Conducted by: Kerry Sheridan, Grace Sawka, Emma Snelgrove
Gail Rudd Entrekin is a poet, editor, publisher, teacher, quilt maker and hiker originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Entrekin earned a Masters degree in English literature from Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to the Bay Area in 1978. Books of her poems include The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (2016), Rearrangement of the Invisible(2012), Change (Will Do You Good) (2005), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award, You Notice the Body (1998) and John Danced(1988). Her poems have been widely published in poetry magazines and anthologies. She is co-publisher and Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press, where she served as Editor of the 2002 anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra and the 2007 anthology, Yuba Flows. She is Editor of the on-line literary magazine of the environment, Canary, founded in 2007. She has taught English and Creative Writing in California community colleges for 25 years, most recently at Sierra College in Grass Valley, and for many years she has taught poetry to kids through California Poets in the Schools. She currently serves as Director of the Entrekin Foundation, a funder of non-profit programs for the endangered environment, children, and the arts.
Can you briefly summarize your editing process? What’s your approach to editing? Are you light or heavy?
I occasionally edit a piece that I’d like to use because it’s on a theme I’ve been wanting to address, or I really like the author’s sensibility or style, and I feel it only needs a small bit of tweaking. If there’s too much to fix, I rarely take the time to get into it.
What sets certain submissions apart when deciding what goes into an issue? Is there anything that you immediately accept or reject based on the first page? What makes a piece jump out at you?
I can usually move on quickly when a piece uses cliches or is intended to be a poem but fails to use any poetic devices like images, metaphors, fresh language, etc. But I always give a read to all pieces in a person’s submissions because sometimes a beginning writer almost stumbles onto one good poem. I even glance through a submission when I see that the writer hasn’t bothered to look at our magazine or read our submissions page and is not writing on our theme. Now and then someone has accidentally included a piece that hits on environmentalism/nature etc.
Is it usual for you to provide feedback when you reject a submission?
No, but if I feel someone is almost there, I often say that and ask them to submit again in the future. I sometimes tell a writer who is really pretty good what I like and how I felt the poem fell short.
How much impact does having a specialized journal about environmental issues help the environmental cause? Have you seen any published works in the Canary make a change?
No, I fear that we have very little direct impact on the crisis at hand. I think most of our readership is already well aware of the loss of habitat and species that we are experiencing. I know that people circulate Canary to friends and fellow writers though, and my hope is that someone becomes more aware of what is happening and is able to have some small impact in their own world.
When editing a submission, how much is appropriate to change? How do you respect authorial integrity while changing necessary parts?
I never change anything larger than a comma or a spelling error without letting the author know what I am doing. If I do more than that, I send them my edited version for their approval. Poets are especially interested in the formatting etc. of their poems, and they don’t take well to unauthorized changes.
Based on your experience as an editor, what have you learned about writing?
I’ve been employed as an editor in one way or another, on and off, for about 40 years. I learned proofreading advertising copy in my 20s, and that was a very rigorous course of training as mistakes cost large amounts of money. Later and in-between I taught English for 25 years, so I endlessly edited student papers.
I also run poetry critiquing workshops, and an important aspect of critiquing is noticing how line breaks, word choices, etc. contribute to the success or failure of a poet’s ability to reach their
desired goal for the poem. At this point the only things I learn are new ways the language is changing: new pronoun usage, use of back slashes within lines, etc. But editing is definitely a great training in organizing your thoughts and being able to present yourself coherently. And this, in turn, makes you THINK more coherently.
What advice would you give writers trying to publish with your magazine?
I guess it’s the same advice any editor would give: read the magazine before you submit, so you understand what kind of work we publish. Be sure to read our mission statement on our home page so you understand what we are trying to accomplish.
What have been some of the high points of running a literary magazine?
Canary is free and we try to obtain enough private funding to pay our webmaster and to maintain our website. There are three of us doing it, and none of us is paid. So we sure don’t do it for the money. Nobody does. Don’t even think about it.
