Tuesday: An Art Project became one of my favorite poetry journals this year. While at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Denver, I met Jennifer Flescher. Flescher edits Tuesday. The original concept thrilled me. Each issue contains a set of postcards, which contain either photographs, prints, or a poem. A colorful piece of paper — similar in weight to construction paper — wraps each set of postcards.

On the plane, I put my tray table down and carefully removed one postcard at a time. I found myself wanting to keep them in the original order. Eventually, I realized I had no idea which way they’d been, so I had to be okay with letting them get “out of order.” What’s funny is that you can read the poems and view the art in any order you want. Why did I care? I had to laugh at myself.

Visit the Tuesday: An Art Project website and subscribe.

My interview with Jennifer Flescher follows:

32: On the Tuesday: An Art Project website, I read that you named the journal after a poem of yours. Could you describe how you made that choice?

JF: Well, when I wrote the poem I was thinking about a sort of strange, dissociated day. It had been raining all week, so the days were sort of blurring together. Tuesday is both specific and vague at the same time. It’s also a sort of lost day — not laden with a lot of other things — a strange transition day….I was in a strange transition — suspension. This is, of course, one of those connections you create after rather than before, but maybe the journal is the same kind of transition spot — after creation but before really traveling on.

32: Your journal is unique in that it provides poems, prints, and photographs on postcard-sizes of paper. Each issue contains a handful of cards wrapped inside colored paper. What led you to create a journal in this format?

JF: Well, I’ve seen a lot of them cropping up… it’s always a mixed flattery. I was a book maker. I made books all the time and also holiday cards — my cards were very elaborate, and I would make about 100 of them a year. In the last incarnation they looked a lot like Tuesday — they had loose pieces bound together with a silk ribbon. That happened partly because I wanted people to be able to keep the photo of the kids and toss the rest, come February… I think that feeling of editing garbage had a lot to do with it. I only ever want to keep the parts of a piece that are important to me — I want to be able to leave the rest behind — I want to give away a piece if it seems meant for someone I know. I came across a project in DC in which someone was sending out a postcard/poem a month — I loved that idea. Bound journals frustrate me sometimes — I hate to get rid of them and I hate to keep them… At the same time, the holiday cards were frustrating me — because I wanted to do something more important — to have a content that really complimented the beautiful format I was creating. I was a journalist, and missed the community and importance I felt in reporting. It all sort of fell in pretty quickly. I love hearing stories of people sending them through the mail and putting them on their mirrors. I have a friend who is a literacy specialist in an elementary school — she leaves poems in the bathroom. I love that.

32: Readers of this blog may be interested in sending you work. What should poets know — beyond what’s in your submission guidelines — about what you’d like to see in a poem? Are there certain kinds of poems that you’d not publish?

JF: I always squirm out of this kind of question because it seems to me that it will limit my options. People often ask if I print visuals connected to poems — I don’t really do that. I look for bravery and risk. I look for an emotional center. I suppose that is my prejudice. I don’t publish light verse. I try to trust my authors — so that I would rather publish my favorite author’s favorite poem than my favorite poem by my favorite author. I think that publishing is cooperative — I prefer it to be.

32: A wise and well-respected editor of poetry and fiction told me that every editor has their prejudice in terms of what they do not want to read. Are there certain subjects that repel you?

JF: Yes — writing. And teaching. A lot of us are in that world &mdash and I think it’s natural to write about it — but I also am not interested. I guess it gets back to the emotional core concept — I’m not interested in what we are trying to write in between what we have to write.

32: What is the most challenging aspect of running a literary journal?

JF: Just time and money. Same as writing, and teaching. All of which I love so much. Distribution can be hard, but we are really lucky — amazing little bookstores all over the country write me and ask for copies.

32: You’ve been published in The Harvard Review, Lit, The Boston Globe, Agni, Jubilat, and Poetry Daily. What advice do you have for writers just starting to send their work out to magazines?

JF: Remember when you send that it is the beginning of a relationship. Think hard about presenting yourself with respect, and remember that it is only the beginning. A relationship with an editor can take years to develop — and that is a wonderful thing! You want people who are really reading and listening to the work. Always send again, and never send frustrated vent e-mails in your moment of rejection. Some of the people I was most bruised by helped me the most later…

32: Where do you most like to create? Do you have a studio in your house? Do you prefer to work in public somewhere?

JF: I have an office — it’s too filled to work in. I work on my couch, in the very early morning. Also out in coffee shops. I love to write traveling — I guess in every place I need some element of dissociation — of otherness. I can’t quite merge it with my real real life — if I do, my kids have to yell and poke me to get me to hear them…

32: What question would you like to answer that we did not ask?

The one question I think I would add is — about editorial mission. I’m not sure how I would phrase the answer, but the question goes something like this…

I think that, as is true in all of publishing, publishing in the literary world remains a fairly gated community. I think about that all the time, and I feel it is a privilege and a responsibility to be editing. I’m interested in the kind of work that I like — which tends to be slightly more experimental than the norm — but I am also interested in opening doors and crossing boundaries. I think that this often means reading and printing work that is outside of my comfort zone — but poetry, I believe, shouldn’t always be comfortable — or maybe, should rarely be — and that can mean many different things. If we don’t somehow cross boundaries of readers and writers we remain a tragically compartmentalized society.