Lit Mag Reading Club Chat: Iowa Review, Summer 2022
Q & A with Lynne Nugent, Editor of The Iowa Review
TGIF, my dear readers. Another editor interview is in the books!
This one was part of our Lit Mag Reading Club discussion. If you haven’t yet joined the club, do it! We had such a great time today hearing from Lynne Nugent, Editor of The Iowa Review, as well as three contributors to the summer issue.
About the magazine:
The Iowa Review's mission is to provide an expertly curated, carefully edited, and beautifully designed print and online space for the voices of writers of every kind of diversity to move and enlighten us; to use the experience gained from fifty-plus years of continuous publication and our connection to the University of Iowa as a home for creative writing to validate, amplify, and encourage those voices; and to serve the reading public by presenting the best contemporary writing in short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
In today’s conversation, Lynne related her history with the journal, where she started as a volunteer reader many years ago. She worked her way up to Managing Editor when the position opened. In 2021 she became Editor. Today, Lynne took the time to explain each of these roles, who does what, and how the magazine’s “train runs on time.”
She also explained the editorial process. This journal does not solicit work. All the pieces published in the magazine come through Submittable. The work is then read by volunteer readers, with oversight from graduate students at The University of Iowa.
Given that the first readers are students, and knowing what I know about how many older writers feel when submitting work to lit mags, I asked Lynne how they ensure that older readers aren’t excluded from the pages. Lynne said she gets this question a lot. As you will see in the interview, her answer was in full keeping with her overall demeanor. That is, it was thoughtful, kind, and wonderfully, warmly encouraging.
In addition to hearing from Lynne about how the magazine operates and what they like to publish, we got to hear from summer 2022 contributors Lisa Ahmad, Nicki Ervice and Serkan Görkemli. It was a real delight to hear their experiences. Each writer tackles the process of submissions in a different way, from the very targeted approach of submitting to a few lit mags at a time after carefully reading the issues to a more general process of submitting to over twenty places at once. They each spoke about why they chose Iowa Review in particular, and what the editorial process was like once their work was accepted.
On a craft level, something I also found interesting was hearing how their work in this magazine took shape. One writer wrote the first draft of the essay that appears here ten years ago. She put it down, picked it up, put it down, picked it up…no doubt a process familiar to us all. Another writer whose story is published here wrote five different versions and seventeen iterations before sending it out. (At this moment in the interview, I nearly wept in recognition and solidarity. Man, writing is hard work!)
Of course, there was so much more we talked about. What can writers focus on in particular to better their chances at this magazine? Are any topics off limits here? And what keeps Lynne at this work of lit mag editing day in and day out?
For all that and more, you’ll have to watch the video!
Iowa Review will open again for general submissions in late summer or early fall. They publish three issues per year and receive about 7,000 submissions per reading period.
To everyone who came out today to participate, thank you for tuning in! Your faces put the spring in my step and the wind in my wings!
And of course, thank you to Lynne Nugent and to the contributors of Iowa Review Summer 2022, for taking the time to take us behind the scenes of another lovely little lit mag.
Happy viewing!
This one is for members of our Lit Mag Reading Club only. You can join any time (and help sustain Lit Mag News) by becoming a subscriber.