by Regina Waters
Matti Ben-Lev is a queer nonfiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He has been published by McSweeney’s, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Jake lit mag, and more. Matti was a part of Grub Street staff for Volume 72 and has contributed to Volume 74 and Grub Street Online. He is currently pursuing his MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University where he is the assistant nonfiction editor for their intersectional feminist literary magazine, So To Speak. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matti about his experiences with working at lit mags and writing.
This interview was conducted over Zoom by Regina Waters and was transcribed and edited for clarity and length.
Regina Waters: You served as the social media editor and an assistant poetry editor for Grub Street. Now, you are the assistant nonfiction editor at So To Speak, an intersectional feminist magazine run by George Mason’s MFA. What did you learn from these experiences?
Matti Ben-Lev: Mainly, I learned a lot about how lit mags operate. I learned about the slush pile, I learned about weeding through submissions, I learned about when edits need to be made, and how you have that conversation with the writer. For example, we had a poem that looked like a prose poem, and our EIC was trying to fit it on the page in InDesign, which was crazy difficult. In the end, we wrote to the author and asked, “Are you okay with us changing the line breaks?”
And another poem that I still love, “How to Deal with a Brick,” looks like a wall of text with chunks missing, forming the appearance of a brick wall. We accepted it because we loved it. Our GS advisor sat with a TA for something like 8 hours trying to format this one poem!
So, I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making a good lit mag. Something I saw while working for Grub Street that I carried into my work as assistant nonfiction editor at So To Speak is the impact of my voice and opinion. I loved how I could champion a piece that I wanted to accept, and seeing that my voice makes a difference. For example, when I was a reader for So To Speak, there was a really good piece that I liked called “Mushroom Clouds” that others were on the fence about, and I convinced them to accept it, and it got published in our last print issue. It was a similar experience with Grub Street.
Through my experiences at Grub Street and So To Speak, I learned a lot about developmental and copy editing. I did not realize the vast difference between developmental edits and copy edits, and how you go about making those edits and communicating with the writers. Of course, writers have the ultimate say in those decisions. It’s a fine balance between editors knowing that changes can make a piece better and making sure the writers still have agency.
I also learned how frustrating it is when you’re about to accept a piece, and the writer pulls it because it got accepted elsewhere.
At So To Speak, for each genre, we have one “panic-button” acceptance, where we can just snag one piece immediately before it is published somewhere else. So, for our upcoming issue, we found a piece, and we just snagged it in a day. Now, we’re all bouncing back and forth and talking about the edits that need to be made. I also like the fast pace and being around art. Being exposed to art I wouldn’t otherwise read is really neat.
RW: How would you define developmental edits?
MBL: I see developmental edits as anything that goes outside the box of punctuation. I even consider changing a line break in a poem to be a developmental edit.
A big edit changes the meaning of the piece. You can argue punctuation does the same thing, especially in poetry, but punctuation usually shifts how you read something or how a specific line lands. Developmental edits work differently. Take the piece we snagged—we’re suggesting we cut the last line because the penultimate line hits harder. I’d call this a major developmental edit.
I, and So To Speak, believe that if we accept a piece, we’re willing to publish a piece as is, and any edits that we suggest, the writer can veto.
RW: What advice do you have for aspiring lit mag editors?
MBL: Be a reader first, if you can. It was helpful for me to be in a backseat role for a while. I read for George Mason’s two lit mags—So To Speak and Phoebe—before applying to be an editor. I think it’s helpful to observe people who know what they’re doing. And of course, when you become an editor you realize that actually none of us really know what we’re doing! I guess that’s the mirage of working with art. What I didn’t realize when I was submitting to mags—before working at one—is how chaotic the backend is.
That’s my advice: become a reader first. There are lots of good magazines that anyone can apply to read for. I have friends who read for Ploughshares, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, Jake lit mag. It’s not hard to become a reader for a decent magazine. Just don’t expect to get paid for it; you get paid in the experience.
It’s an immensely rewarding process, and the truth is—and I think most people will admit this—we don’t necessarily read every word of every piece that comes in. We get works that are 5,000 words. If by the fourth page we know we’re not going to take it, we won’t keep reading. A lot of magazines are like that. There’s a flash magazine that I’ve submitted to 7 times before I got published called HAD. They usually cap at 150 submissions, so pretty much within a minute of them opening, they hit the cap. They go through subs within 3 hours, so their rejection process is quick.
RW: In reading submissions for any genre, what craft elements did you decide to incorporate in your own writing or try to emulate?
MBL: A lot of my essays and poems start by mimicking what other writers are doing. That goes for pieces I read at Grub Street and So To Speak, and my peers’ work. I ask myself, “Can I borrow their form? What are they doing that I admire?” This often resulted in unique pieces that look nothing like the original work that inspired me.
So To Speak accepted a piece that plays with a Greek myth and uses mythology to stand in for a situation in the narrator’s life. That’s something that I read and asked myself, “How can I play with that idea in my own work? What myths can I use to stand in for a situation in a meaningful way?”
When I worked for Grub Street, there were some pieces we accepted that I definitely tried to mimic or borrow from. Borrowing form is very generative for me. So I often think, when reading: What can I borrow from this form? What inspires me about this piece?
