WWS organizer Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera recently introduced me to Jennifer Acker, Editor in Chief of The Common. So much more than a literary journal, “The Common is a literary organization whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place.” Besides their online publishing and two annual print issues, The Common also hosts readings and conversations, and partners with schools, libraries and museums to promote literary engagement and create community. We are obviously all about that here at Women Who Submit. They also do leadership development with the next generation by hosting a literary publishing internship and participating in classroom programs.
From The Common’s website: “The Common is an award-winning print and digital literary journal published biannually, in the fall and spring. Issues of The Common include short stories, essays, poems, and images that embody a strong sense of place. The Common Online publishes original content four times per week, including book reviews, interviews, personal essays, short dispatches, poetry, contributor podcasts and recordings, and multimedia features.
Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, the magazine is supported in part by Amherst College and The Common Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The Common also runs the Literary Publishing Internship Program at Amherst College, mentoring students in all aspects of literary publishing, and hosts public programming regularly.”
After reading Jennifer’s answers, I have no doubt that many WWS members will be inspired to submit their writing to The Common.
How did you come to be involved with The Common and how long have you been EIC?
The Common is my baby. After working in both magazine and book publishing for most of my twenties, I came to a juncture in my personal and professional life when it seemed to make sense to create my own magazine. I mean, a magazine is such an optimistic and unpredictable endeavor I can’t say that it actually made sense, but I was inspired to try to create something that I didn’t see already existing in the literary magazine ecosystem: a beautifully made journal focusing broadly on sense of place. I realized that these questions of place were increasingly important to me: What does it mean to be from somewhere? How do the cultures and landscapes we grow up in shape us? What does “home” mean? What does “place” mean in our increasingly mobile and digital universe? So I am the magazine’s original EIC, and I’m very proud that next year we will celebrate 10 years.
The Common publishes works that embody particular times and places—literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here. What guidance would you give to writers who are not sure if their writing falls within that heading?
The best way to get the feel of a magazine and what the editors like is to read it. No amount of reading or talking about the magazine is a replacement for reading its pages. First a writer needs to know if a magazine suits their aesthetic – do you actually like what this magazine publishes? And then you develop a sense of whether your own writing might be a good fit.
I know that you feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world? How do you ensure that representation and equity in what you publish, and make sure that the same demographics aren’t submitting all the time? Do you solicit work, conduct outreach, etc?
Nearly all of the work we publish in our special portfolios — Puerto Rico, Syria, Anglophone poetry from South Africa etc. – is solicited, and always in partnership with, or on recommendations from, writers from those communities. We are also constantly engaged in outreach with writers’ organizations that represent a wide variety of demographics (VONA, Kundiman, Asian American Writers Workshop, etc). We want to get The Common before as many populations of writers as possible so that we get the best and most diverse submissions. This past year, 63% of our writers self identified as writers of color.
You have a novel coming out this year, yes? We’d love to hear about how you balance being an editor in chief with being a writer? Does one inform the other?
Yes, the novel that I worked on for 10 years, The Limits of the World came out in April! The novel is very much a product of my own editorial journey – I started The Common, the novel, and graduate school all in the same year, and had to figure out how to focus first on one and then the other over the last decade, trying to keep all the balls in the air. While I was writing and revising the book, I was also engaging in these wonderful editorial exchanges with my authors in The Common, and I learned so much, especially about structure. I learned to see the structure of a story or essay as if with x-ray vision. That’s my superpower. Of course, as an editor, you quickly realize that nearly every piece of advice you give to an author could also be applied to your own writing.
I’m interested in the collaborations with schools, museums, and libraries that The Common has done. What is a recent or upcoming collaboration that you are excited about or that you feel really speaks to the heart of The Common’s mission?
The Common in the Classroom has become one of our signature collaborative programs. We were hearing from teachers that they wanted to get away from staid anthologies and offer their students diverse, contemporary literature from around the globe. So we created this program that offers discounted subscriptions to students and free resources for teachers, so that educators can teach the issues we publish and introduce their students to work by writers who share their backgrounds and their concerns, as well as introduce students to voices they’ve never heard before. We work with teachers at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate level in a variety of classroom settings – creative writing, place-based writing, freshman literature surveys, Latinx literature, world literature, Arabic literature, Middle Eastern Studies etc. Teachers are so busy and so important; this is our way of supporting them and their students.