Iris Literature and Arts Magazine Editing Work

In the interest of preserving the privacy of those who contribute to Iris, I have opted to include a brief explanation of my editing process rather than original and edited manuscripts.

Every piece accepted by Iris undergoes a minimum of two rounds of edits. At the very beginning of the editing process, every accepted author and poet are sent a version of the following message:

"Hello, SUBMITTER! My name is EDITOR and I will be completing the first round of edits on your piece. It is central to Iris’s ethos that authors feel a sense of ownership over their work and that the editing process be more collaborative than authoritative. Barring misspellings or glaring grammatical errors/inconsistencies, please feel free to reject any suggestions that don't feel authentic to your intention with this piece. This is a time sensitive process, so please respond to any suggested edits as soon as possible!"

From there, the approach is quite different for prose pieces versus poetry pieces.

For prose, we are able to offer slightly more comprehensive feedback than we might for a poem. We aim to strike a balance between consistency and the maintenance of an author’s autonomy over their piece. Queries on prose pieces might include interrogating inconsistencies in content, posing whether sentences or even entire paragraphs might need to be cut or reworked, and making suggestions about word choice, syntax, and the narrative's organization.

Poetry edits are less content-focused and more centered around considerations of craft. We intentionally relax considerations of "correctness" with poetry, as we know subversions of conventional form or syntax might be intentional on the part of the poet. Queries on poems might include suggesting different language to increase tonal consistency and confirming line breaks/stanza breaks.

Further, we have recently started offering live editing sessions with prose authors to increase   collaboration and ensure we are making the published works the best they can be without diverging from the author's unique voice.

Find the Iris website with all of our published editions here.