Interview with Lindsay Wilson

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Meet Our Authors, Author Interviews

Author of “Letter to You Beginning at a Dead Lake” (Volume XXX, 2026)

When did you realize you wanted to write? 

Pretty early in high school I started to write in a notebook. It started by trying to write a song, and I found it so difficult. I remember sitting there for hours and never finishing it. The difficulty of trying to translate my thoughts into words fascinated me and that never went away. My childhood was complicated, so trying to make sense of that through writing (whether that writing was fiction or nonfiction) helped me sort through events and moments I needed to reflect on. It’s that difficult translation between thought and words on the page that’s very interesting, and I don’t think I would find so much joy through writing if it was easy.  

Is what you write now the same as what you wanted to write when you started?

In a sense, yes, but it’s so much more nuanced than how I started. I didn’t start by wanting to write about any specific thing other than my life and questions that simply came up by living. That has never changed. My understanding of poetry, the books I’ve read, and the writers I’ve studied with, or have become friends with, all have deepened my process, which is completely different than how I started.

How does using technology—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or even just your phone—influence how you write?

Technology mostly has a negative impact on my writing. The positives are obvious. It’s nice to be friends with a lot of great writers through social media. You can talk to them. You can see what their latest works are and read them before they come out in book form. All of that is very interesting, and given so many of these people do not live where I live, feeling “connected” to them in some way is great. It’s also nice to be writing and realize you want to research something, so having the ability to look things up is helpful. That said, technology is powerful distraction, and writing is about attention. Studies suggest that it takes 10-20 minutes to get into a creative mindset, and when we consistently stop working to check our phones, we pull ourselves out of that creative mindset. It then takes another 10-20 minutes to get back into that head space, but most people check their phones every 5-10 minutes, so do that math. We also have this false believe in our abilities to multitask, which isn’t real. What we call multitasking is really splitting our attention. You stop doing one task to do another. You can’t write a good poem and read your phone in the exact same moment. You do one thing, and then stop and do another. It’s never at the same time. Also, reading on a screen is dreadful. I retain half as much as I would from reading a hardcopy. On top of all this, we live in an attention economy, and many of the tech bros who profit from that are not good human beings, so disconnecting from that world is an intentional choice that we all need to make more often. Unfortunately, promoting yourself is difficult to do, and phone addiction is a real thing, but social media gives you the ability to share work that’s been published and promote your books. It’s a difficult thing to manage. The positives are there, but the negatives are extreme.  

What advice would you give an aspiring writer who wants to put their work “out there“? 

There is your writing process and what you create, and then there is publishing and self-promotion. They are not the same thing. In fact, trying to get out there and promoting yourself, takes time away from creating. It’s important to see these things as distinctly different. The most important thing you can do as an aspiring writer is develop a love for the process of writing. There is nothing more important, in my mind, than that. If you develop a love for the process, you will love to write. All creatives need to put in a lot of time and attention to work on their craft. It takes years, but after that time, the growth will be obvious, and then getting it “out there” is much easier. But don’t be in a rush. You’re only competing against yourself. After that time where you do a lot of work, you need to work on learning the literary magazine market and presses. This too will take time. Ask friends what journals they like. Go to book fairs with small presses and journals. Go to journal reading launch parties. Buy sample copies. Follow journals and presses online and see what sort of work they promote. Always remember, you can’t give a journal the ability to say yes to your work without giving them the ability to reject you. See rejection as a path towards acceptance. Rejection can be discouraging, but all writers go through it.

Where do you typically seek inspiration and guidance for your work?

I don’t seek inspiration. Life just happens and poems drift your way if you’re paying attention. You just pluck them out of the sky or pick them off the sidewalk, and if you don’t grab them as they go by, well, then Ocean Vuong gets them.

How do you manage writer’s block?

I don’t have writers block as much as I have moments when what I’m writing isn’t living up to my expectations. You just have to write your way through those moments. Again, you need to fall in love with the process, and that often involves working on writing that may not appear in your next book or get published in a journal. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re writing, and you know that not all of it is going to be your best work. But you have to trust that working through those not-so-great poems or stories will lead you to the next thing and the next.

