Susan Terris & CB Follett, Editors of RUNES, A Review of Poetry
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Susan Terris and CB Follett, editors of the literary journal RUNES, A Review of Poetry. Each annual issue of RUNES has a one-word theme that the 100 featured authors interpret in a wide variety of literal, metaphorical and suggestive ways. Established in 2000, the magazine has published well-known authors such as Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, and Richard Wilbur, as well as many emerging writers. Past themes have been Gateway, Mystery, Memory, Storm, and Signals. The theme for their 2006 issue will be "Hearth", and the 2007 theme will be "Connections".
RUNES reads submissions April 1 through May 31 only. This is also the entry period for their annual competition, which offers a top prize of $1,000 and three runner-up prizes of $100. The fee is $15 for the first 1-3 poems, $3 for each additional poem, which includes a copy of the prizewinners' issue. As with regular submissions, contest entries should relate to the theme of "Hearth". The 2006 final judge is Mark Doty.
The editors say: "We believe RUNES has everything a good book should have: comedy, tragedy, satire, drama. There are poems of love, sorrow, pain, laughter. Poems about nature, children, men and women, birth and death. There are poems that rhyme and ones in free verse, lyric poems and narrative ones. A poem by Jane Hirshfield, first published in RUNES, was printed in Best American Poetry 2005.
"Our taste is eclectic, but we are looking for excellence in craft. We want poems that have passion, originality, and conviction. We are looking for narrative and lyric poetry that is well-crafted and has something surprising to say. We receive about 7,000 poems a year but accept only 100. Press run is 1,500 for 900 subscribers of which 35 are libraries.
"No one can write in a vacuum. If you want to write good poetry, you must read good poetry—classic as well as modern work."
Susan Terris' book Natural Defenses was published by Marsh Hawk Press in 2004. Fire is Favorable to the Dreamer was published by Arctos Press in 2003. Other recent books of poetry are: Poetic License (Adastra Press, 2004), Curved Space (La Jolla Poets Press, 1998), Eye of the Holocaust (Arctos Press, 1999), and Angels of Bataan (Pudding House Publications, 1999). She has won many prizes for her work from publications such as The Iowa Review, Southern California Anthology, Missouri Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her journal publications also include Field, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Calyx, Shenandoah and Nimrod. Angels of Bataan (Ms. Terris' book about Army & Navy nurses interred in the Philippines during WWII) has been expanded and will be presented off-Broadway later this year. It is being produced and directed by Elizabeth Swados, who has also written the original music for the show.
CB ('Lyn) Follett, publisher and owner of Arctos Press, has an impressive list of publishing credits as well. In addition to being published widely in journals and anthologies, Follett won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award for her second book At the Turning of the Light (Salmon Run Press). Additional honors include winning the Portland Poetry Festival Competition, The New Press Literary Quarterly Prize and The Northwoods Journal National Poetry Competition; receiving a grant from the Marin Arts Council; being runner-up in several prominent competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of America; and receiving Pushcart Prize nominations for several of her poems. Her latest book, Hold and Release, is forthcoming from Time Being Books. In addition, Follett was a potter and is a visual artist with works in many national and international collections. "I switched from clay to acrylic/mixed media several years ago," she says. "I like to incorporate words and sayings, sometimes even poems, into the work. I like the way the writing becomes part of the piece and often gives it strength by the flow of letters."
Q: How do you choose the theme for each issue? Tell us about your sources of inspiration; does it start with a visual image, a poem you've read, or something else entirely? Have you ever started with a poem you wanted to publish, and selected the issue's theme based on that?
A: RUNES is named for an early form of Nordic writing. The runes stones, though, are most familiar now as divination symbols. We decided to take our annual themes from particular runes stones that seem to provide for a wide interpretation. We plan two, or even three, years ahead, thinking about the order of the themes, so there's a big change in focus from year to year. We don't have the luxury of reacting to poems from one year and adjusting our themes then. Updates for places like Poet's Market, The Directory of Poetry Publishers and PEN's Grants and Awards are due several months before we've finished selecting work for an edition of RUNES.
A rune is also a poem.
Q: Which of your past themes generated the best response from entrants (most submissions, highest quality of submissions), and which ones proved to be more of a challenge? What have you learned from the response to each theme?
A: "Gateway", "Mystery" and "Memory" seem to have been the "easiest" themes for the submitting poets. We thought both "Storm" and "Signals" would be harder. We didn't want to publish an issue all about rain and snow or one about traffic signals. Much to our surprise, however, a flood of innovative poems came in for each of these editions. The theme for 2006 is "Hearth"; and we're predicting this will be easy, because it's so broad.
Q: As sponsor of a contest whose theme (War) is the same every year, Winning Writers has worked to build connections with readers interested in military and political issues. I would imagine this kind of targeted publicity would be harder for contests with changing themes. Do you vary your publicity outlets or promotional materials for the contest based on the likely audience for each theme? Do you often get entries on a previous year's theme by mistake?
A: We love the changing themes and changing focus of each issue of RUNES. Having different themes makes each edition different. We also put the publication together so that (we hope) each poem relates to the one before it and the one after it. This way our themed volumes each tell a story—each year a different story.
No, we almost never get poetry for the prior year's theme; and we don't vary our publicity outlets or materials. Poets seem to be smart and able to adjust easily.
