Latest Lorin Stein Quotes from Interviews

• It used to be that you would go into a writing program and what you would learn was how to write a short story. You would pick up the magazines and you would be taught from the magazines how to write a short story. Nowadays student writers are learning to write novels because that market is gone, so the ones who are drawn to the form are doing it really for reasons of their own and that's really exciting.

  Lorin Stein

  Writing, Students, Reason

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I don't think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we're getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue.

  Lorin Stein

  Thinking, Issues, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I've found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I've felt, especially at first, when we'd put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together.

  Lorin Stein

  Reading, Thinking, Issues

  Source: therumpus.net

• I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we've published are with people who really interest me.

  Lorin Stein

  Jobs, People, Interviews

  Source: therumpus.net

• I have the feeling that the magazine can reach many more people than it reaches and has something to offer that not everyone knows who should know it. That's why we're starting an app, and that's why we do the blog. But editorially, I think it's mainly a matter of keeping your eyes peeled. You just really don't know what's going to come along.

  Lorin Stein

  Eye, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention.

  Lorin Stein

  Running, Thinking, Two

  Source: therumpus.net

• You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.

  Lorin Stein

  Editors, Voice, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

• Names don't matter, CVs don't matter, previous publications don't matter at all, because, in a certain way, the ideal is for someone to come completely out of left field. And still, of course, it is hard to say no to a writer who matters a lot to you and who you know matters to your readers.

  Lorin Stein

  Names, Who You Know, Matter

  Source: therumpus.net

• Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office.

  Lorin Stein

  Morning, Lying, Kids

  Source: therumpus.net

• A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.

  Lorin Stein

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content.

  Lorin Stein

  Stories, Short Story, Nighttime

  Source: therumpus.net

• I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms.

  Lorin Stein

  Bad Ass, Thinking, Waiting Rooms

  Source: therumpus.net

• I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

  Lorin Stein

  Fun, Thinking, Self

  Source: therumpus.net

• I've never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn't actually find really fun to read. Or, if not "fun," engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness.

  Lorin Stein

  Fun, Density, May

  Source: therumpus.net

• I hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.

  Lorin Stein

  Fun, Men, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I was a book editor, I got used to being told that my tastes were dark or edgy. These are not words that would've occurred to me, but I was told that enough that I have to believe it's true - that I like things that some other people find off-putting or upsetting. My job is to publish stuff that I really, really care about. That might mean that it doesn't sit well with everybody.

  Lorin Stein

  Jobs, Believe, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

• For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it's needed, whether it's publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there's that.

  Lorin Stein

  Magazines, Wells, Needed

  Source: therumpus.net

• There are two basic defenses for an open ending: one is, If you read carefully enough, you'll know what happened. And the other is, That's how life is: things don't come to neat endings, there isn't a "happily ever after." But if you take that second line of defense, then I think you have to make the point that the writer has shown the range of possibility.

  Lorin Stein

  Thinking, Two, Defense

  Source: therumpus.net

• I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story.

  Lorin Stein

  Regret, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before.

  Lorin Stein

  Stories, Taught, Short Story

  Source: therumpus.net

• We've never had a giant circulation. And we've always been a magazine for writers and for sophisticated readers. We've never had to run stories that would appeal to a million people. And what you end up with is a kind of tradition that might have staying power - the cockroach after armageddon.

  Lorin Stein

  Running, People, Giants

  Source: therumpus.net

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