Lunch
Ticket is a biannual journal published by the MFA community of
Antioch University of Los Angeles, a program that is devoted to the
education of literary artists, community engagement, and the pursuit
of social justice. The magazine publishes fiction, creative
nonfiction, writing for young people, poetry, translation and visual
arts. Read the complete guidelines here.
SQF:
What are the top three things you look for in a submission and why?
Rachael
Warecki – Fiction Genre Editor
An interesting beginning. A piece should grab my attention in the
first page, ideally with the first sentence. This doesn't mean things
have to explode or someone has to die, but I should have a sense of
your story's conflict and who your protagonist is by the end of the
first page. I'll usually give a piece two pages before I call it
quits, but if an author hasn't done the necessary work in those first
two pages, I'll have neither the compulsion nor the time to invest
myself in that piece any further.
A story told in a unique way. We've received plenty of pieces that
lack one or more basic story elements—most notably, plot, or in
some cases, an ending. I don't believe that "literary fiction"
and "plot" are mutually exclusive. Slice of life stories
can work, but they have to be told in a unique or powerful way: maybe
the voice is incredibly strong, or the author is particularly adept
at deploying beautiful and original figurative language. The same
goes for stories that tend to lean on tropes. I've seen a lot of
stories about young, unrequited love, usually from a male point of
view, or about the gradual end of a relationship, or about coming of
age in a small town. These stories can be told well, and I'm not
going to vote to reject them out of hand, but many of these
trope-stories don't distinguish themselves enough from the twenty
other similar stories we receive over the course of a week.
Professionalism. That means your piece has been proofread for
spelling, grammar, and syntax errors; your story has been revised and
polished; your submission follows our stated guidelines; and your
cover letter contains more than just some number that I assume is
your story's word count. It also means that you're familiar with our
mission as a social justice publication. We're pretty open-minded in
terms of genre, but we stay away from work that seems to promote or
sympathize with racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. viewpoints.
Michael
Passafiume & Candace Butler – Poetry Genre Editors
- Is the material and/or the voice fresh?
- Is the poem well-written (use of grammar/language, its structure, etc.)?
- Is the poem universal and understandable beyond whatever vision the author had in mind?
Poetry
is tricky in that what speaks to me as a reader may not speak to
someone else and vice versa. I like strong voices with a unique take
on subject matter. I want Lunch
Ticket readers to have
an experience they’re not getting at other literary websites, and
publishing compelling work is one way to win them over.
SQF:
What most often turns you off to a submission?
Haneen
Oriqat – Writing for Young People Genre Editor
Unoriginality
and confusion quickly push me away from a submission. Specifically
within the Writing for Young People genre, I look for what stands out
in a story that makes it different than other YA stories. As for
confusion, there's nothing more difficult than trying to grasp for
some type of understanding when reading a story that uses
experimental writing without answers or direction. I have to keep my
audience in mind with my genre.
SQF:
Will you publish a submission an author posted on a personal blog?
LT:
We don't accept
previously published work, and Lunch
Ticket defines
this as previously published.
SQF:
What are the biggest challenges to publishing a biannual magazine?
David Bumpus – Editor-in-Chief
For
us in particular, as a student-run magazine, I would say that it's
keeping a staff of nearly 40 members on top of the production
schedule: each of my staff members is not only working on Lunch
Ticket as
a volunteer, but is also balancing school and often one or two jobs
on top of that as well. Working on Lunch
Ticket,
and actually producing the final issue of the magazine, is then
really an act of love and dedication for the literary community. This
is also amplified by the fact that our biannual issues come out
during the last days of each semester, when everyone is in some
combination of trying to graduate, compile manuscripts, or prepare
for the upcoming residency.
SQF:
What advice can you offer authors hoping to publish their work in
Lunch
Ticket?
Jennifer McCharen – Translation
Genre Editor
Read
Lunch Ticket,
of course. Also get to know Antioch, because the work that's
important to the institution trickles down to a great extent to the
students curating the journal. Social justice, broadly defined.
SQF:
What one question on this topic do you wish I'd asked that I didn't?
And how would you answer it?
Rachael Warecki – Fiction Genre
Editor
I wish you'd asked about our
decision-making process, because that's something I'm always curious
about when it comes to submitting my own work. The Fiction team is
comprised of four hard-working readers, myself included. We're
assigned pieces as soon as they come through Submittable, and I ask
my team to read, vote, and comment on a certain number of pieces each
week. Submissions are read blindly. After the pieces are read, I
start an email discussion thread for those pieces that have one or
more advocates within the team. We then choose to accept, decline, or
hold those pieces for further discussion. Although we try to respond
to our submitting authors as soon as possible, we do want to make
sure that every piece is thoroughly considered. Even the pieces we
decline relatively quickly have at least four paragraphs of rationale
backing up that editorial decision, and I never make decisions
without the full input of the team. We want our submitters to know
that we love reading your work, we're honored that you're trusting us
with it, and that even if we decline one of your pieces, you may have
another story that's a better match for our team's tastes.
Thank
you all. We all appreciate you taking time from your busy schedule to
participate in this project.
NEXT POST: 6/20--Six Questions for Amanda Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief, Blue Monday Review
No comments:
Post a Comment