Q: The impression I got from back issues of RUNES was that many of the wonderful poems in those issues reflected the overall theme in enigmatic or offbeat ways. Is it more common for you to reject poems because they are too tangentially related to the theme, or because they approach it in too obvious and literal a fashion? Any advice for poets seeking a happy medium?
A: No poem is too literal for a theme if the poem is outstanding. But, for "Signals", once we have fallen in love with a poem with a traffic light in it, we didn't want to duplicate it. For "Memory", one poem about a child being bitten by a rat was all we could use. We usually accept more poems about birds than we really mean to. Birds seem to fit into almost any theme; and poets write a lot of poems about them—both literal and metaphorical ones.
We're always looking for strong metaphorical interpretations of our themes: the "Storm" of butterflies or of a marriage; the "Signal" of a carving in a tree trunk or of a cut green bean vomited after chemotherapy. But, that much said, we always want some poems that hit the theme directly. We wanted a car poem for "Memory" and a literal detective poem for "Mystery". We will probably want a poem about a fire in a hearth for "Hearth"—but only one, an outstanding one.
We're always open to an unusual approach to our theme; and we do sometimes stretch the theme to fit a poem we feel we must have for RUNES. "Hearth" will have a poem about a portrait of the Madonna. How did we rationalize that one? Well, the poem has mention of a structure in it; and we thought about how many homes have reproductions of this sort of portrait hanging in the living room over or near the fireplace. Convoluted? Perhaps, but that's what happens when some poem really speaks to both of us.
What does give us problems, however, is the poet who sends us a whole group of poems that seems to have nothing to do with our theme. Some even address this in their cover letters, saying, "I don't like themes." But we do like them. We enjoy sending our own poems out to magazines and anthologies that are themed; and that's part of the reason why we use themes in what we publish.
Q: In the afterword to your 2001 "Mystery" issue, you said that you view the annual issue as an anthology, and try to select poems that are not only good individually but also work well together with others in the volume. Has that ever been the deciding factor in rejecting a poem that otherwise met your standards? Do other literary journals consider this criterion, as far as you know?
A: Maybe we didn't express ourselves as well as we should have. We never select a poem because we think it will work well with others. We're more likely to select some purely lyric pieces or experimental ones for variety within a collection. We try not to include poems that seem to duplicate one another. We felt there were only so many "death of a parent" poems we could use for "Memory." So sometimes wonderful poems are not accepted, because we already have poems that seem to us (subjective, always subjective) better takes on the specific material (i.e. a better car poem, a better literal snowstorm poem or, once we have a metaphorical storm of butterflies, we may have to say no to a slightly less-compelling poem about a storm of moths).
We're not sure how other publications select poems. We usually take the 7,000 poems and winnow them down to about 350 we think are all superior. The reduction from the 300 to the 100 we publish every year is very difficult and painful. We are then, once we've chosen, often prone to wring our hands over favorites that didn't quite make it.
Q: What proportion of your 7,000 annual submissions are contest entries? What proportion of published poems come from the contest? Do you have quotas for contest and non-contest acceptances (e.g. "35 contest poems and 65 regular submissions"), or do all poems compete together for the 100 slots? What do you see as the pros and cons of the policy you've chosen?
A: About 3,000 poems come in as contest entries (many poets submit 6 or more poems each), but we have no quota or formula for what actually gets in to RUNES. It varies from issue to issue. All poems have an equal chance of being selected. Even looking back at "Signals", our most recent edition, we can't remember which were competition poems and which were regular submission. We focus on the quality of the poem, not on how it came in to us. The policy we've chosen seems to work well for us.
Q: Who initially screens submissions to RUNES? Do they know whether a submission is a contest entry?
A: The two of us do all the reading and rereading. Every poem submitted gets read at least once by each of us. We have no other screeners, no staff.
Q: I notice on your guidelines page that entrants should put their name on regular submissions, but not on contest entries. What is the reason for the difference, and how does that affect the choice of poems for publication? How can prospective entrants decide whether it would be more advantageous to have their work read anonymously?
A: We ask for no names on contest entries so we don't have to start masking them before the poems are sent on to our competition judge. We don't feel there's an advantage one way or another and hope the submitting poets won't either. "Signals" has 56 poems by poets neither of us has ever met. We like to think we always choose the poem not the poet.
Q: How many entries are forwarded to the guest judge?
A: It varies according to how many the judge requests. Judges have reviewed as many as 350 poems or as few as 60.
Q: Has your guest judge ever been unable to choose a winner, or asked to see additional entries that didn't make it to finalist status?
A: No.
Q: Is there a style of poetry that is less likely to find a home in RUNES? Are there styles, topics and perspectives that you'd like to see more often?
A: We try to include a broad range of poetic styles and strategies. We like to think we are open to any quality work—regardless of style. We publish lyric poetry, narrative poetry, political poetry, nature poetry, concrete poems, and some experimental work. We like work that has philosophical or spiritual qualities. We publish a fair amount of poetry in translation. Poetry in translation is usually presented en face—with the original language side-by-side with the translation.
Q: What poets, journals or publishers were your role models in starting RUNES?
A: It wasn't so much any particular role models. Only that we appreciate books and journals that contain poems of quality and variety, poems that both stand alone and inform each other, and we strive for a book that well-designed and appealing to the eye and the hand.
Spring 2006
