Welcome, Victoria and Andrew! Tell us about your Freight Stories. What is it, how did you come up with the idea for it, what are you hoping to accomplish through it?
Victoria Barrett: Freight Stories is an online fiction quarterly. We both worked as managing editors of Puerto del Sol while in graduate school. It’s an extraordinary journal with national distribution and a 40+ year history of publishing brave, big-hearted, wonderful work. The editor-in-chief under whom we served, Kevin McIlvoy, was absolutely committed to operating the magazine as a service to writers as well as readers. We learned writer-centered editing practices from him, and found that the act of putting great work out into the world was gratifying on every possible level. Because we are both writers, we feel a deep and abiding loyalty to the literary community. Freight Stories emerged, after much coffee, conversation, and imagination, as a way to serve both writers and readers, and become further engaged in the literary community we love.
Andrew Scott: We wanted to establish a literary magazine for many years, but print journals tend to be cost prohibitive. The majority of literary magazines are affiliated with and funded by a university’s creative writing program or English department, an affiliation that tends to dictate budget, policy, and staff. We are not interested in complying with the kinds of restrictions university funding generally carries, so we made a commitment to avoid that kind of affiliation. Which left us stumped for a while.
As recently as 2004, we began a campaign to secure seed funding, an unlikely endeavor for most organizations, since an organization has to be in operation for at least three years before it can even apply for federal nonprofit status, which status is the first requirement of most funders. But Victoria has experience working as an arts fundraiser, so we put together several grant proposals.
Victoria Barrett: Freight Stories is an online fiction quarterly. We both worked as managing editors of Puerto del Sol while in graduate school. It’s an extraordinary journal with national distribution and a 40+ year history of publishing brave, big-hearted, wonderful work. The editor-in-chief under whom we served, Kevin McIlvoy, was absolutely committed to operating the magazine as a service to writers as well as readers. We learned writer-centered editing practices from him, and found that the act of putting great work out into the world was gratifying on every possible level. Because we are both writers, we feel a deep and abiding loyalty to the literary community. Freight Stories emerged, after much coffee, conversation, and imagination, as a way to serve both writers and readers, and become further engaged in the literary community we love.
Andrew Scott: We wanted to establish a literary magazine for many years, but print journals tend to be cost prohibitive. The majority of literary magazines are affiliated with and funded by a university’s creative writing program or English department, an affiliation that tends to dictate budget, policy, and staff. We are not interested in complying with the kinds of restrictions university funding generally carries, so we made a commitment to avoid that kind of affiliation. Which left us stumped for a while.
As recently as 2004, we began a campaign to secure seed funding, an unlikely endeavor for most organizations, since an organization has to be in operation for at least three years before it can even apply for federal nonprofit status, which status is the first requirement of most funders. But Victoria has experience working as an arts fundraiser, so we put together several grant proposals.
We also became engaged to be married that year. In the end, the arduous task of securing the substantial funding required to publish a print journal while simultaneously teaching four English courses a semester, working a variety of consulting and freelance jobs, pursuing our creative scholarship, and planning a wedding overwhelmed us. Since none of the other tasks could go, we tabled our (then untitled) magazine.
Victoria Barrett: In the intervening years, something wonderful happened. Online publishing has become both easier and less iconoclastic. Online journals like Narrative have brought the editorial quality that used to be limited to print publishing to the web. While many online publishing outlets remain deliberately outside the mainstream, publishing a poem-a-day in blog format, for example, or eschewing the editorial selectivity that the limited page count of a print journal necessarily enforces, web journals began to emerge as a viable outlet for the highest quality work, the work of writers who, a few short years before, wouldn’t have considered publishing online. And so, Freight Stories was born.
In 2006, we bought a house adjacent to the original B & O Railroad (yes, the one in the Monopoly game) in the Irvington historic neighborhood of Indianapolis. The railroad now belongs to CSX, and is heavily used. Some days we hear the whistle seven or eight times; some days not at all. Meanwhile, as we came closer to making our magazine a reality, we hoped to choose a name that had real imagistic power, but also implied a sense of weight and of movement, two things we feel bound to as readers of fiction. We love—and publish—stories in many forms and styles. But they must have big hearts and move us to feel something. So: Freight.
