What I want to see when reading work for Diagram or my other literary projects is evidence of an essential, irreducible, even uncomfortable human weirdness. People are weird. AI is not, or not in that way. Writing to the center is boring because everyone tries to go there. It’s better to work at the margins—or all the way in them. Not everyone will get it and that is fine. A bad writing group or workshop or editor wants to rub the edges off your work. Don’t let them. A good one identifies, highlights, and sharpens those edges so you can figure out what you can cut with them and how to make them gleam. Things that cut and gleam are useful tools. Of course none of this is simple: The problem we each have to individually solve is how to pull as many of us as possible into the weird world of you.
—Ander Monson, editor, Diagram and New Michigan Press
Photo credit: Aiden Avery