Author Archive

Interview with Rose Himber Howse, Fiction Editor

Rose Himber Howse is a current MFA candidate in fiction at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her nonfiction and interviews have been featured on Dead Darlings, GrubStreet Boston’s site for novelists. She is currently at work on her first novel, The Stones They Broke, a queer Appalachian story. Before pursuing her MFA, she taught high school English and adult literacy.

Evan Fackler: Rose, you’re one of two fiction editors at The Greensboro Review. Do you and Richard [Moriarty, the other editor] usually agree on which stories to publish? 

Rose Himber Howse: Generally, yes. Looking at our respective styles as writers, you wouldn’t expect there to be as much overlap in our preferences as there is, and I like to think that’s testament to our general open-mindedness when it comes to a story’s right to dictate its own terms.

We can sometimes be attracted to different things when we’re reading the slush pile, but in these situations, we often make a pretty effective case to the other person for a story that they might have overlooked. It’s funny, actually–occasionally one of us will be championing a story the other has doubts about, and the next day the roles will reverse because we’ve done such a good job convincing each other.

Ultimately, stories with a strong voice tend to stand out for both of us. He’s more of a minimalist, which tends to be a good editorial predilection, and he always appreciates sharp dialogue whereas I can have a tin ear. I’m probably pickier about surprise–I hate when I can predict the next thing that will happen in a story.

EF: When you’re reading through fiction submissions, are there particular things you’re looking for? Specific characteristics or strengths you want to see in a piece for The Greensboro Review?

RHH: People always say that you should read a journal before submitting to get a feel for its style. And while I certainly hope submitters will read The Greensboro Review, I think that the beauty of a journal run by MFA students is that the editors change regularly, which means that personal preferences don’t limit the aesthetic of the journal.

The most obvious form that this sort of bias can take relates to a journal’s orientation toward experimental work, and I can confidently say that The Greensboro Review doesn’t come down on either side of this. If psychological realism and a traditional plot structure aren’t the best way to tell a story, that’s great; if they are, that’s fine too.

Our editorial process is intensive and collaborative. Having conversations with writers about how to edit in service of their vision is my favorite part of the job. Because we do subscribe to this particular process, we’re more willing than some magazines to take a story that might be imperfect yet more memorable and unique than a different, “cleaner” story. When I’m at home chopping onions or something and I find myself still thinking about a character, that’s usually a very strong indicator that I’m going to advocate for that submission.

EF: If you could give some blanket advice to writers based on your experience on the editorial side of things, what would that advice be?

RHH: Put a story in your story! It sounds really obvious, I know. But the most common reason I stop reading is that the opening feels bloated with exposition. That doesn’t mean that the first page needs a high-speed car chase–just that it needs to establish momentum for the story in the present. While it can be realistic for a character to have had a wounding event earlier in life that informs the present action, I’d rather learn about this through its impact on the present than through a frontloading of summary.

Every now and then, there’s a story with a compelling premise, but language that doesn’t excite or invigorate; however, the inverse is much more common: sentences that are stronger individually than the narrative that they make up.

Not that we’re looking for stories that read like action movies.  One of my favorite pieces in the last issue, “The Stone Lawn,” is about the interaction between an elderly man and his neighbor over lawn maintenance. It’s very quiet and very interior, and it does make use of flashback. But there’s an incredibly strong sense of underlying tension, and so it really moves.

EF: FAQ: Should I send my erotica to The Greensboro Review? 

RHH: Probably not. But never say never? Sex and sensuality are great if they’re in service of a narrative arc. Just please, if you are a man and your protagonist is a woman, don’t have her describe herself the way a catcaller might describe her (i.e.: “I looked down at my bodacious rack”). This has been weirdly common lately!

EF: Last question: let’s say you’re trapped on a desert island by Sycorax, Caliban’s bad-ass witch mother, and the only way off is through a literary barter. What novel or short story collection would you entice Sycorax with in exchange for safe passage off the island?

RHH: This won’t be news to anyone, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. While I think that magical writing doesn’t necessarily need to have a purpose beyond magic itself (for me, enchantment is enough of a reason to read) her collection really taught me how fabulism can be used to delineate emotional truths. I’m thinking in particular of the story “Real Women Have Bodies,” in which women are becoming invisible and nobody cares. It’s almost too obvious, but there’s nothing obvious about the artistry with which it’s executed.