Stories is easier. The odds of getting a poem or an essay published in a literary outlet are mathematically much, much higher than a story. There are many journals, print and online, that publish exclusively poetry or essays, but just a handful for fiction. Among the majority of journals that publish several genres per issue, you’ll find on a contents page upwards of 20 poems, and maybe one or two stories. Since we are both fiction writers ourselves, and have edited fiction in the past, restricting Freight Stories to fiction is a natural choice for us. But it also clearly serves readers and writers of fiction.
Do you have a pet peeve having to do with this biz?
Andrew Scott: We want to avoid much of the anti-print bias that online journals sometimes evoke, because Freight Stories is not a protest against the literary publishing establishment. On the whole, this is very much a positive movement for us, and is all about what it can offer writers by way of exposure, and readers by way of excellent fiction, free of charge. We don’t focus much on what it is not.
What are a few of your favorite stories?
Victoria Barrett: Some of my favorite short stories include Debra Monroe’s “Plumb and Solid,” from her wonderful collection, A Wild, Cold State, as well as “What the Thunder Said” by Janet Peery. And Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” which we were lucky enough to hear him read a few years ago.
Andrew Scott: I admire Colum McCann’s “Everything in This Country Must,” as well as Ha Jin’s “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” but in truth, there are hundreds of writers and stories we could name here.
What work have you done that you’re especially proud of and why?
Victoria Barrett: Mary Swan is a longtime favorite. When I teach creative writing, I usually read aloud Swan’s “Where You Live Now,” from the Sudden Fiction, Continued anthology, on the first day of classes because it shows you how much emotional resonance and formal originality the short story form can contain. Swan is a known perfectionist with enormous heart in her stories. She’s not afraid to risk sentimentality or break the “rules” to move her readers. But we don’t know her at all, and requested a story as a shot in the dark. She had no reason to trust us except for our mission and the way we articulated it. So publishing her story “My Mother’s Ghost” was a big, big deal.
Andrew Scott: As was each story that came in. It all gave us a sense of what we could do. Most of our authors can publish pretty much anything they want in a print journal somewhere. Among the author bios on our site, you’ll find at least four O’Henry Awards, several NEA Fellowships, two AWP book prize awards, one Pushcart Prize, one Guggenheim Fellowship, at least two appearances in Best American Short Stories, and one in Best New American Voices—these are most of the top honors an American fiction writer can garner. They are widely anthologized writers. All told, they’ve published more than 30 books. So we knew, as their work rolled in, that we were accomplishing something special, that these were major-league writers who trusted our editorial sensibilities enough to put their work out in the least trustworthy of possible places: the web. We also knew, almost right away, that we could make our wishes for Freight Stories come true.
Can you give us a look into a typical day for you?
Andrew Scott: Besides our editing work for Freight Stories, we’re also full-time writers and full-time writing teachers, so our days are jam-packed with words. But a typical day for us with Freight Stories involves reading submissions, data entry, possibly line editing a story for the next issue, and getting our ducks in a row. Every now and then, we might spend time seeking artwork for an upcoming issue, or taking photographs (Victoria’s photographs have been used for the covers of our first and third issues), and in the weeks before an issue is made “live” online, we’re hard at work on website design. We also produce a monthly PDF newsletter called CARGO—which we features original essays, author interviews, and more—that we create for Freight Stories supporters.
Victoria Barrett: And every so often, we manage to sleep.
How long have you been editors?
Andrew Scott: About a decade, at this point. We have details and plans, but if we’re able to keep doing what we do indefinitely, it will be a wonderful experience and accomplishment. Our core hope is that Freight Stories can continue to bring great fiction to online readers.
As an editor, what's that special something you look for in a story?
Victoria Barrett: The bottom line is that a story must move us. Formal tradition or formal experimentation is nice, but if the story’s heart is not powerful, there’s not much point. That doesn’t mean a story has to be sad—Alexander Parsons’ story in the first issue resonates with humor, for example—though great stories often are. We believe that the real reason people read is to be moved to feel something among the sameness of everyday life. So that’s really the primary requirement.
Of course, with novel excerpts, which we do welcome, the work must be self-contained, by which we mean that the reader has to be able to get it, and to get a lot out of it, without any explanation of the novel’s remaining pages.
What are some things that set off red flags in a manuscript?
Andrew Scott: We’re not in search of red flags, for sure, but especially sloppy manuscripts make it difficult to read the story on its own terms, which is something we strive for each time. Beyond that, perhaps stories that are overly familiar.
What makes a manuscript stand out from the rest?
