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Meet the Readers

Sarah Kosch

September 7, 2021


” . . . it’s heartening to know how thoughtfully submissions are handled at NER and other journals.”


Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER?
I live in Omaha, Nebraska, and I just started a new job as the content creator for Omaha Performing Arts. I write marketing materials and tell people why they should come see concerts and shows which is a pretty sweet gig! I’m also a fiction writer working on my own writing and editing the online lit mag Random Sample Review.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
I started reading for NER in 2018! I fell in love with literary journals in college and worked for The Iowa Review as an intern and then as an editor at Anomalous Press. Especially after college, it was a great way to keep tapped into the literary community no matter what I was doing for my day job. I took a break while I got my MFA but then I really missed reading submissions! A friend from my program who was reading for NER recommended that I get involved, and it’s been such a wonderful experience.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication?
Yes! “The Corridor” by Ryan Eric Dull (NER 41.2). 

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission?
I only read one or two stories in a sitting. I try to be really aware of my own mood and mindset so that I’m giving every submission a fair chance and am not voting no just because I’m grumpy or need a snack. I look for stories that capture my attention and keep me reading and I do a lot of second or third reads depending on the story. There are so many that are promising but maybe need another few drafts, so I always try to leave a note to consider sending them an encouraging rejection, since as a writer I know what a world of difference that can make.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally?
There’s an author who keeps submitting these fantastic stories about life after birds have gone extinct— but they keep getting accepted at other journals before we can accept them! Her first one that I read had an ending that lives rent-free in my mind; it was so gorgeous and right for the story.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits?
It helps me stay positive to know both sides of the submitting process. And it’s heartening to know how thoughtfully submissions are handled at NER and other journals. 

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend?
At the moment, I’m researching my novel in progress and reading a lot about horror and filmmaking. I love Stephen King’s essays on horror in Danse Macabre—he is such a generous teacher in his nonfiction (On Writing is also a favorite craft book of mine). 


Our staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Filed Under: News & Notes, Staff Reader Profile Tagged With: Ryan Eric Dull, Sarah Kosch

Meet the Readers

Andrew Kane

July 12, 2021


“I like more than anything to be surprised by freshness, especially freshness of language; I’m always looking for the novel turn of phrase, the inevitable volta that I somehow never saw coming.“


Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER?
I grew up in northern California—along the stretch of coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz—but I left for good in 2013, and I’ve been in Brooklyn for six years now. I’m currently in a social work grad program at NYU, so when I’m not reading for NER I’m mostly reading, writing, and interning for that. I also have a handful of freelance writing jobs, the most interesting of which is my role as a senior writer for the NPR program Ask Me Another, which is less time-consuming than it sounds.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
I’ve been reading for NER since May 2017, when NER put out a low-key call for readers via their mailing list. (I should note that my value as a reader was pretty limited for the first year or so, and I credit then–fiction editor Janice Obuchowski with some incredibly deft, patient, and not at all confrontational mentorship on that front.) I was also, at that time, casting about pretty desperately for some way to feel connected to the literary world—I’d attended a writers’ conference put on by the Virginia Quarterly Review but was otherwise very much at sea—and in that regard NER has been a terrific lifeline.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication?
Yes! After three years of reading and a handful of near misses, I was finally able to recommend a submission that ended up being selected for publication—a short story by Scott Broker, which is scheduled for inclusion in the next “Emerging Writers” issue (NER 42.4). I am very excited about this piece, which is so unlike anything else I’ve encountered in my time reading for the magazine.

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission?
I like more than anything to be surprised by freshness, especially freshness of language; I’m always looking for the novel turn of phrase, the inevitable volta that I somehow never saw coming. There is also a feeling, which I’ve gotten while reading certain submissions, when I can tell that an author is completely in control of their process: they know where they’re taking you and how you’ll be getting there, and they allow the story to unfold exactly as it needs to.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally?
Hands down the best story I’ve read in NER was Emma Duffy-Camparone’s “The Package Deal,” (NER 40.3), which is a rich and funny and very sexy story about a woman navigating her relationship with a newly-divorced father and his young son. Some other favorites have included “The Elephant God” (40.1) by Lauren Acampora, “The Corridor” (41.2) by Ryan Eric Dull, and “How Can You Be Happy?” (40.2) by Steve Almond—all of which, I’m now realizing, walk a fine line between comedy and despair—as well as a pair of stories by Scholastique Mukasonga (41.3, 39.1), who is top-notch. As for submissions, a few stories that didn’t make it to print still stay with me: there was one in particular, about a girl who stars in the DIY horror movies that her brother makes, that I think about fairly often.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits?
Honestly—and I’m no Malcolm Gladwell apologist by any means—the greatest boon has been the whole “ten thousand hours” thing: assessing the strengths and weaknesses of several hundred short stories annually is pretty well guaranteed to make one a better writer; at the very least, it’s made me a better, more critical editor of my own work. The variety of work I encounter as a reader has also empowered me to take more chances with my own writing, linguistically and plot-wise; it’s also helped me to crystallize my understanding of the nuts-and-bolts aspects of writing like story structure and character.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I tend to read a lot of short fiction—I recently read Joy Williams’s collection of microfictions, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which I enjoyed a lot, and am currently reading the Karen Russell collection Orange World, which I’m not particularly enjoying at all. Other recent hits were Brian Evenson’s collection Contagion and Emma Duffy-Camparone’s Love Like That (see above—I picked this up as soon as it came out and cannot recommend it highly enough). I also subscribe to One Story—I’m a sucker for anything shaped like a zine—where I recently read the story “Breastmilk” by ’Pemi Aguda; I’ve since tracked down some of her other work online and I think she’s terrific.


