a bit more but on the other hand you have a house you know you have people who pay the bills for the printing and things like that that's a nice thing at least for the university I'd say that certainly depending on the publication for which you work obviously some people are not paid at all and other people are paid somewhat more than not at all I do think it's I think it is something that an awful lot of people do just like translation work very hard for very little and the rewards are not financial but you still have to pay the bills I remember Peter Bush telling me that he thought that there are about half a dozen maybe eight people who make their living translating from Spanish into English literary translators and I think they're slightly more editors than make their living from it but basically the dynamic is very similar we're a press so we do books plus the journals so we actually have staff but it's not a lot of staff like there's three of us and none of us are full-time we also have some volunteers that help with reading and things here and there and they're part of the editorial meetings but it's not a lucrative profession everybody who works at Asymptotus is reading the person who runs it so nobody gets any money does that answer your question? basically I come from this question I think the word lucrative never really entered my head I come from personally from a background of editing and breadth, representation and lots and lots of translation and coming from a foreign country coming back to the United States expected me to not talk about my foreign experience when looking for looking to start at the bottom the US publishing system is extremely high but I assume that a lot of editors, a lot of translators here are also aspiring editors we love to edit as much as we love to translate and for many of us it's sort of a dream to finally become employed doing anything I think sometimes it's not about necessarily your credentials or your skills it's just what's available it might be easier to get an associate editor position than an editor position I mean, I myself when I first started publishing I was entering invoices into a computer at a very large distributor and eventually I managed to get over where I was editing and writing the catalogs and that was about a year or so later when you start isn't necessarily where you're going to be forever it is I would say that publishing is a field that does expect an awful lot from a lot from a few we actually have three full-time employees but we publish 12 issues a year and we're all run ragged but you have no idea how nice it is to be here but it also depends on a lot of it's luck and a lot of it is just happy confluence but if you put yourself in a position to receive it maybe we've got time for one more if there's one more question are we questioned out? yeah could you talk a little bit about how your publications are funded? especially the free ones Asim Tot has been looking at various sources of funding I'm not sure that they have anything beyond a couple of small grants that they've gotten recently but their big issue was that everything came with strings attached the Singapore government said they'd be happy to fund them if 30% of the content was Singaporean every issue and they said we don't want to limit ourselves that way so that hasn't gone for government grants so far and they're looking at various possibilities it's also a bit of an issue if you've got 80 people working on an issue all of them volunteers and then you go into non-profit status and you're paying people you're suddenly just lurching into this enormous bureaucracy and all kinds of complications with paying people in different countries and so forth so it's a new journal and I think they're a little bit anxious about but they do have an aspiration to become a non-profit that is something we're headed to we are a non-profit we were founded at the University of Massachusetts but we're actually funded by the, it's called the Five Colleges which includes Smith College Amherst College, Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke along with the University and they fund us to just over half of our budget and the rest comes from usual suspects, permissions subscriptions and since I managed to a three year campaign that was successful in getting my managing editor moved from part time to full time, now we have time to apply for grants and we just landed an NEA and a Dreyfus Foundation grant we're entirely grant supported we're non-profit the NEA is a huge funder of ours we also depend very heavily on private foundations our executive director spends and I don't want to say the majority of her time but a huge chunk writing grants and we're all in which we all participate and we, again we can be free online because we're non-profit but we have a very vague institutional affiliation with Bard in that wondrously we are Bard employees which means insurance yeah it's very, very nice yeah it's really but that is, but Bard does not does not support us in any other way they don't fund us so but yeah we're very heavily and you know the economic downturns really hit magazines you know private donors especially the ones who were with Madoff we're totally funded by Fairleigh Dickinson University they're our publisher and I've been fighting for six years to get my managing editor to more than half time status and one day we will and that's yeah we're non-profit so usual non-profit subtext grants, donations, subscriptions that's what they start I know maybe it's time to wrap thank you so much for all of that