Laura Bernstein-Machlay Q & A with Eastern Iowa Review
Chila: I just received my contributor's copies from Soundings East and noticed that you're also represented, along with myself and another person, as one of the three nonfiction contributors. Tell me about your submission process: how do you decide what to send where?
Laura: What a wonderful coincidence, that we share space in yet another great journal!
My submission process is a little scattered. I happen to live in a community with a dearth of independent bookstores, particularly those carrying a healthy selection of literary magazines to peruse, and sadly, I can only afford to subscribe to a handful of journals (teaching being an act of love as opposed to one offering big payouts). Therefore, I'm sorta stuck with scouring the web for inspiration. Yay internet!! When I find a little pocket of time (which isn't nearly often enough), I sometimes head to the New Pages or Poets and Writers sites. These allow me to discover interesting new magazines and to reconnect with old favorites, to check out the magazines' websites--which in turn provide mission statements, selections of recently published work, writers' guidelines, etc. Sometimes I'll purchase a back issue to really lose myself in the word bath--honestly, this is the best way to see if my work might be a fit for the journal. But then again, sometime I'll just send if I love the magazine, even if the majority of work it publishes looks very different from my own. And sometimes those magazines surprise me and take something. Go figure. Let's see... I tend to mostly submit to print journals since I like to hold them in my hands. Ironically, I'm an online submitter; I'm too lazy to print out pages, dig around for envelopes and stamps, get to a post office, etc. And again, yay internet!! A writer's best friend.
Chila: Interesting. My submission process is much the same, Laura. Next question: You took a unique approach in "Dirty Cities": what could have been a Detroit-bashing turned into a positive place-based essay. Was it originally written this way or did you have to tailor it for our "good spaces" focus?
Laura: Nope. I've never once written, or even tweaked, a piece to make it fit with a journal's preferences.
But here's the thing--my city, Detroit, where I work and have lived for years now, has been bashed more than enough. There's already all manner of "Detroit-porn" floating around online and in print, articles and whatnot focusing on the brokenness of the city, enough to satisfy everybody's voyeuristic curiosity and then some. Not that I want to sugarcoat things--like all places everywhere, Detroit is made up of the positive and the negative, the hopeful and the (seemingly) hopeless, people well-off and those desperately impoverished and desperate. Lately though, we're all seeing a lot of positive changes, even if they're not happening fast enough for us exhausted Detroiters.
Oh, and since I didn't mention it yet, I love it here. I love my beautiful neighborhood filled with the best people you'll ever meet!!
Chila: I find my space/place here in rural Iowa similar, and so it was when we lived in Milwaukee for nearly two decades, and other places in between. So much is perspective, isn't it? Third question: What's one thing you especially try to get across to your writing students?
Laura: It's probably pretty standard advice, but here ya go: stuff, stuff, stuff!! Write about the stuff you can touch, taste, listen to, the stuff you can feel through your skin. Big, abstract ideas just don't work by themselves. In other words, without grounding those ideas in the tangible, touchable details of the world around us, they can't make an emotional impact, can't make readers care. And as writers, that's our job, right? To make our words matter to people.
And too, I try to convince my students to rely less solely on visual imagery. We're definitely creatures that rely on sight to move through our day-to-day lives, but the best bang for your buck (words) comes from evoking our other senses--a smell that sends you back to the first day of school, a song that makes your chest ache, just a little, with joy or sadness you want to hold on to for a little while longer... Combine these with your stuff and big ideas, and you've got the recipe for really impactful, memorable writing.
Chila: Your most ambitious writing project in the near-future?
Laura: I finished a collection of autobiographical, creative nonfiction essays not so long ago--and am hoping to get them published in book form sometime, someday. If I can stop fussing with them, rethinking them, reordering them, cutting them out, then putting them back. Sigh. My comfort zone seems to be writing and publishing individual essays and poems. When it comes to putting out whole collections, apparently I have some kind of block to that...
Additionally, I'm currently working on a series of dense-ish, shortish essays of which Dirty Cities is one. Most of these are place-based to some extent. Not so sure where this particular project is going to end up--the fun is in finding out, I guess :))
Chila: I just received my contributor's copies from Soundings East and noticed that you're also represented, along with myself and another person, as one of the three nonfiction contributors. Tell me about your submission process: how do you decide what to send where?
Laura: What a wonderful coincidence, that we share space in yet another great journal!
