Editor Insights: Moon City Review

Editor-in-Chief & Flash Fiction Editor Michael Czyzniejewski on writing, submitting, and what he’s looking for

Earlier this year, Michael Czyzniejewski, editor-in-chief and flash fiction editor at Moon City Review, joined my “How to Submit Work to Literary Journals” class as a special guest. I first met Michael when Moon City Review accepted my fiction story “Terra Incognita” for their 2023 issue. Below are some of the insights and wisdom he shared about writing and submitting during the class.

Note: If you’re interested, my next “How to Submit Work” class starts Saturday, Aug. 9. More details here.

How to tell when your work is ready to submit:

1. If you want to be published in literary magazines, you need to be reading literary magazines.

   “Some magazines are going to be for you, and a fit for you, and their editors are going to like what you do, and then some magazines just aren’t. I’ve been sending out for 32, 33 years now, and there are magazines that I’ve been sending to that entire time that have never taken a story of mine. I’ve probably sent them 25 stories, and they’ve never said yes, but I keep trying because sometimes you get close and sometimes the editors change. But then there’s places that I’ve been in like 5 times because they like my work, and they say every few years, you should send again and we’ll publish you.”

2. Revise, revise, revise…and then put it away for a while.

   “To really know if something is ready, I think you revise the heck out of it to the point that you’re coming back to it and not making any changes … Say you have a poem that you think is done. Put it in a drawer for two weeks. Put it there and let it sit for a while, get some distance from it. Make yourself objective to it as opposed to subjective to it. And then come back to it, and revise it again, and maybe you’re going to make a ton of changes because you understand this piece now because you’re looking at it with new eyes. Or maybe you put it in a drawer for two weeks and you come back to it and you really don’t make any changes and that might be when it’s ready.”

How he knows when his work is ready:

“Before I send anything out, I have to make at least one complete, clear pass of it, reading it out loud, without making a single change. So, if I read a flash piece, and halfway through I’m starting to make changes in sentences, that doesn’t count. I have to start over, and I have to revise it again, and then I have to make another pass. Because I need to do a clean pass through something, where I’ve had some distance from it, and I read through it completely and I’m like, that’s exactly it, word for word, what I want.”

What he’s looking for at Moon City Review:

“I’m looking for something that’s different from anything I’ve read before. Something that stands out. I know that that’s hard to do, but I’m looking for something where either the subject matter or the way that it’s written and the approach and the entryway into the story is just different and really grabs me in a different way. The writing has to be really crisp and interesting. Because we read through so many submissions, it’s just a matter of how are you sticking out from the rest of the submissions.”

The trap of “the competent submission”

During our conversation, Michael referenced the idea of the “competent submission,” first discussed by Steve Almond, the former fiction editor at The Greensboro Review. The basic idea is that when it comes to submissions, 5% are terrible, 5% stand out as interesting and exciting and worth talking about, and the other 90% are “the competent submission.”

“The competent submission is good and fine and technically proficient, but I don’t want to read it again because it doesn’t stand out. It’s just not that interesting, it’s not written in an interesting way. It’s hard to critique that because you haven’t done anything wrong to the story — it’s fine, but I don’t remember it. I’m not going to remember it next week.”

So, does this mean you have to use a lot of bells and whistles or do very drastic things in your fiction or poetry to make it stand out? No, but Mike says you have to be interesting, you have to have things happen, and you have to write well.

How to ruin your ending

“A couple times a year, we’ll get a story that’s perfect, but they add one more paragraph that kind of explains the story after the resolution part. They write out the denouement because they feel as a writer that they want to explain what happened so the reader gets it. Probably 10 or 15 times we’ve said, ‘We like this a lot, can we cut the last paragraph because you wrote too far.’ And every single time, the writer has been like, ‘Oh my god, you’re exactly right, I’m going to cut the last paragraph.’

The instinct that they had was like, I desperately need the reader to understand exactly what I’m saying in this story, so I’m going to write a paragraph at the end that wraps it all up, and it ruins the story. And if anybody ever said, ‘No, I’m not going to cut that,’ we would very much just say, ‘Then we’re not taking it.’

Don’t write the denouement of your story. The denouement is supposed to be implied, not written.”

Tips on cover letters/bios

• Keep your cover letter brief & don’t name-drop

  “Be very minimal with your cover letter. Put your accolades on there, like if you have any publications or any awards that you won. You can put where you studied. I wouldn’t put who you studied with. Sometimes people put that. They’re like, well, I worked with Raymond Carver at Iowa and I worked with this person here. That's not an accolade for you. You didn’t do that — you signed up for a class. So don’t put that.”

• Don’t explain your work

  “Definitely don’t explain your work. That’s probably the biggest mistake. I’ll read your story and determine what your story is about. That’s the one thing that [editors] don’t want is you explaining what your story is to them. Just say, attached is my story, I’m this person, thank you for your time and consideration.”

The worst thing a writer can do…

Not withdrawing your submission when it’s been accepted elsewhere.

“Don’t do that. That’s really disrespectful. We have simultaneous submissions, we want you to send your work out to more than one place at a time. But if you’re not going to withdraw things from us, and we’re going to spend time reading and accepting it only to find that you’re just not treating us with respect, then that’s really infuriating. We kind of keep a running tally of people like that in our heads — like, hey, weren’t you the one that we took that story, and then you refused because it was already published? Don’t do that.”

I hope you found these insights useful. I’m grateful to Michael for sharing his perspective with me and my students, and now you too!

👋 Hi there, and thanks for reading! I’m Janelle Drumwright, a writer, teacher at The Writers Studio, instructor at Chill Subs, and reader at The Masters Review. I help writers strengthen their work and teach them how to submit to literary journals. Find me at janellewrites.com.