But I love, love, love the opportunity to read work by so many talented and passionate, mostly-unknown writers that I would not have read otherwise – people leading their own quiet campaigns in their neighborhoods to save the small piece of the planet on their watch. It’s very heartening that so MANY people are unobtrusively trying to live sustainably and without damaging the other occupants of the planet, who so many people view as their family.
What would be the one piece of advice you would give to a young aspiring editor looking to work for a literary journal or start their own literary journal?
Ask yourself why you are doing it. Do you want to have some say in what stands as good work in the culture? Do you love reading poems and short prose about the natural world, or whatever theme you plan to pursue? Don’t do it for the power. Don’t do it for the prestige. Turns out there IS a tiny bit of both, but to get to it your life becomes a shit show of self-promotion and marketing. (Well, that’s just me. I guess some people somewhere like that part of it. But no one that I know does.) But mainly you’re sitting in an office at a computer reading and writing responses. It’s the best job in the world if you love that part. If you don’t, don’t do it.
What do you look for in an applicant when selecting intern positions?
We have only ever had two interns and both of them came to my attention when they were my students when I was teaching college English. They were both super bright, had a really good sensibility about poetry – what was working and what was not – and both were very reliable hard workers. (Also, as it happened, both were chosen by me for all those reasons in addition to the
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fact that they seemed lost and about to head down roads that were beneath their skills. But don’t try that as a ploy for getting a job. Pretty unlikely to work, I’m guessing, and instead you might end up down that bad road.)
Was there anything in your college years that prepared you for the role of this editorial position?
I have an M.A. in English Lit/Creative Writing. That certainly was the main qualifier. I worked on the school lit magazine both in high school and in college.
What made you want to pursue a career in editing?
At the risk of repeating what I’ve said above, I love the work. I started a local online publication for women first, the idea being to showcase and discuss work in progress. It was wildly popular, and I expanded it into a local reading series in Nevada City, CA, up in the Sierra, where I was living at the time. For the series, once you had had something published at the site (Women’s Writing Salon), you were eligible to read at the local monthly readings. People read works in progress, and I think it was really helpful for beginning women writers in the community to get a view into what others were working on, to see where they seemed to be going awry, to see them, over the months, improve. We didn’t critique, but I think presenting your work aloud often causes you to realize what’s not working as you suddenly feel embarrassed to be reading it, or you notice that something is cliched or not making sense. You suddenly hear it “for the first time” and, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself, you notice what’s not working.
When we moved back to the SF Bay Area, I wanted to publish a higher quality of really finished work. I had been working with many of the women who submitted to the Salon page, and that was highly gratifying, but I felt burnt out on that and wanted to read and publish really good work.
I backslide now and then and work with someone to help them get a publishable poem (which is still also highly satisfying), but mostly I just marvel at all the people out there in obscurity writing lovely work.
What inspired you to create a niche literary journal about the environment?
I don’t know. It was the thing that was on my mind all the time. Our area of the world had been gold mined back in the day and there was mercury in many areas that was damaging the soil and the water supply. We were fighting the powers that be not to dam the beautiful and scenic Yuba River, and the air quality was heading down due to the pollution rising up to us on our mountain from Sacramento down below. There was a lot going wrong, and I became aware of how we
were a microcosm of the larger world. The more I learned, the more upsetting it was. It wasn’t a widespread understanding as it, thank god, is today. I am not political enough to enjoy going that route.
So it seemed to me that what I could do to help was small, but perhaps it would help some people to wake up. And if nothing else, it might serve as a reminder of all the beauty, the connection with the natural world, that we were betraying and stood to lose. Worst case scenario, it might stand as a reminder for those to come of how things once were; of how sad we were as it was disappearing; of how helpless we often felt in the face of the obliviousness of those only interested in the money and power they could reap.
I hope you three women go into the world and teach peace and oneness with the natural world, however you do it. You have that power, and will have that power when you graduate. Make your voices heard. Keep a record. Demand change. Mother has spoken. (Not me: the planet)