Poet as Copyeditor

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Editing, To Make Public blog

As a poet, learning copyediting has been very helpful to me. When it comes to formatting, for the most part, poets have the creative liberty to do whatever they please. Before learning copyediting and other processing techniques used in publishing, I believed that to an extreme—putting in all sorts of strange punctuation and stanza breaks just to do so. As an editor, I cringe at that now. Not only for my lack of good reason, but also because I’ve now had to read piles upon piles of poetry, and those pieces with a ton of confusing spacing or punctuation marks are the spark of countless arguments between editors as we try to find out what is intentional, a processing error, or a simple mistake! In the early stages of acquisitions this can be solved through a simple message or email, but when we’re further along in our publishing process and working on copyediting there often simply isn’t enough time to have conversations with our authors.

Working as a copyeditor has helped me better prepare for submitting my poetry for publication and is helping me write my poetry more efficiently and concisely as well.

—Jakey S.

Follow-an-author Marketing Research

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Marketing & Promotion, To Make Public blog

As editors for the CLR, it is our duty to explore, edit, and cast the works by dozens of writers and poets into a meticulously curated collection—it’s a simple trade-off: authors get to see their work selected and presented to readers, and we receive written works to then market, publish, and celebrate. Within this relationship, however, opportunity for edification and growth arises. While beginning the copyediting process, our editors do individual research on our featured writers and poets, seeking personal websites, features in other literary journals/magazines, and any other platforms they may be using to share their works. This information aids us in the marketing process, allowing for updated distribution, new opportunities for collaboration, and improved rapport with our esteemed authors.

As students, this process is especially crucial to our individual understandings of publishing—with many of us wanting to pursue editing in the future, this opportunity allows us to perform intimate research on our “case studies” for our future professions. We see first-hand the “backstage production” behind decades of the CLR, exposing many first-time editors to the nitty-gritty details and moving parts behind our journal. Because the CLR is student-run, an inevitable learning experience is thinly veiled over this careful undertaking; meaning each step, manuscript, and style sheet is under the review of keenly-peeled eyes, acquiring new details and logistical elements to cultivate and improve our publishing.

Though this operation is controlled, students orchestrate most of the “big decision-making” and are responsible for applying this personal research to our journal’s marketing plan, which varies year after year depending on what information is gathered. Because the editing world is under constant change, it’s up to us to stay on top of what, where, and how our writers are sharing their works. This follow-an-author process allows us to “stay in the loop,” keeping us uniquely updated with where our writers are appearing (e.g. Instagram, Medium, other literary magazines, etc.); this information then becoming applicable to our own literary review and marketing process.

With each year, it is our intention to continually improve, edit, and learn from these processes, fostering creativity and solidifying relationships between us and our writers, as well as discovering new methods to distribute and market our final product. The goal is never to simply regurgitate these writings, but to scrutinize and master each diligent course of action.

—Becca L.

Style sheets: what are they, and who uses them?

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Editing, To Make Public blog

Style sheets are just one step in a multi-part process we call editing. Writers may know this as “editing hell” due to the length and tediousness of this task!

A style sheet is used as a communication tool between editors, primarily created in the copyediting phase, that is used as a guide for correctness and for what we determine is the favorable way to maintain consistency among pieces. However, we must be mindful of each story and its stylistic choices through the author’s eyes.

For instance, there are many ways one can use “T-shirt” in a sentence, such as “T-shirt,” “t-shirt,” and “tee shirt.” It’s important to keep the version consistent within each piece and among all the pieces. A style sheet isn’t just for stylistic choices though; it’s also very commonly used for us to simply tell our editor comrades, “Hey, this word is properly spelled; leave it!” A lot of a style sheet will include names of places with odd spellings, names of things from other cultures and/or languages, or things the copyeditors may have had to research to see if they’re even correct.

These sheets are collaborative and discussed between the whole editorial division of our literary magazine and then carefully bundled into a master sheet that is based on the Chicago Manual of Style and our own classifications of “global rules.”

—Alana H.

Guide to Target Audience Personas

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Marketing & Promotion, To Make Public blog

WHAT IS A TARGET AUDIENCE PERSONA? A target audience persona is a representation of a fictional someone who fits the characteristics, goals, behaviors, and motivations of our target audience so we can market and provide our books to the real target audiences like you. Yes reader, you!

WHAT’S THE IMPORTANCE OF A TARGET AUDIENCE? They help our marketing go boom; allowing us to understand our customers better and deeper so we can make more and more of our wonderful CLR magazines for the world to read! Our marketing efforts become more effective when they resonate with the audience we’re going for who want more and more of what we provide. This also saves us from creating the mistakes of making or doing something in our marketing that will turn away our audience from our published magazines. We don’t want to be the person who ruins it all!

