Rick Rofihe, Editor of Anderbo
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Rick Rofihe, editor of Anderbo. Founded in 2005, this online journal based in New York City sponsors several annual contests: the Anderbo Self-Published Book Award, a $500 prize for the first 40 pages of a self-published fiction or nonfiction book (deadline October 25); the Anderbo Poetry Prize, a $500 prize for unpublished poems (deadline December 15); the biennial Mercer Street Books Fiction Prize, which gives $500 and publication for a novel excerpt (next deadline in Fall 2013); and the RRofihe Trophy, a free contest awarding $500 for an unpublished short story (deadline December 31).
Rick Rofihe is the author of Father Must, a collection of short stories published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Editor: Jonathan Galassi; Agent: Gail Hochman). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, Open City, Unsaid, Swink, and online at fictionaut, slushpilemag and epiphanyzine. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, SPY, and online at mrbellersneighborhood. A recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, he has taught MFA writing at Columbia University, and currently teaches privately in New York City. He is a member of PEN; was an advisor to the Vilcek Foundation for their 2011 prizes in the field of literature; and the judge of the annual RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest for Open City Magazine. Rick is the founding publisher of Anderbo Books (1971) and the founding publisher and, along with Senior Editor June Eding and Contributing Editor Wayne Conti, one of three founding editors of anderbo.com (2005). Read Rick's e-book, BOYS who DO the BOP: 9 New Yorker Stories by Rick Rofihe, free at Anderbo.
Q: What does the name "Anderbo" mean, and how does that relate to the journal's aesthetic?
A: When I started the first Anderbo—Anderbo Books—in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1971, it was my second publishing company. There were some problems choosing a name for the first—Straw Books—so I decided to "invent" a new word, like "Kleenex", you know. Because my thinking was, why "ruin" a word? Like, "mustang" used to be a horse, but now it's a Ford car. In any case, when the e-version of Anderbo was conceived in New York City in 2005, I had wanted to call it "Virtue"—as in "Virtue is its own reward"—but that domain-name was already taken. Then, after Googling became available I did at some point learn that there's a very sparsely-populated area in Sweden called Anderbo, and there are even a few people there and also in America who have it for a family name.
Q: What makes Anderbo—and its contests—different from other publications?
A: To date, over 99% of whatever we've published on Anderbo is still up on the site, and, by Googling, it's easy to find specific pieces. We don't archive; we just keep adding new work on. Also, all our contest-winners over the years are locatable from the anderbo.com home page: the 2011 Anderbo Poetry Prize winner, Susan Cohen, for example, and yourself, Jendi, our 2010 winning poet. And whoever the winner of our new 2012 Anderbo Self-Published Book Award is, he or she will have included in the announcement a link by which the winning book can be purchased.
Q: How is the website funded? What are the pros and cons of that business model?
A: Mastercard, Visa, and American Express: no pros, all cons.
Q: How does the online format affect your choice of work to publish? Does the screen, as opposed to the printed page, favor certain styles, topics, or length of poems and prose pieces?
A: I certainly know that in a practical sense the paper book or journal or magazine or newspaper is already as obsolete as the vinyl LP-record is, especially when it comes to the time and costs devoted to their manufacture and, especially, distribution. I was born into an era in which recorded music still came on heavy 78 rpm discs; now even my compact discs are passe. When Kindles and iPads first started popping up around me I figured their users to be odd show-offs, parading their electronic affectations. I still don't own an e-reader, but soon I'll be the one appearing even to myself quite strange, cluttering up my environment by reading hard-copy while at the very same time publishing an e-journal like Anderbo, which anyone can read for free anywhere, anytime, on any computer, smart-phone or tablet—no paper required. As for content, probably shorter is better, but that might have as much to do with how much time to read that modern readers actually have, not so much with in which medium they're reading.
Q: Anderbo's minimalist interface is adaptable to different browsers and mobile devices. New work is simply added in chronological order to a single-page list of links in that genre. How have you decided to balance elegance of design versus usability? Are there any plans to make the site more searchable (e.g. by author's name, year, and name of contest won, etc.)? Or do you like the serendipity of readers discovering new work at random?
A: Because Anderbo does not have proper funding, it's always "a work in progress". But readers seem to really like its simplicity; every two minutes a visitor will come to Anderbo and hit 5 or 6 times—that comes to well over a million hits a year; more than one of our pieces have been read over 100,000 times.
