"SORTES is an ongoing collection of stories, poems, songs, and illustrations to while away the wintery June nights. They have neither theme nor scene. With ten authors per issue and four issues per year, SORTES publishes both the sufficiently strange and insufficiently boring: swart stories, hoity poetry, oddball literary pulp, beatnik travelogues, antibiography, experimental sentimentalism, and sideways photography. SORTES also hosts readings, performs old time radio scripts, plays the festival circuit, and attempts many similar gimmicks and gimcrack." Read the submission guidelines and contact information here.
SQF: Why did you start this magazine?
Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum: SORTES was created as the best alternative to not creating it. You become too bored not to create, and it's much less effort to be strenuously interesting than to maintain the stasis quo. Silence takes so much effort to sustain -- for me, at least.
SQF: What are the top three things you look for in a submission and why?
JET: Why should you want to kiss this person but not that? Everyone admires wit and humor and scrumptious eyebrows -- but why *these* eyebrows? Fortunately we're a collective of editors with diverse turn-ons, we disagree well, and every three months our invisible hands lift up something recognizably SORTESy.
SQF: What most often turns you off to a submission?
JET: We're a little alarmed by any piece that doesn't glancingly acknowledge the 1,600-year history of English literature. We tend to like stories that use dollhouse conventions -- character, scene, conflict -- to stage something convincing and hopefully a bit twisted. We like poems that play new tunes while the metronome swings. And sometimes we adore submissions that disobey all the rules, but we wouldn't advise it.
SQF: What do you look for in the opening paragraph(s)/stanza(s) of a submission?
JET: Every train has a convincing engine and shapely caboose; the best give you some reason to watch every intervening car go by.
SQF: Many editors list erotica, or sex for sex sake, as hard sells. What are hard sells for your publication?
JET: The typical SORTES reader has Cronenbergian ideas about the body; this sex sells, yes, but at what cost? SORTES's hard sell titles might include words like "Cataclysm," "Disco," "Eldritch," or "Fop." All four in one title might finally get us noticed by both either the general public or Mr. Cronenberg.
SQF: What one question on this topic do you wish I'd asked that I didn't? And how would you answer it?
JET: As a free publication, SORTES, how can you expect to amass the vast wealth you seem to think you deserve?
A: We're nearly there. Only one puzzle left: how do we earn tremendous money without charging anyone?
Thank you, Jeremy. We all appreciate your taking time from your busy schedule to participate in this project.
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