It's All in the Edit - Making Pen Pusher / Blog / Untitled Books

Issue 40 / January 2012

It's All in the Edit - Making Pen Pusher

Pen Pusher Magazine's editor, Anna Goodall, discusses the process of putting a new issue of the literary publication together.

It's both an enjoyable and an anxiety inducing process creating a new issue of Pen Pusher Magazine... Initially it feels as if I'm groping helplessly in the dark: What on earth is going to be in it? What are all those ideas I had before? Where's that bit of paper I wrote them all down on? I'm really hungry. I think I'll go have a coffee and a piece of toast.

The process, once it does get underway, always starts with fiction and poetry. This is what Pen Pusher is really about: publishing new writers and new writing. We get submissions directly through our website to a database system, to the editors email and via post. At some point I will sit down, feeling daunted, with all these stories and poems and start reading.

Something I find really satisfying is that as we've developed as a publication and as my editorial style and taste has become more distinct, writers submitting to PP have responded to this. I do appreciate everyone who sends me their work and I'm often doubly appreciative because I feel they've read Pen Pusher and taken on board what the magazine is all about. (When we first started we had a lot of random stuff, bizarrely often about life on the streets, drug dealing and prostitution, written by people who knew nothing about it, which was odd.)

You can be reading for hours and hours, several days and 100 submissions can go by and you haven't found anything that is right for the magazine. Panic sets in: what am I going to do if I don't want to publish anything? Could we just skip an issue and make it sound as if it was for a good reason?

Then suddenly: an opening sentence, a narrative tone that is seemingly effortless, a description that is concise but imaginatively expansive... unbeknownst to you five minutes go by and at the end you jump up from your chair and reward yourself with a little dance round the room to whatever happens to be on the radio at the time. The buzz of finding a piece of writing that you want to publish is addictive; it's like digging for gold and I'll only experience that two or three times per issue.

Everything else I am interested in goes on to a very, very long "short" list, which gradually gets whittled down. Often equally good pieces of work that end up being published in the magazine take a little more time to dawn on me... I will also be contacting writers, publishers and poets I know, and be organising interviews, extracts and other content to be published. Slowly the issue begins to take shape.

The personal highlight for me as regards the latest issue, Pen Pusher 15, was interviewing Diana Athill. Meeting her was both inspirational and comfortable - like talking to an old friend who just happens to have had a ridiculously distinguished career in publishing and is also an immensely talented writer. Other non-fiction highlights in PP15 are Helen Lewis's interview with Helen Oyeyemi and Niall O'Sullivan's excellent review of Roddy Lumsden's seminal new anthology for Bloodaxe, Identity Parade; with poetry, fiction and comment coming from the likes of Ross Sutherland, John Osborne, Susan Barker, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Ruth Davies, Thomas Land...

Once it's all been chosen, written, and edited I will then go through a phase where I have bad dreams about how I've done everything wrong and how many typos there are, etc, etc, that won't quite have dissipated by the time we get to the party.

The party we threw for PP15 this time was fantastic and our readers were really diverse, but all equally confident and capable of holding a noisy room crammed with people in their thrall: Clare Pollard (who featured in PP14), Swithun Cooper, Joe Cairo read poetry in the first half; then Sara Stockbridge read from her novel Hammer in the second, and Wayne Holloway-Smith read from his work-in-progress novel Big Time, an extract of which is published in PP15.

Wayne possibly stole the show with his mid-set drinking games and an attempt at a camp voice for one of his characters, Daddy Smalls, being hilariously interrupted by some, ironically enough, camp-looking men who opened the fire door behind him trying to get into the bar and stood there dazed and confused for a moment or two before abruptly disappearing again. Cue much hilarity.

It was a great night, I had a terrible gin hangover to prove it, and then spent two days recovering. Then I picked up the magazine again after the weekend, had a look a through and realised, oh yeah, it is a really good issue, I needn't have worried so much.

Now I'm starting to think about the next one...

ACG

Issue 15 available to buy as single issue or subscribe to Pen Pusher Magazine here.

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