HOW DO YOU MAKE ONE? That’s a good question. There are many things to consider when creating an audience persona. First things first. Research. I cannot stress this enough. Researching is an effective way of gaining insight and better understanding of the audience persona we plan on creating, whether that be from interviews, surveys, or even as simple as taking notes on the people we talk to on the daily who share the same passions. As long as we are retaining the information we find that is helpful to our publishing goals, we are ready to create an audience persona.

Next we must identify characteristics that our marketing can offer this person. That means putting in their age, gender, where they live, interests, values, and how they buy things based on what they like. These are all things we must consider when planning out our audience persona.

Now for the fun part: creating the persona through and through. Those who have made a character before should have a pretty good visual on how to make an audience persona because the process is similar. Only, the focus needs to be more narrow and unfortunately, certain aspects of creating an audience persona has more limits. That is because we need to have this persona match with what our marketing can do for them. If we lose focus, we’ll lose the audience we worked so hard to attract and that’s no fun. Stick to the plan people!

FINAL THOUGHTS. Personas are a priority to good marketing as a whole. They are extremely useful and are easy to look back on when we continue improving our publishing program. As long as they apply to what our audience wants and needs, their goals, expectations, and whatnot, we’re going to have a pretty damn good literary publication!

—Isabella R.

What is literature, and what is Literature?

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Acquisitions, To Make Public blog

In casual conversation, the word “literature” is used broadly to reference anything that employs the written word as a vehicle for information exchange. For the purposes of deciding what is fit to be published in the CLR, however, this is a functionally useless definition as it includes anything ranging from ancient Greek philosophy to the legal copy on a car ad.

So, how then do we determine what literature is fit for acquisition? The short answer: we have criteria!

Having specific criteria we use to assess all submissions allows us to make the shift from the unhelpfully general definition of literature to a more selective and purposeful one; colloquially, works that fall into this latter category are known as Literature with-a-capital-L.

What elevates literature to Literature, as per the acquisition criteria we developed, include the following:

Cultural or Academic Value: Works that invite discussion and offer diverse interpretation, are morally or philosophically profound, and/or offer a timeless snapshot of contemporary sociopolitical contexts are Literature.

Unique Voice & Style: Works that push boundaries, explore complex themes, and inspire our readers through innovative writing are Literature.

Of Lasting Relevancy: Works that can survive trends and endure in meaningful ways generation to generation are Literature.

By being selective with what we choose to publish, we hope to curate a reading experience both profound and inspiring.

—Izaiah S.

Musing on Reading

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Reading Histories, To Make Public blog

My earliest memory of reading involves The Hungry Caterpillar in a widely spacious library painted in primary colors that my mother would take me to. Another early memory I have was from the first eight years of my life spent in Australia, being seated cross-legged alongside my fellow young classmates having a book read to us all. The book was The Gizmo by Paul Jennings. Skipping ahead, I recall being introduced to Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Shadow Children series. The first book captivated me. I ended up binging through the rest of the series at home, then laying on my couch reading The Missing series, lost in a book from start to finish for three hours straight.

These days I’ve fallen off a bit with how I’ve become someone who accidentally hoards library books they’ve been meaning to read but haven’t been able to get to. On the other hand, I’ve certainly been someone who accidentally stayed up overnight consumed by the need to finish a rich long fanfic with engaging stories and concepts that explored what canon tales overlooked. Personally, I’ve often found I feel my way through a text. It also affects how I write, usually with me considering a character’s inner ‘voice’ or thought process. Reading for me usually involves imagining accompanying cinematographic visuals; my finger constantly on prose’s pulse, trying to pick up rhythmic structure. In the best summary, I’ve become someone who enjoys picking apart text intuitively and taking into stock how an author’s values, worldviews, and even creative process shape their work.

What I’ve found really interesting regarding my fellow editors is that everyone appears to enjoy being challenged. Being moved by text. I’m really fascinated with the fact that my peers look to be actively provoked in terms of an emotional response—even if that may be anger or discomfort. I think it’s very valuable, and that it’s significant to also be equipped with the tools to be able to unpack or be willing to explore just why that is.
With all this in mind—seeing how my reading history, and remembering the qualities of stories that have moved me in the past, paired with observing what my peers like to read—it certainly affects our collective outlook on how we editors approach looking at poetry and prose submissions to consider for publication. It allows for some fascinating and insightful discussions as well, from the perspective of readers, editors, and budding writers!

—Jessi Joy