Monkeybicycle’s editors—Steven Seighman and Shya Scanlon—talked with Luna Park’s Nick Ripatrazone about Monkeybicycle 8 through e-mail. The interview was a follow-up to Ripatrazone’s recent review of the issue.

Nick Ripatrazone: Monkeybicycle 8 works so well as a cohesive issue. Could you discuss how this particular edition went from individual submissions to a collective, a completed “book”?

Steven Seighman: I was actually a bit worried about the book ending up as a more scattered collection since Shya and I haven’t done this together in several years. For the most part it’s just been me making the fiction selections (Jacob Smith handles the poetry) for the past several issues and I thought that bringing someone else in might throw off the energy a bit. But it was clear right off the bat that Shya and I could get back into the groove we had in the early days of Monkeybicycle. I think our tastes are very similar and still just different enough to offer up a good amount of variety in the stories without having them seem like they’re all over the place.

Shya Scanlon: I agree that it basically comes down to aesthetic agreement across the editorial team. Steven and I have worked together a lot over the years, and despite the number of issues he released since I’d last been officially on board, we’d remained close enough to know we’d still be able to work well together. I wish I could say that some incredibly detailed strategy informed the issue, but it’s largely an intuitive process. We select work that speaks to us, and also that seems to resonate with other work we’ve chosen. I see a couple interesting patterns/recurrences in issue 8, but I wouldn’t even want to spell that out, really, because the idea is not to enforce a particular reading, rather to encourage readers to discover something for themselves. Beyond the selection, of course, there’s also the order—in this case, Steven made those decisions, but I’d bet he’d agree that although his brain was at work, intuition had an equal hand in steering this process too. So, yeah, the answer is basically: magic.

Ripatrazone: You guys obviously enjoy all the pieces in this issue, but did you each have a particular submission that demanded your attention?

Seighman: I think just about everyone who has come up to me or emailed me about the book has cited Jonathan Redhorse’s “Delores Threnody” as their standout piece, and I completely agree. That story is just brilliant and I’m really happy Shya selected it (another example, I think, of how well the two of us work together and trust each other’s judgement). There are so many others in the book that I feel really close to as well, but the two that stand out to me are Blake Kimzey’s “Donald Mason’s City Inspection and the Stakeout Standoff” and Curtis Smith‘s “Lenin!”. These stories are bookends for the book and I set it up that way for a reason. I think both of them are somewhat light and also very engaging in pretty absurd ways. That’s the kind of thing I really like, and it seems to be a really great way to ease into and out of the book with a little umph. Kimzey is a new voice to me and when I read that story I knew he was a great talent. I hope we get the chance to publish more of his work in the future. And I’ve been a fan of Curtis Smith’s work for a long time. He has a gift. So I’m always eager when I see a submission from him.

Scanlon: I think I’d rather answer this slantwise by saying that some editors I’ve spoken with just love finding stories or poems that need absolutely nothing. While I agree that there’s a certain magic in finding work that requires nothing of me, I often end up being more fond of pieces that demand a little attention, pieces I work on with the author, that grow better, or more precise, or more themselves, through the strange and candid dance of author and editor. There were a few authors I worked with in this way for issue 8—they’ll know who they are if they read this—and though I don’t think I’ll reveal which stories are the result of that work, I’d just like to thank them for listening to me and trusting my input. All the work is great, of course, but I admit to a selfish amount of fondness for work that, however great it was coming in, for one reason or another “needed” me.

Ripatrazone: Monkeybicycle is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of a literary magazine with an equally strong web and print presence. So often magazines seem to treat online content as merely an addendum to a print issue, or worse, a place to house weaker pieces. I’m equally impressed with your web selections as with the material in your print copies. How do you approach the maintenance of these two representations of Monkeybicycle?

Seighman: Monkeybicycle began back in 2002, when the web was still fairly new. There were maybe a half-dozen literary sites that I was aware of back then, but it certainly seemed like a frontier that was going to offer more options for writers to showcase their work. The intention from the very beginning with Monkeybicycle was to have both print issues and a website. I was working at an internet company in Seattle when I started the journal, so it felt like an obvious decision to have a web presence. And I loved the idea of being able to produce content more frequently than twice per year. There are so many great writers out there, and we wanted to give them at least one more opportunity to find a home for their work.

It’s taken a long time to really streamline our print and web processes, but it feels like it’s exactly what we’d been striving for at this point. We have a fantastic web editor in Jessa Marsh, who consistently picks really great work. And J.A. Tyler was recently brought on board as our blog editor. Both of them have put forth really great efforts to make the site more of an almost daily destination. With new fiction going up every Monday and Friday and the blog posting reviews, interviews, and whatever other literary things that come to mind every few days, it feels like the site is bustling and really worth bookmarking.

And while those two maintain the website, Shya and I work together on the print issues. Most of the time I feel like what’s in there is kind of like long-form versions of what would go up on the site. The books are eclectic and fun and you never know what you’re going to get next, but you know it will be worth reading.

Together, I think the books and the website have really come a long way from those early days, and they work so well as a whole to showcase great writers. That’s exactly what I wanted Monkeybicycle to be.

Scanlon: I think it helps to have separate editors for web and print. That way no single editor will prioritize one over the other or, perhaps even subconsciously, skew the quality in a certain direction. Since I passed the web editing hat to Matthew Simmons many years ago, there has a series of excellent web editors, and the editorial divide has given the web editor a great degree of autonomy—essentially running his/her own journal (while maintaining the general tone of the brand). Jessa has a great eye, and she’d done a very fine job with the site. Similarly, Jacob’s poetry selections for the print side are essentially autonomous. His decisions are not questioned by Steven or I, and this, too, makes for a strength and clarity of vision. Everyone on the masthead contributes in a unique way, and everyone is treated as an equal. By trusting one another implicitly to know what’s best for the journal as a whole, we can focus energy where it’s needed without feeling like the attentions any one editor is spread too thin. I’d say it’s a pretty successful strategy. Glad you noticed.

Addendum: Seighman noted on Facebook: “I should add here that even though we didn’t get a chance to mention her in the interview, Laura Carney is our secret weapon. Her copy editing efforts on the print issues really make them something we can be proud of. Sometimes I see journals that could benefit from a copy editor, so we’re very lucky to have her, like we are all of our staff and interns.”