POETREE

Hello! Good morning, members of poetree, and thanks for the invite to write about my experience as the poetry editor of Ideomancer!

Ideomancer is a speculative fiction webzine that debuted in 1999 and began to publish poetry in 2005. In the world of speculative fiction webzines, where new zines tend to pop up and...go pop?...on a monthly basis, I suppose it is unusually persistent.

I joined the staff of Ideomancer as a fiction editor (one of many – I’m guessing one of the secrets to Ideomancer’s longevity is that we really like to spread the work around) in 2007, and became the poetry editor last year after stillnotbored left to work on her forthcoming fantasy trilogy. At the time she left, I was the Ideomancer volunteer with the greatest interest in poetry; I was already the poetry editor of filling Station, a Canadian magazine of experimental writing (but more on that later).

Life as a webzine’s poetry editor is simple; I receive poems, read them, and decide whether or not to publish them. Then I send rejection notices or contracts as applicable. I do this all by email, as the volume of submissions I receive is really too low to bother with any kind of submissions management software.

I also work with the authors of accepted poems to make any needed edits to their work, and I have a small role in publicizing new issues of Ideomancer through social media.

( Deep, deep thoughts )