So much of both the horror and the beauty in the collection are inextricable from Machado’s exploration of what it means to be a woman–often a queer woman–in the world. And I’m amazed at the book’s ability to hold those two forces (horror and beauty) in the same hand, acknowledging that they feed each other as much they negate each other. I think Sycorax would agree.

 

Evan Fackler is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. You can find him on Twitter @evanchilli

Interview with Jabar Boykin, Poetry Editor

Jabar Boykin is from Greensboro, NC and is currently getting his MFA in poetry at UNCG. His poetry primarily centers around his Black American heritage of which he seeks to create new narratives and mythologies from past tragedies and traditions. After earning an MFA in Poetry, Boykin intends to pursue a PhD in African American Literature. He is a current poetry editor for The Greensboro Review.

Evan Fackler: By all accounts you maintain a pretty busy work schedule, working multiple jobs while you’ve been in school. Where do you find the energy and time for your own poetry? 

Jabar Boykin: I actually write mostly during the time I should be sleeping, so like around 1-2 am, but this is also the time I feel like I do my best writing. I tend to get distracted during the day really easily so it’s hard for me to focus on coming up with ideas I think are creative enough to turn into poems.

EF: Has your editorial work at The Greensboro Review informed anything about your own writing or writing process?

JB: It has made me take a second look at my own poetry. When editing, it’s so nice to have a clean poem that doesn’t need any work or at least needs as little work as possible, so it’s most definitely made me go back and tidy up poems that I now understand to be a little messy for publications.

EF: Poetry and fiction submissions to The Greensboro Review have to make it past two editors in each genre, plus Terry Kennedy and Jessie Van Rheenen. Is everyone typically in agreement about what to publish? How much back-and-forth discussion do you have over the typical acceptance? 

JB: For Michael and I there hasn’t been too much disagreement, and the few occasions that there have been we usually let Terry act as the tiebreaker. However, there are moments where maybe we’ve had biases toward a poem for whatever reason and in that final process when we meet with Terry and break the poem down line by line we’ll usually see things in discussion that we didn’t see before when we were just sitting at our desk reading. It’s really interesting what you miss and what everyone else is seeing that you’ve not paid attention to. I think moments like that also sharpen your awareness of your own poetry as well.

EF: You’re mentioned under the Wikipedia entry for the pantoum: “Jabar Boykin wrote a well-received pantoum,” the entry reads, with no citation. Have you written a well-received pantoum?

JB: The story behind that is actually pretty funny; we were assigned, in our Structure of Verse class last semester, to write a pantoum so I decided to just revise one that I was already working on for my thesis. Long story short, Stuart ended up really enjoying it and also mentioned that he had written this very famous pantoum that he’d received a lot of accolades for, so the rest of the class, unknown to me at the time, decided to write in Wikipedia that I had written a “well-received pantoum” as well. When I found out it was hilarious to me because my work has never been published, but I also felt really honored at the same time that they would do that.

EF: FAQ – Is The Greensboro Review interested in publishing a particular kind of poet? 

JB: I can’t speak to past editors that have come before me but I don’t feel there’s anything in particular that Terry, Michael, or I look for other than for the poem to be skillful, thoughtful, and engaging. Me personally, I like poems that take a lot of risk; that feeling you get when you’re reading a poem and it seems that it could all fall apart at any moment, but then you’re at the end and somehow all the elements managed to hold together is priceless. Those are the poems I like the most.

 

Evan Fackler is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. You can find him on Twitter @evanchilli

Interview with Emily Morris, Managing Editor

Emily Morris won Honorable Mention in the 2018 NC State Fiction Contest and has work forthcoming in Reservoir Journal. Originally from Charlottesville, VA, Morris is currently at work on a short story collection focusing on issues of family and class in rural Southern America. She is the 2018-2019 managing editor of The Greensboro Review.

Evan Fackler: Emily, you’re the managing editor of The Greensboro Review. What’s an average day-in-the-life of a managing editor like? What is it that a managing editor does?

