A Conversation with Adam Clay, Editor

How did Typo begin? Matt Henriksen and I started Typo in 2003 when we were both graduate students at the University of Arkansas, which didn’t have a literary journal at the time. We found ourselves very interested in the idea of online publishing, but there were few online journals at the time, and to be honest they didn’t receive the same notoriety that a print journal received. As graduate students, we didn’t have a lot of extra cash so going online was a cost effective move and allowed us to reach a wider audience than a small, independent journal might have. We solicited work for the first issue and published it in May that year. From there, we opened submissions for our second issue, and we’ve been constantly amazed by the work we receive from published and emerging writers alike.

Describe your decision-making process for selecting work to publish.
Matt and I have a fairly simple process—one of us will read submissions and flag them as being of interest or not. From there, we might have some dialogue, but we’ve always had veto power when it comes to selecting work. If Matt or I don’t want to accept a poem, we usually reject it. It’s nice to have a two-person editorial team because it makes the decision process fairly straightforward. We’ve also been working together for thirteen years so we know each other’s editorial sense pretty well at this point.

If your magazine has an ethos, what is it? Our ethos is that we don’t have an ethos—we’re open to any possibilities and all types of poems. At the end of the day, I don’t want someone to be able to read a poem and say: “That’s a poem that belongs in Typo.” We have a very open and liberal view to the editorial process.

After Typo, what’s your favorite writing venue? There are so many amazing online journals today—I still subscribe to quite a few print journals, but I find so much to admire in online publications. For one, many of them are independent ventures like Typo, started by individuals without institutional support—they’re running on love and devotion to the art. Diagram has long been one of my favorites (and it’s been around for a long time). In terms of other online journals, I also like Phantom, Pinwheel, and Waxwing. In terms of print journals: Forklift, Ohio; Conduit; and Denver Quarterly come to mind.

What is your plan for the future of the magazine? As with not really having a plan, per se, when we started Typo, I don’t think we really have concrete plans for its future. Keeping things open-ended has allowed us to publish some thematic issues (for example, Jennifer Bartlett put together an issue on non-normative bodies for our 25^th issue—we’ve also published portfolios of contemporary poetry in translation from the Netherlands, Venezuela, and Sweden). We tend to publish two issues a year, but occasionally someone approaches us with an idea for an issue or sometimes we see a theme emerging from unsolicited work. All of this is to say that we’ll probably keep doing what we’ve been doing and make room for new projects as they come up. It’s nice to step back sometimes and lend our platform to other editors for theme-based issues. Matt and I have always had a shared vision for the future of the journal, and it’s something we’ll continue to have for as long as the journal exists.

Website: http://typomag.com/