SJ: This is the question that has been keeping me up at night for five months now. I think this is where I’m most likely to eat my words, so I’ll start there. This is where a lot of the experimentation is going to happen. Right now I see us publishing issues every other month, in part because to ensure the quality of every piece of work we do. To be able to pay writers — that’s essential. But I imagine that we’re going to have to experiment and see how readers want to engage our content. Because really, and again, everything to me begins and end with reading, especially if I think of writing as an elevated form of reading anyway. I could have this idea, this conception about, ‘everything other month, we debut a new issue, big fan-fare.’ If that’s not how readers are living, we can’t stay that way.

I think often in literary communities we develop these ideals that are so important to us as the people who created them. You really have to decide, is my ideal more important or is the way people read and live more important? That’s what I err on the side of. Right now, we’ll be publishing a new issue every other month and probably doing something like a new piece of content once a week leading up to, give readers opportunities, interviews with the writers, give it a sense of continuity because the internet moves quickly and has a short memory.

SA: And it has a long memory. There’s an odd duality. For example if in Wag’s Revue, we published something four years ago that now I would not have published, it’s still there. I’m not going to go back and delete it. It’s part of the record, part of the archive. I’ve been thinking about how both are true.

SJ: Oh yeah it’s fascinating. When I speak to students invariably someone asks me for advice that I am in no position to dispense. One of things I’ve told writers, especially younger writers, is to wait to publish their work, to wait before they start submitting it. I was a college sophomore who couldn’t wait to log back into Duotrope to find all sorts of obscure literary journals to send my work to. How unfortunate for me that some of these literary journals decided to publish my early poems and they’re horrible. They’re horrible.