Hey everyone! Happy winter season from Los Angeles! Today I have two exciting announcements to make, both of which have been brewing for a while and are firsts for us.
As you know, we have a small editorial team, currently consisting of myself, Mel, and Cerid. We love running this magazine, and we also have busy lives outside of it, so it’s always been my mission to ensure that we don’t burn out because let’s be real, running a magazine is basically running a small business. As a result of deliberately taking things slow, we have accumulated a sizable backlog of submitted pieces that need to be reviewed. (Thank you sincerely for your patience, dear submitters!) That’s where my first announcement comes in.
A few months ago, we put out a call for slush readers and we got a pile of applications from immensely talented writers and readers interested in helping us out. After several rounds of interviews, we narrowed it down to six lovely individuals who I am thrilled to introduce today as our inaugural group of slush readers!
Please give a warm welcome to our newest members of the team: Helen, Travis, Grace, Julia, Matt, and Sarah! Read about them below and also find them on our Staff Page.
Welcome to our new slush readers!
Grace McGuire
Slush Reader
Grace McGuire is a nonbinary poet, editor, and essayist born and raised in San Diego, California. They began performing spoken word poetry at age sixteen and carried their passion for the English language into adulthood, centering their work on the exploration of gender identity and the trials of growing up in the digital age. Their Substack, Dog-Fearing Man, features bi-weekly essays about the ways online subcultures impact our real-life relationships. Grace’s work has appeared in Advintage Press, The Ana, and Compass Rose Literary Journal.
Travis Flatt
Slush Reader
Travis Flatt (he/him) is a teacher and actor living with his wife and son in Cookeville, Tennessee. He writes flash fiction and CNF. His stories appear in JMWW, HAD, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. He enjoys dogs, theater, and theatrical dogs.
Julia C Gaytan
Slush Reader
Julia C Gaytan is a self-proclaimed math geek who spends her weekdays teaching high school math and her weeknights battling her inner demons with poetry and short stories through the sword of the pen(cil). It is in this space that she embraces her truth while also exploring different identities and realities, all the while clothing her pieces in mathematical and scientific garments. Julia grew up in the Nickerson Gardens, a housing project of Watts, and attended inner city k-12 schools until attending UCLA as an undergraduate and then graduate student. It is there where she learned the importance of acknowledging her roots and identity as a Chicana poet. Recently, her work was published in The Waiting Room, an anthology by Nervous Ghost Press. She currently lives with her two children in southern California.
M.R. Lehman Wiens
Slush Reader
M.R. Lehman Wiens is a writer and stay-at-home dad living in Kansas. His work has previously appeared in The First Line, Hearth and Coffin, WayWords, and others.
Helen Meneilly
Slush Reader
Helen Meneilly is an Irish poet who is currently living in Toronto. She holds an MA in Creative Writing, and her work has found homes in a variety of magazines. She loves stormy weather, video games, and becoming immediate close friends with strangers’ dogs as often as possible.
Sarah Hermes Griesbach
Slush Reader
Sarah Hermes Griesbach (she/her) was co-founder and executive editor for St. Louis’s All the Art Quarterly. She regularly authors articles on art, culture, history, and social and environmental justice topics for numerous small regional, large national, and academic publications. She is also a writer of fiction with her fingers in many writing group pies. When not in front of her computer, she can be found flailing around on improv stages in New York City.
Our slush readers are currently in training to get a feel for what kind of pieces we are looking for here at The Metaworker and it’s been a pleasure to work together and get to know each other thus far. As I’ve said many times in our meetings, I truly appreciate their effort and time, and am looking forward to hearing their input.
Along with our readers, we have also brought on a podcast intern! Her name is Lissa Muir and she has been doing a wonderful job of copy-editing our podcast transcripts. Another goal of mine is to make our content as accessible as possible, and with Lissa’s help we will be able to achieve that for our podcast episodes.
This leads me to my second big announcement. Bringing on slush readers will not only help us move through our submission queue a little faster, it will also free up my, Mel, and Cerid’s time a bit to focus on other projects for The Metaworker that we’ve been wanting to work on for a while. One of those projects is nominating the incredible work we publish every year for awards. We at The Metaworker know our contributors are awesome, and to be able to formally recognize them with award nominations is one way we can give them our support.
So this year, for the first time, I am thrilled to announce our inaugural batch of Pushcart Prize nominees! It was so tough to choose only six, and the three of us editors had quite a lengthy discussion about it, but we are proud to nominate these six pieces because we loved the imagery, themes, technical construction, and raw vulnerability that we experienced while reading them. These six pieces represent a sampling of the diverse genres, styles, and authors that we publish. We are so excited to be able to call ourselves an award-nominating magazine going forward because our writers are brilliant and they deserve it.
Below you can find links to all six of our nominated pieces to read and share:
2023 Pushcart Prize Nominees
The Beach by Daniel Brennan
Thirst by Chris Cooper
Desquamation by Frank Njugi
Retreat by Amita Basu
For Thea by Linda Lacy
Lives of Dust and Ashes by Marie-Louise McGuinness
It’s amazing to be able to say that our magazine is growing! I could hardly imagine it when we first started this wayyy back in 2015 and I am grateful that so many people have found value in our little magazine–that is actually not so little anymore! I feel lucky to be able to work with all the talented folks who have contributed to The Metaworker over the years and thrilled that people still seem to like what we’re doing and want to be part of it. So thank you to everyone reading this and to everyone who submits to us. And thank you to my team for being the amazing people you are. I am so glad to be going on this journey with you 🙂
Elena L. Perez
Editor in Chief, The Metaworker
