A conversation with The Journal’s Managing Editor, Margaret Cipriano, and Advisory Editor, Kathy Fagan.

How did The Journal begin? (KF): The Journal, originally titled The Ohio Journal, was founded in 1973 by William Allen of the English Department at The Ohio State University, and has been published continuously ever since. The late David Citino, OSU’s one and only Poet Laureate, took over the editorship in the ’80s, followed by Michelle Herman and I as coeditors in 1990, sharing prose and poetry duties, respectively. For the next twenty years, The Journal grew into the magazine we know today—seeking out diverse work from both emerging and established writers—with only minor physical changes, until the MFA students gained full editorial control, implementing online issues and including visual art as well as book reviews. One of the things I am personally proudest of is how much we’ve always done with so little. The Journal is given zero operational support from OSU; all of its staff, students, and faculty, volunteer, and our contributors, who are the most excellent writers anywhere, are paid nothing in return for their stunning work.

Describe your decision-making process for accepting work. (MC): Our process, like most literary magazines, is a tiered one wherein a group of readers (MFAs, alumni, current literary publishing graduate and undergraduate students) read through our submissions weekly before making the decision to pass those pieces onto the Associate Editors. From there, those editors can reject pieces or send pieces on for further consideration to the genre editors, who make the final call on what is published in the magazine. We find this process helps to retain some anonymity (we rarely look at bios, and try to keep solicitations to a few writers per issue) and champion diversity. Our readers are interested in a variety of voices and we trust that they approach the process with the utmost integrity and respect for The Journal’s goals of creating a wide-ranging, exciting reading experience.

If your magazine has an ethos, what is it? The spirit of The Journal is one of change. We’re not interested in publishing only well-established writers, we’re not interested in a certain kind of poem or story—we love things that surprise us, that make us look at the world (or our assumptions) again with new eyes. We place importance on finding and supporting new writers not only in the magazine itself but also through our prizes: The Charles B. Wheeler Prize for Poetry and the Non/Fiction Prize that offer publication through OSU Press. Additionally, AWP 2016 was one of our first reading series we’ve hosted (in conjunction with other Midwest magazines) in quite some time, and it was such a pleasure to meet and champion our writers who have had incredible success after their publication.

After The Journal, what’s your favorite writing venue? Speaking for myself, right now one of my favorite writing venues is DIAGRAM. I love how they combine visual and textual work while taking care to de-emphasize ego—it’s a place that puts out pieces I’ve never seen before, and that always attracts me.

What is your plan for the future of the magazine? In terms of The Journal’s future, we’re interested in making our website more accessible for all users, in pushing ourselves to cultivate daring, innovative work, and in attending more writing conferences in order to meet with new communities and share our love of writing.

Website: http://thejournalmag.org