A group of English students from Providence College interviewed me about editing Identity Theory, an online literary magazine I founded almost 22 years ago.
We talked about:
- How to prepare for a career in editing
- How social media impacts my relationship with writers
- The challenges of editing a fully online journal
- The qualities I evaluate when hiring editors
- Much more
A clip:
I: How would you describe your role in Identity Theory to someone who is looking to pursue a career in literary editing and publishing? Are there any downsides to your career that people don’t realize when working in this field?
Matt Borondy: My role in Identity Theory consists of different capacities: web development, social media management, editing, writing, HR, and more. It’s more of a hobby or craft than a career, in the sense that it’s not done with any strict intention of making money. Which I suppose would be its biggest drawback. My personality is such that the “traditional” path of undergrad to MFA to writing to academia never appealed to me enough to pursue it, and I think the most interesting way to be involved in the literary world is to have only one foot in it, with another doing something completely different. But on the other hand, a fully funded MFA leading to a stable job probably would have been a sweet life as well. There is no one path, and probably the big theme of our site is that all roads can lead to literature.
Read the rest of our interview about editing at the Providence College literary magazine The Alembic.