"We Want to See Something That Wakes Us Up." Lit Mag Reading Club Q & A with Jenny Molberg, Editor of Pleiades

LMRC Editor interview

Friends, another editor interview is in the books!

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Jenny Molberg, Poetry Editor of Pleiades as part of our Lit Mag Reading Club.

Pleiades: Literature in Context is a literary biannual featuring poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews by authors from around the world. Past contributors include winners of the Nobel, Ruth Lilly, Pulitzer, Bollingen, Prix de la Liberté, and Neustadt Prizes, recipients of Guggenheim, Whiting, National Book Critics Circle, and National Book Awards, and many writers seeing their work in print for the first time.

The journal was founded in 1991 and is based at the University of Central Missouri.

Each issue includes a special themed folio, though not all the work published in each issue is part of the folio. The issue we read was a ginormous beauty-packed double issue, whose centerpiece was the folio themed around “Silences of War: Erasure within Conflict,” guest edited by Hadara Bar-Nadav and Jameelah Lang. Past folio themes have included Korean American Women Poets, Afro-Caribbean and its Diaspora fiction, Contemporary French Fiction, and more.

The guest editors select the pieces for the folio. However, Jenny and her co-editors select the non-folio work. For poetry, Jenny said the journal gets a whopping 4,000 submissions. That is just in one month.

A few pieces are solicited from writers, but the bulk of the material that is published does come from the “slush pile.” How on Earth can a poet make it to the top of the stack of 4,000 submissions? In this discussion, Jenny gave some great insights into what she personally likes to see in a poem, vulnerability and honesty chief among the characteristics.

She also said that, interestingly, it is often the fifth poem in a multi-poem submission that she ends up accepting. Why is that? We pondered some possibilities, ranging from the fact that poets maybe consider the fifth poem to be their weirdest (and thus their riskiest) to the fifth poem being the most uninhibited.

We also went through a few of the poems in this issue and discussed what captivated her as an editor and us as readers. I got a quick education on poetry forms as I had no idea what an abecedarian is, and also had no idea that one of the poems I loved from this issue utilized this form. My god, poetry is fun! Who knew?

(Just kidding. I know all of you knew.)

Additionally, we heard from one contributor to this issue, Jackie Craven, whose poem appeared in the war-themed folio. She talked about her process submitting to Pleiades, how submitting to the theme issue helped her tease out certain ideas within the poem and how changing the title helped too. We asked Jackie to read her poem to us, and she did, which was a treat for all.

Pleiades will re-open for submissions in June.

What should writers look for in their work before sending it to this market? What has Jenny been seeing a lot of lately in submissions? What advice does Jenny have for people interested in starting their own lit mags? And what keeps Jenny doing this work in the midst of other life demands? (Spoiler alert: The answer is love.)

For more great answers, you will have to watch the video!

This one is for Lit Mag Reading Club members only. You can become a member any time by simply subscribing.

To everyone who came out to join the conversation today, thank you! Your faces are the sugar in my lemonade!

And, of course, thank you to Jenny for taking the time to take us inside the making of another lovely little magazine.

Happy viewing!