So, in the spirit of opening our doors a little, I'd like to say a thing or two about the reading process, and what happens to your submissions (with particular attention to unsolicited fiction submissions, seeing as that's what I oversee) when you send them to us. Keep in mind that contest submissions are treated differently to preserve their anonymity, and to keep everything fair and ethical.

The first person who sees your submission is probably our intern, who logs submissions, keeping a record of author names and addresses (which we never share), and even the titles of the stories you send us. Your submission at this point has a permanent record, and we can use our database to track it, and to contact you if we need to.

It's difficult to say how many fiction submissions we get in a single reading season. Let's call it a thousand. That's a conservative estimate. As submissions come in from all over the world (from anyone but current or recent students of Purdue University) they are grouped together in packages of four or five. These go out to our reading staff, about ten or so editorial assistants who read stories and make recommendations to me, the fiction editor. These are graduate students, generally in our MFA program, who are interested in seeing how a national magazine is put together, and who I try to give an idea of what I want to publish.

I instruct the readers to look for interesting stories, preferably under twenty pages (yes, it matters), that strike them as confident and enjoyable. Readablity (however they define it) is a definite plus. These interesting, competently written, readable stories get a "yes", and move up to my in box. All others get a "no", and their authors receive one of our neat little green rejection slips.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that a journal publishes anything "publishable" it gets, or that we can recognize certain stories as "the best," and automatically publish those. We're working with a limited number of pages here. The truth is, I get a broad range of stories, about thirty "yeses" in a given semester, and the criteria I have for making my final recommendations to the EIC deal with much, much more than simply artistic merit or "publishability."

So that's part 1. Next time I'll tell you about what specific things I look at, and how EIC Silverman makes her final selections. It's not pretty, but that's the sausage business.