Cover of Nimrod's Mexico/USA issue

I recently had the chance to have a brief Q&A session with the editor of Nimrod International Journal, Eilis O’Neal. Nimrod is one of the most well-known literary journals in America. The University of Tulsa has been publishing Nimrod continuously since 1956, and its list of past contributors reads like the table of contents in a Norton anthology (for example, see the authors O’Neal cites below). As a young writer, my questions for O’Neal center on how one can get published in Nimrod. Examples of what Ms. O’Neal discusses follow the interview.

*

Jeffrey Tucker: What are your interests as an editor? In other words, aside from a submitted piece having the basic attributes of solid literary writing, what themes, ideas, or other qualities are you looking for?

Eilis O’Neal: We look for different themes at different times; we do a different thematic issue each spring, so we’re always looking for new things. For instance, we just finished accepting for an issue on Mexico, and last year we did an issue on memory. We also always accept general manuscripts, however. Basically, we’re just looking for the best writing.

Tucker: Upon what constituency does Nimrod focus?

O’Neal: We focus on everyone who has a love for new literature. We try not to focus too narrowly on any one constituency, but to bring in even people who have previously not have much literary experience.

Tucker: Generally speaking, how often does Nimrod publish “new” writers?

O’Neal: Our mission is the discovery of new writers, and we’ve been discovering new writers since we began. For instance, we were among the first journals to publish William Stafford, Octavio Paz (in translation), Linda Pastan, Sue Monk Kidd, and S. E. Hinton. We have previously unpublished writers in every issue.

Tucker: Is there a theme/quality/pet peeve that you see in submissions that you consciously and consistently avoid?

O’Neal: Oh, there are several. For poetry, we dislike poems that are actually more like journal entries rather than poems. For fiction, we see a lot of stories that are really just “talking heads,” stories in which people stand around and talk and yet nothing happens.

*

To see examples of what O’Neal means, one need not look any further than the Nimrod website. There are numerous excerpts from the past several issues, and the issue to which O’Neal refers in the interview—the Mexico issue—is now up.

A story from the Mexico issue illustrates what O’Neal looks for in fiction. Shelley Ettinger’s “All the Ashleys in the World” describes the hardship endured by a migrant family crossing the US border illegally:

He told them they must split up. They had clung close until now. A dozen, together tamping down the terror pumping through each as they tramped onward those first hours, ever farther from home. Now Señor Estes divided them into three. Smaller units, less detectable, and lighter on their feet. If they kept moving in this big cluster the miles ahead would break them, he said. They might every single one be caught and sent back. On the other hand, if they encountered Migra agents, or bands of roving drunken vigilantes, which would become more likely the further they progressed, he said, four could scatter and each have a chance of escape […]. They might not all make it but most would.

This passage demonstrates how to not—in O’Neal’s words—sound like a talking head, while still maintaining an intimate perspective; there is action, but it doesn’t come at the cost of other needed elements.

Kara Candito’s poem from the same issue, “Hello from the Hills of Oaxaca,” also exemplifies what O’Neal and other editors at Nimrod look for in poetry. Candito writes,

You taught me to remember this tide
of chicken feathers rising around
the windshield, falling back like a veil
and the hills in this half-light, women
lifting maguey skirts, pulling off cloud-masks;
their faces a flash of foam on a cup of cacao—
that beauty begins with a grease fire in
the eyes. Like dragonflies, we marry
the light. We injure ourselves, instinctively.

I study the codices in the museum—
the foreheads of Olmec infants flattened
with boards at birth, the obsidian prongs
widows used to pull out their own tongues;
their wailing an affect I can only imagine,
faith that one day the beloved will return
like a secretive snake in new skin.

Again, the writing is extremely personal, yet the poem is not cloying—not at all, as O’Neal criticizes of other writers, like a journal entry. The language is rich, the descriptions solid without becoming overbearing.