by Elsa Pair ||
What is Glass Mountain’s aesthetic? Essentially, Glass Mountain looks for new writing from emerging writers. Not being committed to a specific theme or style or topic allows us to publish interesting and engaging writing in all its various shapes and forms. The lack of a fixed aesthetic allows for wildly diverse submissions. I think—and I imagine most of the other Glass Mountain editors would agree with me—that diversity is one of the most important things for a literary magazine to have.
During my previous years as a reader on the Glass Mountain poetry team, the past editors never really specified what kind of poetry or writing we were looking for. The aesthetics they described left lots of room for interpretation. At first I found this difficult—how would I know what types of poetry to be on the lookout for without a guideline? Highly curated aesthetics can be helpful, but they can also be overly restrictive, and I found that the lack of strict guidelines ended up being a gift. It meant that I (and the other poetry readers) were free to go to bat for poems that others may have overlooked.
Because of this, I was lucky enough to learn a lot about what kinds of poems I like and what kinds I don’t. For example, I tend to have a fondness towards poems about experiences with motherhood and womanhood, poems written in free verse, and poems that take up space on the page in an unusual way. Truthfully, I didn’t know that I liked these kinds of poems before I read for Glass Mountain, and I may not have ever learned this about myself had I not joined as an editor. Sure, these kinds of poems are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re mine. The fact that the magazine supports such a variety of writing taught me new ways to view my own writing.
If I’m being honest—and I bet any student who’s taken a creative writing or literature class will back me up on this—I likely would not have been exposed to so many literary voices if I had not joined Glass Mountain. English classes, especially now, often do their best to be inclusive and diverse in the readings they assign, but curriculums and time crunches only allow for so much exploration. I love Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson just as much as the next reader, and yes, I do think they’re crucial to the literary canon, but we must remember that the classic and iconic writers are not the only models for new writers. I can probably count on one hand the number of classes I’ve had that have incorporated poems by queer writers or writers of color. And yet when I wade through submissions for Glass Mountain, it seems that every fifth poem touches on queerness or race, or is at least influenced by it in some way. It’s important to remember that pieces written by people from marginalized backgrounds don’t have to explicitly be about their backgrounds. We would be doing a disservice to the literary and academic communities (and to our social community as a whole) if we did not emphasize voices from all backgrounds on a variety of subjects. We have a responsibility as editors to be inclusive to all.
Aside from lived experience, poems with diverse forms and styles are important too. As the new poetry editor, I wanted my team’s voices to be evident and to have our selections for the magazine reflect what values they saw in a poem. The poetry section should not be filled solely with poems I like, or one type of poem, and I made it clear to them that I wanted to know their thoughts and opinions so that the finished product would reflect our team. My only stipulation was diversity. There’s nothing wrong with a literary journal that only publishes nature poems or absurdist fiction, but with our emphasis on showcasing new writers, we don’t want to restrict ourselves in that way and risk missing out on something completely different and equally great. Glass Mountain is not made up of one kind of person or one kind of student, and each reader in the poetry section reads a poem differently and is drawn to different aspects of a piece. So why fill the poetry section with only one kind of writing?
We’ve looked at iambic pentameter, ghazals, and prose poetry. We’ve loved some and passed on others. The wonderful thing about having an open door is that there’s something for almost everyone and we have the luxury to be able to talk it over and decide. Glass Mountain will look different every issue, wonderfully different and unique as long as we keep prioritizing varied work.
