Editor's Note

One of the hallmarks for excellence that the Association of Writers and Writing Programs asks MFA programs to follow is to have their students engage with a literary magazine—and here’s the important part—in a meaningful way. I’ve heard writers complain—maybe I’ve done the same?— about literary journals whose screening readers are inexperienced grad students. The assumption, in part, at least, is that they usually choose a piece because they recognize the writer’s name or that anything exceptional won’t be recognized as such because it’s, well, exceptional, and not like the majority of work coming through Submittable. Which, while good, often risks very little.

While a lot of literary magazines name a pet student to serve in the highly coveted role of genre editor, every one of our students works in some way with the magazine, and not simply for one semester. Our MFA students, each and every, work with Good River in all four core semesters, and not in isolation. We ask them all to work in small editorial groups and to come together after reading submissions to discuss which pieces they’d like to recommend for publication to the editorial staff. In this way, our students have to decide for themselves what work they love and, sadly, what work they should pass on. And if they pass on that work, they need to articulate at least for themselves why. Often, that work we send back, though promising, isn’t quite ready for the magazine; perhaps it hasn’t quite been made completely whole yet—one of the frequent reasons for saying no to work. That doesn’t mean with another pass or two it won’t be whole and find future publication; it only means it’s not quite there for us yet. Sometimes, we pass on work because it doesn’t seem to say anything new for the reader, meaning, I suppose, we’ve already read whatever it’s saying. Sometimes, and this is often the hardest work to send back, we’ve recently said yes to something similar.

So while we do use Good River as a teaching tool for our MFA students, our readers aren’t working in isolation, sending work back simply because it doesn’t appeal to that one screener. And we hope we’re helping to develop not only great writers but also great editors who will go out to work on their own magazines in the future. Further, one of our very experienced genre editors on the masthead also reads every piece of work submitted, often agreeing with the student editorial groups—but not always.

Admittedly, like other literary magazines, we do send back a rather bland no-thank-you note to writers whose work we ultimately reject, but it’s important to all of us working on Good River that submitting writers understand that we have treated their work according to the Writer’s Golden Rule, which asks us to treat other writers’ work with same respect that we’d like ours to be treated. And that if we send your work back, that doesn’t mean we think it will never find publication; only that it’s—ugh, sorry for this phrase—“not right for us.” And if you’ve received that note from us, you know now how our process works, so we hope you’ll send something again to us and soon.

Kathleen Driskell

Editor in Chief

Good River Review