Emily Morris: The majority of my role here is to attend to production. I also format the poems and stories, convert them into our house style, and, once the order is decided, format the issue and prepare it for print. A “day in the life” changes according to where we are on the production schedule, which is something I appreciate—I’m not stuck doing one task for too long. We all kind of change pace as the stories and poems roll closer to our print deadline. In the beginning, I’m going through all the submissions, seeing if we have previous submitters, logging their subscriptions to our journal, etc. After the editors narrow down their selections, I do a lot more with the physical stories in InDesign and editing them according to what the fiction and poetry editors have decided. There’s a lot of back-and-forth with the authors.

EF: The stories of yours I’ve had the opportunity to read evoke setting in powerful ways, conjuring issues of class in rural American towns through things like language and image. Sometimes, just a character’s affect seems to enrich your settings. Is there a particular interplay between place and character that you’re conscious of trying to capture when you write? Is that sensibility something you look for in the poetry or fiction you help select for the GR?

EM: Much of my identity is embedded in the area of Virginia that I grew up in and is certainly at the forefront of my stories. I’m very interested in the effects of place on character, especially in settings where it seems stagnation has set in, where no one really leaves, or even knows how to anymore. I’ve noticed, as these stories come together in my thesis, that there’s always a sentimentality in the character for that place he or she is from. When I weigh in, I try not to favor a story that’s interested in those things just because I am, but I think there’s something to be said of stories in which the setting matters so much that it can be antagonistic in the narrative. In fact, in our upcoming issue there are a few stories where place really does play a big part in how the characters feel, and their resulting actions.

EF: Michael Parker [a fiction faculty member at UNCG] is fond of saying that the major divisions in this country aren’t regional but rural/urban. Do you think of your stories as investigating specifically regional concerns, or as speaking to a reality embedded in a larger rural/urban divide that might transcend the specificity of place?

EM: I hope my stories do surpass regional concerns. All of my pieces are positioned in a small area of the rural southeast because that’s where I grew up and that’s what I know. I try to make my stories feel lived in—give them an authenticity that I couldn’t necessarily obtain by writing about a different area with similar issues. I think, though, that many rural areas are similar in terms of education, political orientation, religion, and race, and that they generally lean pretty opposite of more urban areas. So, yeah, I think about Michael Parker’s statement a lot, and it’s a statement I had never considered before coming to this MFA program. I hope that when I write about rural class issues, it resonates with everyone, because everyone falls on one side or the other.

EF: Are there lessons you’ve learned working on the editorial side of things that have helped your own writing? Or vice-versa: writing lessons you’ve transferred to your editing work?

EM: Editorial work has helped me learn to take rejections a little more easily, because now I’ve seen the hundreds of entries we get each go-around while only having space for a handful of stories and poems. There’s also the different tiers of rejections, which is something I hadn’t been very familiar with in the past. The difference between form rejections, form rejections with an encouragement to submit again, and then the personalized rejections, where the editors often explain that they liked your story, but didn’t have room for it, but would love for you to resubmit…would’ve never thought to be excited over a rejection until now.

In terms of my own work, I think I’ve learned to not try to write what I think an editorial team will be interested in. If I begin to lose that personal edge, then that’s not helpful to me or the person reading my work, because it’s always about standing out from that pile of submissions. Even if a submission’s plot may need a little reconfiguring, I think the editors would much rather work with that than a clean story with a little less heat.

EF: Last question. There’s a sense somehow that we’re in a polarized cultural moment—a time when we’re both more aware of sexual and gender discrimination and racism in society at large (as well as in the literary community) and where misogynists and racist are more emboldened. What responsibility falls on a literary journal and its editors working and publishing in this milieu? 

We recently had author Ben Fountain come to the MFA program to visit, and he remarked how important it is for writers to get out, see the world, and come back to tell the truths of it. Writers are here to tell stories that hold us accountable. It’s the editors’ responsibility to let those voices be heard. Most journals’ processes, at their core, are about finding creative work that encapsulate the human condition, so often enough stories are commenting on past, present, or future social culture. I don’t speak for all literary journals by any means, but here at the GR we don’t wish to limit the subjects, styles, or voices we work with, and also do our best to select pieces that promote the journal’s vision, which is to publish the best stuff we get, period.

 

Evan Fackler is a fiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. You can find him on Twitter @evanchilli

Send us your work

Our general submissions are now open, and we will accept short stories and poems through February 15. We look forward to reading your best work. Please see Submittable for full guidelines and to submit to The Greensboro Review.