On Readers, Triggers, Access, and Accountability

Where are you now as you read this? What is it you see when you look up and away from the page or your screen?

When we started writing this piece, the world was hidden under three feet of snow. Now there are lawn mowers, days in the 80s, thunderstorms moving across the Mitten State from one lake to the other, and enough greenery that the farmers’ markets have opened. By the time it gets into your hands, we will be past the ripest, most fecund part of the growing season in Michigan. The 2015 Old Farmer’s Almanac will have already arrived with foretellings of the winter to come.

There’s a way in which the production process for a print journal stretches out time, or requires a bit of leapfrogging while we’re waiting for someone else—for the proofer, the person producing page proofs, the printer, or distributor—to do his or her job, or someone is waiting for us, and in that waiting, there’s time to re-think what’s been said, what’s been decided, what’s been shaped. Room for a lot of second-guessing, sure, but room, too, for contemplating, for gazing off into the distance and taking a different angle.

Here among the manuscripts formerly in limbo, and large-scale sticky notes covered with scrawled drafts of table-of-contents pages for upcoming issues, we are polishing and preparing. As they do, our conversations turn to what practices we want to carry forward into the coming production year. We <3 print. But among us are also visual artists, crafters, zinesters and zine collectors, radio hosts, bloggers. We are paying attention to how digital culture influences and re-shapes print culture. As we contemplate going digital with our submissions process, we ask how that will affect access for certain writers and readers—people with limited access to the Internet, for example, or the prisoners who sometimes send their stories and requests for literature and pen pals. We also have a new podcast, Off the Page, started by recently graduated editorial intern Eric Walters, including interviews with Daisy Hernández, Brenda Miller, Matthew Gavin Frank, and soon Julie Marie Wade. We have a growing social media presence.

We love all the parts of the editorial and curatorial process of producing a print journal, but we know that most of that work is invisible to readers who hold only the finished volume in their hands. This was made especially clear at a reading we ran at the Boston AWP, which very quickly became a Q&A about how we choose the pieces we accept for publication and what goes on behind the scenes of a literary journal. We’re interested in making these processes more transparent to writers and readers who don’t have the experience of working on an editorial team, who have really only idealized or anxious images of what happens after they slip the envelope into the mail slot or click send.

We value transparency because we believe in being accountable to writers and readers for how we handle and respond to and ultimately choose what appears in these pages and online. It’s why we have made a practice of sending substantive comments about any essay that the editorial staff has discussed, even when the ultimate decision is not to accept it for publication. If we had something to say about it, we think we should share some part of that with the writer. Communicating with writers about their work means remembering that texts come from people’s experiences and bodies.

Part of what goes on behind the scenes are conversations about the far too few pages we are allotted for each issue and how we decide what to give room to in those pages. Fourth Genre is a venue—a platform—a showcase— for writers, but we think just as carefully about readers’ experiences in those pages. There has been a lot of talk recently, as you’ve no doubt noticed, in both print and electronic media about trigger warnings and the place they have...