Victoria Barrett: A compelling, engaging narrative voice, for one. Richly drawn characters, for another. Sharp prose. There are numerous ways for a manuscript to leap out at us.
We all hear how subjective this business is. Can you elaborate on that?
Andrew Scott: As for the subjectivity of editors selecting work for publication, it’s good to remember that, as with writing and love, science plays no part. We understand how writers feel when they submit their work to a journal or magazine. One article in The Writer’s Chronicle a few years ago suggested that a piece of writing needs to be submitted 55 times to have a 95% chance of acceptance; but, again, no statistical study can pinpoint how many submissions will guarantee a 100% chance of acceptance. Even though Victoria and I have similar reading tastes, we still disagree about submissions all the time—or, perhaps, we may both recognize that a story has merit, but disagree about its strengths and weaknesses.
Victoria Barrett: But generalizing the publishing of literature as a “subjective business” rings loudly of complaint. It’s valuable for writers, readers, and editors to remember that the publishing of literature in journals is usually an act of service and love. It isn’t much about “business” in the sense that it generates a profit for anyone. Is that service “subjective,” then? Until the robots take over, yes, as are all human endeavors. Let’s work to keep it that way.
What's the best piece of advice you can give our readers about getting published?
Andrew Scott: We asked a longtime friend of ours, a fiction writer with a lot of talent, to send us a specific story that we remembered reading and liking. Instead, he sent us three other submissions, one of which wasn’t finished. The work was not his best, and when we passed on them, we again asked him to consider sending us the story we knew we liked. Instead, he replied that he would send his work to real journals, journals with name recognition, because he would be entering the teaching job market soon. His tone made it clear that we was “slumming” it for us, somehow.
There are a few things to learn from this incident. First, if an editor asks you for something—for a specific story, or for a revision with suggestions, or for anything that might help your work reach a wider audience—pay attention, and don’t dismiss it out of hand. Second, you’ll most likely be left behind if you think web publishing is going away, or that it’s always second-class somehow. As with print journals, books, newspapers, and anything else, you should learn to tell the difference between the good and the not-so-good. We’ve published the work of bestselling authors, major award winners, and brand-new writers. We only care about finding good fiction to share with our readers. Our ultimate advice: write a great story, follow the submission guidelines, and hope for the best.
Let's say I have an intriguing query, a well-developed synopsis and my writing is strong. Why might I still get a rejection?
Victoria Barrett: As an online literary journal, we don’t read queries or synopses. But in general, there are still hundreds of reasons why a piece of strong writing could be rejected by a magazine editor, book editor, or literary agent.
If a writer is rejected and reworks the story, can he/she resubmit it?
Victoria Barrett: Yes, writers can resubmit their work after its been revised substantially. But unless we specifically ask a writer to resubmit, he or she is probably better off submitting that piece to other journals. No writer should completely change his or her work just because one editor made a suggestion or comment. Now, if several editors make the same comment, perhaps the collective wisdom should be heeded.
Would you recognize a resubmission? If you did, would you be able to see it with fresh eyes?
Victoria Barrett: Our record keeping is quite good, but beyond that, yes, we’d most likely recognize a story submitted for the second time. Every so often we might ask an author to consider submitting the piece if it’s revised, but that happens infrequently.
Do you have any parting words of advice?
Andrew Scott: Writers should read every literary journal where they might hope to publish their work. They should also subscribe to them, too, or find other ways to support the publications that shepherd new fiction into the world.
To learn more about Freight Stories, check out:
Freight Stories: http://www.freightstories.com/
Support Freight Stories: http://freightstories.com/Subscribe.html
Victoria Barrett: In the intervening years, something wonderful happened. Online publishing has become both easier and less iconoclastic. Online journals like Narrative have brought the editorial quality that used to be limited to print publishing to the web. While many online publishing outlets remain deliberately outside the mainstream, publishing a poem-a-day in blog format, for example, or eschewing the editorial selectivity that the limited page count of a print journal necessarily enforces, web journals began to emerge as a viable outlet for the highest quality work, the work of writers who, a few short years before, wouldn’t have considered publishing online. And so, Freight Stories was born.
