Editor’s Notes
Rent from DeepDyve- Editor’s Notes
It’s been a busy season here at River Teeth, what with selecting Rosemary McGuire’s Out West: A Season on Water as the new River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize winner from among nearly two hundred book-length entries. Then, too, we have just put our seventeenth year of the journal to bed with the final selections to issue 17.2. Each year, we receive some 2,500 submissions to the journal and another two hundred or so full-length book submissions.
We often are asked how we manage to choose from so many submissions from so many fine writers. In an effort to answer that question both for ourselves and our readers, the two founding editors of River Teeth chewed over the topic in a dialogue presented here in slightly edited form:
I would say that the first thing we look for is something urgent. We aren’t interested in publishing an also-ran piece by a good writer. We want to publish something that a writer was born to write. We want something that is the most important thing he or she has ever written; we want to prize the fact that they’ve trusted this thing to us. Even if that’s not strictly the case, it has to read with that sort of urgency. [End Page vii]
Beautiful language isn’t enough, though it certainly helps. And it’s nice if the material is fresh, something that we maybe haven’t heard before. But that’s not definitive either. Something about the writing has to be vertical, has to feel like something has been ripped open viscerally. And I’m not really talking about subject matter. It doesn’t have to be traumatic; it can be quiet and beautiful. But it has to mean something important, and the writer has to communicate that to us.
I think we read a lot of manuscripts in which the things that happen clearly mean a lot to the writer, but maybe the writer hasn’t quite yet found a way to make it mean a lot to the reader. The writer often needs to go deeper and to make the work more compelling. But aren’t we throwing around a lot of adjectives? Bottom line: What do we really mean when we say the manuscript must be urgent?
It starts, for sure, with giving a moment or a passage a purpose beyond itself. And it does mean searching for the perfect word, the perfect sentence, and the perfect scene to convey that purpose. Something has to reach out beyond.
We’re getting closer to the nugget here, but I get the sense we are still talking sort of generally.
When that happens, you have to use an example. Take the essay “Colander,” by Lee Martin, which opens his Such a Life. We didn’t publish this particular essay or the book it appears in, but you know we would have done anything to get it. Now that’s the way to open a book. His opening would have made our journal or our book contest cut, for sure.
OK, why?
OK, so he’s a little boy and he answers a phone call for his grandmother, and he hears his Aunt Anna say: “Lee, tell Grandma to bring her calendar.” And the writer here finds a way to take that innocuous [End Page viii] moment, something that could happen any day, and to bring it to us with a precision that captures true emotion, that is not sentimental. It turns out that it was his mother on the phone and that she had asked Lee for a colander, not a calendar, and that he had not recognized his own mother’s voice. It’s a moment where Lee’s own family history breaks into the text. So he can imbue that moment with forty years of life experience. It’s what makes it pulsate with meaning.
Yes. And later in the essay, the adult narrator who was once the boy confesses: “Sitting here now, I try to recall my mother...