My submission process is a little scattered. I happen to live in a community with a dearth of independent bookstores, particularly those carrying a healthy selection of literary magazines to peruse, and sadly, I can only afford to subscribe to a handful of journals (teaching being an act of love as opposed to one offering big payouts). Therefore, I'm sorta stuck with scouring the web for inspiration. Yay internet!! When I find a little pocket of time (which isn't nearly often enough), I sometimes head to the New Pages or Poets and Writers sites. These allow me to discover interesting new magazines and to reconnect with old favorites, to check out the magazines' websites--which in turn provide mission statements, selections of recently published work, writers' guidelines, etc. Sometimes I'll purchase a back issue to really lose myself in the word bath--honestly, this is the best way to see if my work might be a fit for the journal. But then again, sometime I'll just send if I love the magazine, even if the majority of work it publishes looks very different from my own. And sometimes those magazines surprise me and take something. Go figure. Let's see... I tend to mostly submit to print journals since I like to hold them in my hands. Ironically, I'm an online submitter; I'm too lazy to print out pages, dig around for envelopes and stamps, get to a post office, etc. And again, yay internet!! A writer's best friend.
Chila: Interesting. My submission process is much the same, Laura. Next question: You took a unique approach in "Dirty Cities": what could have been a Detroit-bashing turned into a positive place-based essay. Was it originally written this way or did you have to tailor it for our "good spaces" focus?
Laura: Nope. I've never once written, or even tweaked, a piece to make it fit with a journal's preferences.
But here's the thing--my city, Detroit, where I work and have lived for years now, has been bashed more than enough. There's already all manner of "Detroit-porn" floating around online and in print, articles and whatnot focusing on the brokenness of the city, enough to satisfy everybody's voyeuristic curiosity and then some. Not that I want to sugarcoat things--like all places everywhere, Detroit is made up of the positive and the negative, the hopeful and the (seemingly) hopeless, people well-off and those desperately impoverished and desperate. Lately though, we're all seeing a lot of positive changes, even if they're not happening fast enough for us exhausted Detroiters.
Oh, and since I didn't mention it yet, I love it here. I love my beautiful neighborhood filled with the best people you'll ever meet!!
Chila: I find my space/place here in rural Iowa similar, and so it was when we lived in Milwaukee for nearly two decades, and other places in between. So much is perspective, isn't it? Third question: What's one thing you especially try to get across to your writing students?
Laura: It's probably pretty standard advice, but here ya go: stuff, stuff, stuff!! Write about the stuff you can touch, taste, listen to, the stuff you can feel through your skin. Big, abstract ideas just don't work by themselves. In other words, without grounding those ideas in the tangible, touchable details of the world around us, they can't make an emotional impact, can't make readers care. And as writers, that's our job, right? To make our words matter to people.
And too, I try to convince my students to rely less solely on visual imagery. We're definitely creatures that rely on sight to move through our day-to-day lives, but the best bang for your buck (words) comes from evoking our other senses--a smell that sends you back to the first day of school, a song that makes your chest ache, just a little, with joy or sadness you want to hold on to for a little while longer... Combine these with your stuff and big ideas, and you've got the recipe for really impactful, memorable writing.
Chila: Your most ambitious writing project in the near-future?
Laura: I finished a collection of autobiographical, creative nonfiction essays not so long ago--and am hoping to get them published in book form sometime, someday. If I can stop fussing with them, rethinking them, reordering them, cutting them out, then putting them back. Sigh. My comfort zone seems to be writing and publishing individual essays and poems. When it comes to putting out whole collections, apparently I have some kind of block to that...
Additionally, I'm currently working on a series of dense-ish, shortish essays of which Dirty Cities is one. Most of these are place-based to some extent. Not so sure where this particular project is going to end up--the fun is in finding out, I guess :))
I appreciate this interview with a gal I seem to have much in common with on the writing front. Very best wishes to her in the days ahead. ~ Chila
Laura Bernstein-Machlay is an instructor of literature and Creative Writing at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI where she also lives.
Her poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Madrid, Concho River Review, Oyez, Redivider,upstreet, etc. She has work forthcoming in The American Scholar, Soundings East, and Moon City Review.
Lyric Essay Award Finalist
Laura Bernstein-Machlay is an instructor of literature and Creative Writing at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI where she also lives.
Her poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Madrid, Concho River Review, Oyez, Redivider,upstreet, etc. She has work forthcoming in The American Scholar, Soundings East, and Moon City Review.
Lyric Essay Award Finalist