In 2006, we bought a house adjacent to the original B & O Railroad (yes, the one in the Monopoly game) in the Irvington historic neighborhood of Indianapolis. The railroad now belongs to CSX, and is heavily used. Some days we hear the whistle seven or eight times; some days not at all. Meanwhile, as we came closer to making our magazine a reality, we hoped to choose a name that had real imagistic power, but also implied a sense of weight and of movement, two things we feel bound to as readers of fiction. We love—and publish—stories in many forms and styles. But they must have big hearts and move us to feel something. So: Freight.
Stories is easier. The odds of getting a poem or an essay published in a literary outlet are mathematically much, much higher than a story. There are many journals, print and online, that publish exclusively poetry or essays, but just a handful for fiction. Among the majority of journals that publish several genres per issue, you’ll find on a contents page upwards of 20 poems, and maybe one or two stories. Since we are both fiction writers ourselves, and have edited fiction in the past, restricting Freight Stories to fiction is a natural choice for us. But it also clearly serves readers and writers of fiction.
Do you have a pet peeve having to do with this biz?
Andrew Scott: We want to avoid much of the anti-print bias that online journals sometimes evoke, because Freight Stories is not a protest against the literary publishing establishment. On the whole, this is very much a positive movement for us, and is all about what it can offer writers by way of exposure, and readers by way of excellent fiction, free of charge. We don’t focus much on what it is not.
What are a few of your favorite stories?
Victoria Barrett: Some of my favorite short stories include Debra Monroe’s “Plumb and Solid,” from her wonderful collection, A Wild, Cold State, as well as “What the Thunder Said” by Janet Peery. And Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t,” which we were lucky enough to hear him read a few years ago.
Andrew Scott: I admire Colum McCann’s “Everything in This Country Must,” as well as Ha Jin’s “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” but in truth, there are hundreds of writers and stories we could name here.
What work have you done that you’re especially proud of and why?
Victoria Barrett: Mary Swan is a longtime favorite. When I teach creative writing, I usually read aloud Swan’s “Where You Live Now,” from the Sudden Fiction, Continued anthology, on the first day of classes because it shows you how much emotional resonance and formal originality the short story form can contain. Swan is a known perfectionist with enormous heart in her stories. She’s not afraid to risk sentimentality or break the “rules” to move her readers. But we don’t know her at all, and requested a story as a shot in the dark. She had no reason to trust us except for our mission and the way we articulated it. So publishing her story “My Mother’s Ghost” was a big, big deal.
Andrew Scott: As was each story that came in. It all gave us a sense of what we could do. Most of our authors can publish pretty much anything they want in a print journal somewhere. Among the author bios on our site, you’ll find at least four O’Henry Awards, several NEA Fellowships, two AWP book prize awards, one Pushcart Prize, one Guggenheim Fellowship, at least two appearances in Best American Short Stories, and one in Best New American Voices—these are most of the top honors an American fiction writer can garner. They are widely anthologized writers. All told, they’ve published more than 30 books. So we knew, as their work rolled in, that we were accomplishing something special, that these were major-league writers who trusted our editorial sensibilities enough to put their work out in the least trustworthy of possible places: the web. We also knew, almost right away, that we could make our wishes for Freight Stories come true.
Can you give us a look into a typical day for you?
Andrew Scott: Besides our editing work for Freight Stories, we’re also full-time writers and full-time writing teachers, so our days are jam-packed with words. But a typical day for us with Freight Stories involves reading submissions, data entry, possibly line editing a story for the next issue, and getting our ducks in a row. Every now and then, we might spend time seeking artwork for an upcoming issue, or taking photographs (Victoria’s photographs have been used for the covers of our first and third issues), and in the weeks before an issue is made “live” online, we’re hard at work on website design. We also produce a monthly PDF newsletter called CARGO—which we features original essays, author interviews, and more—that we create for Freight Stories supporters.
Victoria Barrett: And every so often, we manage to sleep.
How long have you been editors?
Andrew Scott: About a decade, at this point. We have details and plans, but if we’re able to keep doing what we do indefinitely, it will be a wonderful experience and accomplishment. Our core hope is that Freight Stories can continue to bring great fiction to online readers.
As an editor, what's that special something you look for in a story?
Victoria Barrett: The bottom line is that a story must move us. Formal tradition or formal experimentation is nice, but if the story’s heart is not powerful, there’s not much point. That doesn’t mean a story has to be sad—Alexander Parsons’ story in the first issue resonates with humor, for example—though great stories often are. We believe that the real reason people read is to be moved to feel something among the sameness of everyday life. So that’s really the primary requirement.