Q: As your 2010 poetry winner, I can attest that you promote your winners well through email press releases, Twitter updates, and comments on other writing blogs. Are there other PR strategies that you or your authors particularly recommend?
A: Recently we published a short story called "Clarins" by Courtney Maum. Clarins is an international beauty-products firm, and it wasn't beyond me to put a link to the story on various Facebook pages they maintain. As for stories I especially recommend, they would include "Dings" by Wayne Conti; "Welcome to the Hamptons" by Thomas Cregan; "How James Franco Became My Boyfriend" () by Anderbo Contributing Editor Carolyn Silveira; and a novella, "We Were There and Now We're Here" by Kayla Soyer-Stein.
Q: Have the winners of your book excerpt prizes gone on to place their manuscripts with publishers? How has Anderbo facilitated that?
A: We have our ways of trying to help, but that doesn't mean we have our ways of succeeding in helping. (Yet.)
Q: Tell me about the recent winners of your contests. What made them stand out? How are they representative of what you're looking for at Anderbo?
A: I personally judged only the the first poetry one we held, back in 2006—its winner was Vera Long, who is a woman from Stillwater, Oklahoma born in 1924. The 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007 Anderbo Poetry Prize contest results are all on the Anderbo home page. Our other current contest is the 2012 Anderbo Self-Published Book Award, which I judge, with an October 15th deadline. Also on the Anderbo home page are the results for our past two No-Fee Novel Contests, and our recent Anderbo Creative Nonfiction Prize.
Q: Your creative nonfiction section is captioned "fact" in scare-quotes. How do you feel about the blurring of the line between fiction and memoir that seems so prevalent nowadays? Does a piece labeled nonfiction earn the reader's trust differently (perhaps too easily?) compared to fiction?
A: I'm not sure—and while I've never actually met our Anderbo "fact" and Features Editor, Stacy Muszynski, who lives in Texas, in person, I do know that she's been extremely sharp for us in the nonfiction, memoir, and essay areas, that's for sure. One of Anderbo's recent "facts" which is a great short read, is "My Sister Bags Groceries" by Alexandra Tanner.
Q: Tell me about some authors you've discovered on Anderbo and why they should be more widely read.
A: I feel very strongly about the writing talents of Amy Bonnaffons, whose Anderbo story "The Wrong Heaven" had been the 2010 Open City Magazine RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest winner and I know that longtime Open City Magazine Editor Joanna Yas feels the same way. The contest runner-up that year was the story "Ghosts" by Mac Barrett, who's certainly a writer to watch. And indeed the 2011 RRofihe Trophy runner-up story "Monologue" by Juliet Grames was, I know, thought of by Contest Assistant and Anderbo Managing Editor Carolyn Wilsey as a unique and compelling work.
Q: Over the past 8 or so years, you've either judged or administrated contests in the fields of short fiction, novel-manuscripts, poetry, creative nonfiction, and, most recently, you're involved with one in the field of self-published books. But when you were an aspiring writer, did you enter a lot of contests?
A: Strangely, because of the factor of paying entry fees, as a writer I had always been "anti-contest" up until 2004, when I started the RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest for Open City Magazine. The contest, which required a an entry-fee of $10, received about 200 entries, and a winner was chosen, who received a $500 prize and was published in Open City, with the rest of the entry-fee money received going toward advertising and other contest-administration costs. Some years later I asked Open City Editor Joanna Yas how many unsolicited story-manuscripts (which required no reading-fee) the Open City staff would have to go through to find and publish just one. She estimated about 1,200, and remarked that she always let story-writers know that their odds for publication in Open City were better for them through the contest than via a straight submission. And I came believe this to be true throughout the lit-journal-contest universe.
Q: Any other advice for contestants?
A: My advice is: ENTER! It may seem like a long shot, but your odds of winning or at least having your work published are actually much, much, better than through a regular submission.
Read other interviews with Rick on these websites:
http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/2010/02/six-questions-for-six-questions-for.html
https://duotrope.com/interview.aspx?id=724
http://sonorareview.com/editor-interview-rick-rofihe/
http://fictionaut.com/blog/2009/11/06/nicolle-asks-rick-rofihe-for-advice-on-behalf-of-all-writers-in-the-universe/
Fall 2012
