The Light Bulb is a new interview series by The Lumiere Review. This month, our Editor-in-Chief, Jessica Kim, has interviewed editors of various regional, national, and international literary magazines to shed some light on the work they are doing. Many editors are writers themselves, and we hope that these conversations bridge the gap between these two identities by giving editors a chance to discuss their contributions and motivations and writers a chance to learn about the editorial process, preferences, and interests behind these magazines. We believe in amplifying a diverse range of publications and editors in the ever-expanding literary scene through this series.
This time round, we have Jennifer A. Howard, editor-in-chief of Passages North, the annual literary journal sponsored by Northern Michigan University. Passages North has published short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid writing since 1979.
I am enthralled by the work Passages North is doing. How and why did you start editing for Passages North and what has fueled you to continue running the literary magazine?
Passages North is housed at Northern Michigan University, where I teach, so when the previous editor-in-chief, Kate Myers Hanson, retired about ten years ago, I prepared to arm wrestle any other faculty who wanted to compete with me for the gig. I had previously served as the magazine’s managing editor, and I may have voiced my interest quite loudly, so nobody stepped up to take me on, thank goodness. I’ve been fueled by the camaraderie of the office and the joy of reading submissions since then.
Definitely. Is there anything else that distinguishes Passages North from other journals?
It’s difficult to make sweeping proclamations about the magazine, given our large staff that turns over frequently, but I do think we’re committed to publishing work that experiments, that fails to be neatly categorized by genre (even though we divide the submission queue by genre and read in those groups for practical reasons). We love hybrid writing. When a piece is submitted in one category, but we think perhaps readers in another genre (say from poetry to shorts, or from fiction to hybrid) will click with it more, we send it on to the team where we know it’ll get the most love.
To segway on to the next question, what do you look for in submissions? Do you have any advice for writers who submit to your journal?
I’ll speak to the short-short category, since that’s the genre where I spend most of my time. We tend to like shorts that feel more like prose poems than like truncated fiction, stories that are deliberate with language, stories that insist upon being sincere even if they are clever. We love pieces that reach toward other genres, especially sci-fi (robots and rocketships), paragraphs that say the hard thing directly and still beautifully, stories that embrace pop culture with gravity. Queer stories, more of these please! I like a story that makes it obvious the writer is obsessed with something weird and probably doubts that anybody else will connect but forges on with the writing anyway. When that adamant curiosity shines through, they’ve usually got something special.
Could you elaborate on Passages North’s editorial process? How do you and your team determine the acceptance or rejection of a submission?
Our staff is divided into four teams: shorts, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction/hybrids. Every piece in the queue is read by at least two readers (graduate student editors and undergraduate interns) and then the team leaders (in the same order: Olivia Kingery, Tori Rego, Hannah Cajandig-Taylor, and Ian Maxton) sift through the comments to find the pieces that generated the most excitement to bring to our weekly meetings. We’re working online this year, of course, but usually we gather in the Passages office and project those stories, poems, essays up onto the wall and read them aloud and have a conversation. If a piece is generally a yes, we send it onto the faculty genre editor for a final call. Our managing editor Audrey Bauman deftly navigates us all through this process, keeping everybody on track and communicating with authors. We have a big staff, so we can be hard to corral, but as a university journal, part of our mission is to provide a way for students at all levels to be involved with the magazine’s choices, and I do love how our aesthetic shifts a little every year depending on who’s reading with us.
Tell me something about Passages North that can’t be found on your “About” page.
Before we mail out issues in the spring, we have an office doodle day, where all the editors take a day off reading submissions to draw on the envelope containing the issue. Contributors get a special doodle that relates to their published piece drawn by our more visually talented editors, and sometimes even issues going to people we don’t know get a doodle inspired by their street name or city. The unluckiest get my scrawly robot doodles, but nothing goes out with a little individual attention.
That is such a unique and fun-filled initiative, it makes me want to submit just to get a personalized doodle. What has given you joy or fulfillment as an editor? Conversely, what has been the greatest challenge you faced while running Passages North?
I love getting to hype writers. I love that the PN office is a place where undergraduate English majors get to hang out with our very cool MFA and MA students: to get book recommendations, an idea of what grad school looks like, craft advice that comes casually in the form of responses to submissions rather than in a more formal and vulnerable workshop setting. I see informal mentoring happen –in both directions – organically, even in the off-task moments, like when we fill out our Survivor pools or search the internet for memes that will tell us our unicorn names.
Challenges are minimal, to be honest. Of course, I have to spend a lot of time justifying our very tiny budget, but I’m happy to do that if it means we can keep going. As well, I have not yet found the intern or grad student editor who will help me build a Passages North literary geocache network, which is a dream I’ve had for a while: a series of Upper Peninsula geocaches that somehow guide people from poem to poem while trekking the gorgeous landscape up here along Lake Superior. One day the perfect dork will arrive and we’ll figure it out together.
Geocaches for Passages North sound like a superb idea and I’m looking forward to that play in action. I’m very fond of your own flash prose pieces, so I’m wondering which came first for you, editing or writing? Is there a particular role you prioritize? Or do both positions come hand-in-hand?
That’s very kind of you! I was late to writing, actually. I didn’t attend an MFA until my thirties, and even before that I was much more of a reader and an editor than a writer. Even now, I prioritize my work as a teacher, editor, MFA director, thesis director over my own writing. I realize that’s an embarrassing thing to say, and I advise young writers to be selfish about their own time to devote to their creative work, but honestly I think it’s more important and more fulfilling to me to champion other people’s art right now. I do have a collection of Flat Stanley flash prose pieces coming out with the Cupboard Pamphlet next year – little dispatches from a paper boy seeing the scary adult world for the first time, with a focus on true crime television, bisexuality, and gendered violence – and I’m excited about that. But my personal writing ambitions are chapbook-sized; my bigger joys come from making this annual book of amazing writing and encouraging the successes of the students here as they build their own writing lives.
What other literary magazines are your current favorites?
So many, but magazines run by editors who worked with PN when they attended NMU have a special place in my heart: Threadcount, Lammergeier, and Heavy Feather Review.
These three are some wonderful magazines. Finally tell me a fun fact about yourself!
Mosquitoes don’t bite me? I’m hoping this superpower helps me survive the apocalypse, but gosh there are so many other and bigger dangers to worry about.
Jennifer A. Howard teaches and edits Passages North in Michigan’s snowy Upper Peninsula. Her collection of flash sci-fi, You on Mars, was published by The Cupboard Pamphlet, and her hybrid chapbook Flat Stanley reports back to his third-grader will be published in 2021. Her cat Alice serves as another person’s muse; she’s mostly cool with that.
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.