Of course, with novel excerpts, which we do welcome, the work must be self-contained, by which we mean that the reader has to be able to get it, and to get a lot out of it, without any explanation of the novel’s remaining pages.
What are some things that set off red flags in a manuscript?
Andrew Scott: We’re not in search of red flags, for sure, but especially sloppy manuscripts make it difficult to read the story on its own terms, which is something we strive for each time. Beyond that, perhaps stories that are overly familiar.
What makes a manuscript stand out from the rest?
Victoria Barrett: A compelling, engaging narrative voice, for one. Richly drawn characters, for another. Sharp prose. There are numerous ways for a manuscript to leap out at us.
We all hear how subjective this business is. Can you elaborate on that?
Andrew Scott: As for the subjectivity of editors selecting work for publication, it’s good to remember that, as with writing and love, science plays no part. We understand how writers feel when they submit their work to a journal or magazine. One article in The Writer’s Chronicle a few years ago suggested that a piece of writing needs to be submitted 55 times to have a 95% chance of acceptance; but, again, no statistical study can pinpoint how many submissions will guarantee a 100% chance of acceptance. Even though Victoria and I have similar reading tastes, we still disagree about submissions all the time—or, perhaps, we may both recognize that a story has merit, but disagree about its strengths and weaknesses.
Victoria Barrett: But generalizing the publishing of literature as a “subjective business” rings loudly of complaint. It’s valuable for writers, readers, and editors to remember that the publishing of literature in journals is usually an act of service and love. It isn’t much about “business” in the sense that it generates a profit for anyone. Is that service “subjective,” then? Until the robots take over, yes, as are all human endeavors. Let’s work to keep it that way.
What's the best piece of advice you can give our readers about getting published?
Andrew Scott: We asked a longtime friend of ours, a fiction writer with a lot of talent, to send us a specific story that we remembered reading and liking. Instead, he sent us three other submissions, one of which wasn’t finished. The work was not his best, and when we passed on them, we again asked him to consider sending us the story we knew we liked. Instead, he replied that he would send his work to real journals, journals with name recognition, because he would be entering the teaching job market soon. His tone made it clear that we was “slumming” it for us, somehow.
There are a few things to learn from this incident. First, if an editor asks you for something—for a specific story, or for a revision with suggestions, or for anything that might help your work reach a wider audience—pay attention, and don’t dismiss it out of hand. Second, you’ll most likely be left behind if you think web publishing is going away, or that it’s always second-class somehow. As with print journals, books, newspapers, and anything else, you should learn to tell the difference between the good and the not-so-good. We’ve published the work of bestselling authors, major award winners, and brand-new writers. We only care about finding good fiction to share with our readers. Our ultimate advice: write a great story, follow the submission guidelines, and hope for the best.
Let's say I have an intriguing query, a well-developed synopsis and my writing is strong. Why might I still get a rejection?
Victoria Barrett: As an online literary journal, we don’t read queries or synopses. But in general, there are still hundreds of reasons why a piece of strong writing could be rejected by a magazine editor, book editor, or literary agent.
If a writer is rejected and reworks the story, can he/she resubmit it?
Victoria Barrett: Yes, writers can resubmit their work after its been revised substantially. But unless we specifically ask a writer to resubmit, he or she is probably better off submitting that piece to other journals. No writer should completely change his or her work just because one editor made a suggestion or comment. Now, if several editors make the same comment, perhaps the collective wisdom should be heeded.
Would you recognize a resubmission? If you did, would you be able to see it with fresh eyes?
Victoria Barrett: Our record keeping is quite good, but beyond that, yes, we’d most likely recognize a story submitted for the second time. Every so often we might ask an author to consider submitting the piece if it’s revised, but that happens infrequently.
Do you have any parting words of advice?
Andrew Scott: Writers should read every literary journal where they might hope to publish their work. They should also subscribe to them, too, or find other ways to support the publications that shepherd new fiction into the world.
To learn more about Freight Stories, check out:
Freight Stories: http://www.freightstories.com/
Support Freight Stories: http://freightstories.com/Subscribe.html
I really enjoyed this interview. Very thoughtful. I hope readers take advantage and check you all out. Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteGreat interview - so informative. Y'all have some good stoties and a cool site. :)
ReplyDeleteLisa how did you find them?
They found us! Thanks for checking in, Andrew and Victoria.
ReplyDelete