RW: In your 2023 interview with Professor Jeannie Vanasco, a memoirist and this year’s faculty advisor, you asked her what GS meant to her. She said she loves it when students find meaning in the lit mag and everything that goes into producing it. What did you enjoy about working on Grub Street? Has that meaning changed for you?
MBL: The sense that my voice really mattered and doing work in a way that felt not-performative. I’m sure there’s a better way to state that! I also just like being around art. I like having conversations about art, I like questioning it and hearing from our readers about what stands out for them in a given piece.
On the more stressful days, it can be like, “Okay, let’s look at this piece” and, “Okay, we have 10 more pieces to get to in this hour. Let’s see where we’re at.” When you slow down, you get to read pieces you wouldn’t otherwise read, which makes you think outside the box as an artist, and getting to participate in art and it passing through your hands is a really magical and powerful experience.
RW: How would you describe your writing niches, if you have any?
MBL: I think I can be really funny, and this memoir and what you just read, and the poem that y’all accepted does not fit with this, but I like writing about politics, and I like humor. I think those are some niches that I’ve discovered more recently. I wrote a short story recently that got published that has a lot of humor in it. I’ve written a lot of political satire. I like that kind of stuff. I like writing about politics to point out the absurd. Outside of that, I think it’s strong imagery, writing about people and relationships, and trying to do that work without telling you I’m doing the work. “Phosphene” is a perfect example of that. “How can I do the work that the ocean is doing without telling you what it’s talking about?” You just kind of infer.
I’m a sucker for lyrical writing. I think that lyrical writing is the niche that I hope I fit. I like flash, although I’ve kind of taken a step back to invest time in longer works. And political satire is almost like a much-needed comedic relief from the harder writing, which is very emotional, and, also from the world we live in, it feels I can almost take a break by pointing out the absurd. I wrote a piece that got published in McSweeney’s. It was written as a letter from the Department of Homeland Security to send in Optimus Prime to combat protesters. McSweeney’s took that. I was overjoyed. But I’m literally watching democracy crumble, and that’s a way that I can find a light in the absurd. It is not the same as actually taking action and going out there and protesting and organizing food drives. I’m not gonna compare the two, but it does feel like an act of artist resistance because I think all art is inherently political. Even if you’re not talking about it, you’re creating art within a political world, and so all of it will be political.
RW: How much verisimilitude do you think a writer should aim for, especially as time passes and our understanding changes? I define it as how real the truth can actually be.
MBL: The memoirist Mary Carr wrote this craft book about memoir, and she talked about when she was teaching creative nonfiction at a university. On the first day of class, she would stage an incident where another professor would come in and scream at her, throw her stuff on the floor, start this loud argument, and then walk out. And the whole class is shocked. She’d be like, “That was staged, I want you to take out a piece of paper and write out everything that you saw happening when you thought it was real.” She collected them and then a month later, she had them recount the exact experience they saw, and then handed them back the sheet of paper. They all basically wrote different things like clothing and items being broken, except for a couple people who had photographic memories. I think there’s no such thing as pure honesty. We can both agree that a table is a table, and a chair is a chair, (that’s a Jeannie line), but outside of that, truth is so subjective. I think we owe it to our readers to be emotionally honest.
I’ve written some things during the pandemic when I was living with my parents for a while that I’ve recently gone back and read, and I’m like, that’s not true or real. Like, now that I have the remove, I can see that’s not really how that happened. So I think we have that duty to be as honest and close to the truth emotionally as possible and not change a situation.
You can have that kind of speculative sense in memoir and nonfiction, and in poetry since you have more room. I don’t think there are those lines in poetry. I’ve definitely written poems that are more confessional and more non-fiction-adjacent, but I’ve also written poems where I’m just trying to convey an emotion and what happens in them isn’t true.
I think with nonfiction, we do have that duty to be as honest as we can be, and just acknowledge that truth is also very subjective. I shared the original draft of “Phosphene” with my mom, who’s a central character in that piece, and she explained, “I remember this moment, that didn’t happen exactly like that.” We have a lot of latitude by using words like “maybe” and “perhaps” and a duty to the people that we’re writing about to be as emotionally honest as we can be, especially if they could get hurt by what we write.
RW: What makes a work successful?
MBL: I took this flash course with this really awesome flash writer, and I asked, “How do I know when this piece is done? I’ve been editing it, and it’s something that got published a while ago.” I wrote it for the memoir and took it out, and realized this is a flash piece, and it works really well. She quoted this director who answered, “How do you know when a movie’s finished?” He said, “When it gets released.” So, I think it’s kind of the same thing with this. “How do I know when a piece is done?” Because it is published.
So, whether it’s successful or not, I guess I hear from people their thoughts and know if it’s successful, is it conveying what I want it to convey? There are times I’ve written poetry and prose, and someone goes, “wow, you really indicated such and such.” And I’m like, “Not my intention, but I’ll claim the credit.”
I think a lot of the decisions we make in writing we make because it feels right and then justify them later. So when a piece feels successful, it’s like, “Did I make you feel something? What did this mean to you? Did you read it?” If you read it, that’s successful. Even if you didn’t like it, if you read all of what I wrote, that’s a success.
Regina Waters is a senior at Towson University pursuing a degree in English. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street Online.
