LITERARY PUBLISHING - MAKING EDITORIAL CHOICES

Course Description

The purpose of W&L CS 170B: Literary Publishing: Making Editorial Choices is twofold. First, by virtue of enrolling in this class, you have now joined the staff of Spectrum, a literary magazine housed in the College of Creative Studies that annually publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art by writers and visual artists from across the country. Spectrum received submissions for the 2019 issue from June-December of 2018. Your job, as a class, is to select the pieces to be published from these submissions.

This act of selection is a large part of what professional editors do. They seek out good writing and publish it. Of course, in order to do so effectively, an editor must develop taste. This is the second goal of this class-to help you understand what it is that editors do, develop a sense of your own literary tastes, work with writers to develop their work (and, on the flip side, to work with an editor to develop your own creative work), and develop editorial content for Spectrum.

Keep in mind that editors are primarily professional readers. In this class you will do a lot (and I mean a lot) of reading and writing in response to that reading. Not only will you read submissions to Spectrum, but a significant portion of the work of our class will be reading other literary magazines in order to get a sense of the current literary publishing scene.

Required Text

Gerald C Gross, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do Grove Press
Spectrum Literary Journal, 60th anniversary anthology, 2017