Six Questions for Desmond White, Editor-in-Chief, Rune Bear

Rune Bear publishes fiction and poetry up to 300 words with elements of the strange, surreal, supernatural, and speculative. Read the complete guidelines here.

SQF: Why did you start this magazine?

Desmond White: I was inspired by the 60 Second Film Festival and their love for small content, huge impact. I wanted to create (another) home for flashy prose and poetry; a place where great ideas could exist without being stretched to unnecessarily high word counts.

Back in 2017, I started talking to my wife and some literary accomplices in California and we came up with some fundamental ideas: we’d make a literary magazine with weekly content and a quarterly contest, and the focus would be genre pieces like science fiction and horror.


SQF: What are the top three things you look for in a submission and why?

 DW: I look for:

1. An original idea, hopefully delightfully interesting and twisted.
2. A concise, sublime delivery. Our magazine’s frugal word requirement demands high attention to word choice and methodology. The challenge is to be as beautiful and economic as a haiku.
3. Completeness. The narrative needs to be trimmed and truncated, sure, but that doesn’t mean a piece can’t hint at a full story. I want to feel like the best part made it to writing; the rest can unfold in the imaginative world between and beyond the lines. 

 SQF: What most often turns you off to a submission?

DW: Since Rune Bear wants to welcome new and aspiring writers, our editors are not typically deterred by poorly crafted submission letters or manuscript formatting. However, I am turned off by arrogance. Sometimes a writer will send us their work with lines like “this poem is part of a collection that will change the world” or “I hope you choose to collaborate with me.” One contributor wrote that their poetry is “undoubtedly of great importance.” I do not think that’s what Neil Gaiman meant when he said: “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like.” Humility, friendliness, and confidence are the submitting writer’s greatest assets, but not self-bloat and arrogance.


SQF: If you could have dinner with three authors (living or dead), who would they be and why?

DW: Although I can be puckish, I’m a quiet person who prefers good conversationalists over raucous, bombastic characters. I’d have been intimidated by the famous sleepover at Villa Diodati where Frankenstein was conceived. My ideal dinner mates would be Flannery O’Connor, an older, gentler Mark Twain, and Umberto Eco. I can only imagine the stories.


SQF: Many editors list erotica, or sex for sex sake, as hard sells. What are hard sells for your publication?

DW: I’m not worried about sex, although I take a Thomas C. Foster approach to love-making. Explicit sex should be about everything but sex. For example, let’s say someone submits a piece about a succubus who seduces a guy at a bar. It’s likely the editors will feel like this has been done before and not be very engaged in the work’s conventional lustiness. But if the author twists our expectations, such as revealing that he was an incubus all along, and she used her muggle wiles to seduce the unseducable, we might be more interested. I guess I embedded the hard sell in my anecdote. We want to avoid petrified fossils. The ‘this has all been done before’ feeling that accompanies tropes that do not break from previous renditions.

I should add that as an ally of and advocate for #saferlit, our magazine rejects the glorification of gender violence, rape culture, and any discrimination against minorities and the disadvantaged. Preferably, the pieces we select will use the fantastic and speculative to reflect on the state of things today, whether its political, social, or just the human condition. And in this reflection, conflicts can arise that touch on difficult subjects: genocide, self-harm, toxic philosophies, etc. But we do not want to promote any ideology or thought-concept that truly seeks to harm, destroy, or negate anyone who has been historically oppressed or silenced. For example, sending us a piece that involves racism against fey (you can tell I’ve binged Carnival Row) is acceptable if the racism is shown to be ignorance, delusion, and darkness. But any endorsement or promotion of racism is a hard no.


SQF: What one question on this topic do you wish I'd asked that I didn't? And how would you answer it?

DW: Why flash fiction and not larger works?

There are a few practical reasons why we pursue 300 words or less.

(1) It’s easier on the editors to read through the slush pile in a timely manner and discuss pieces.

(2) It’s easier on the reader to submit original work if it’s short and sweet. No one feels compelled to submit a 10,000-word story to a magazine that, sadly, cannot afford to pay its contributors.

(3) With so much content on the internet, reader attention spans have dwindled (including mine). But everyone has time to read a paragraph of prose or a stanza of poetry.

But there are some other reasons that pertain to literary loftiness. 

(1) Brevity is a noteworthy skill in a storyteller.

(2) Smallness allows ideas to be expressed without being stretched to abnormal lengths. Our writers can play around with a clever concept and execute it without unnecessary extension. Saves some brow-sweat.

(3) As a Jedi Master once opined: “Size matters not.”

Thank you, Desmond. We all appreciate your taking time from your busy schedule to participate in this project.