NER‘s staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

Filed Under: News & Notes, Staff Reader Profile Tagged With: Andrew Kane, Emma Duffy-Camparone, Lauren Acampora, Ryan Eric Dull, Scholastique Mukasonga, Scott Broker, Steve Almond

Behind the Byline

Ryan Eric Dull

August 14, 2020

A character type I find myself writing a lot is Person with nothing concrete at the center of their life, who, in their hunger for meaning, grabs ahold of a shaky set of principles / practices / ambitions and refuses to let go.

Author Ryan Eric Dull talks with NER fiction reader Andrew Kane about writing “The Corridor” (NER 41.2), which included “a lot of time pressed up against the wall trying to figure it out.”


Andrew Kane: This story is so thoroughly unexpected—it begins with the protagonist, Alex, relocating from Baltimore to Providence, and ends with him slathered in peanut oil, nude but for a belt, with enough food and water to survive several days inside an eight-inch-wide crevice. How did the idea for this piece come to be? Did it arrive more or less fully formed, or were extensive brainstorming and revisions necessary?

Ryan Eric Dull: The central idea kind of dropped from the ceiling. My wife wondered aloud why someone on social media was trying to lose weight and I said, “Maybe he’s trying to get through a really tight hallway,” which struck me as a funny thing to get passionate about, to be looking at this hallway every day thinking, “Soon.” From there, it was all step-by-step logical chain stuff: What kind of person does he need to be to end up wanting this so badly? What needs to be true about the building that it has this weird, barely usable hallway? The building renovations paralleled Alex’s self-transformation in a way that felt interesting, so I tried to make those elements dovetail. I wrote the first draft for a workshop (thanks again to Ben Loory and that whole group! Can I do shout-outs here? If so, my wife from a few sentences ago is named Allison) and I didn’t have a lot of time, so it was a lot of writing impulsively, letting one idea chase the next, that kind of thing. By this process, I gradually turned a spontaneous goof into a studied, laborious goof.

AK: There is a wonderful sense of physicality throughout the story, ranging from comical to terrifying—the scene where Alex becomes briefly stuck in the corridor reminded me of nothing so much as the starkest passages from James Salter’s rock-climbing novel Solo Faces. What was your vision for the overall tone of the piece? Was there any specific goal you hoped to achieve by working in the space between these modes?

RED: I’m glad the physicality works! I spent a lot of time pressed up against the wall trying to figure it out. Generally, I don’t think about tone in an instrumental way—I usually have a kind of intuitive sense of how I want the story to feel and then I orient all of the elements toward that feeling. In this case, I think the core concept of the story is so goofy that I had to keep the tone pretty earnest or it would have felt weightless. Maybe there’s a way to tell this story where Alex faces a little more ridicule from other characters and from the story itself, so the reader is a little more alienated from him and experiences the story more analytically. That could be interesting. But I wanted to take him seriously, which meant the struggle had to be genuinely arduous and the hallway had to be genuinely menacing. And of course treating something really undeniably silly with a lot of gravity creates kind of a funny dissonance for the reader, so everything feels heightened and strange. Ideally, I want to create an atmosphere where every sentence could plausibly end with a joke or a life-altering disaster.

AK: The character of Alex emerges in surprising ways. On the one hand, he willingly accepts his fairly dull workaday job; on the other, a primary reason for his return to Providence is that he remembers it as “alive with passionate intention”—certainly something he regains, though perhaps not in the way he had expected. What was it that drew you to writing this particular character, and how were you able to fully explore a protagonist whose primary arc is concerned with training to shimmy through a very tight space?

RED: A character type I find myself writing a lot is “Person with nothing concrete at the center of their life, who, in their hunger for meaning, grabs ahold of a shaky set of principles/practices/ambitions and refuses to let go.” Alex is reminiscing about a moment in his life where everyone around him had just finished the really purposeful, goal-oriented experience of formal education and was trying to ride that momentum into the rest of their lives. Now he’s becoming aware, without a lot of real understanding, that he never settled on any stable source of meaning, so he’s kind of drifting through his life, totally vulnerable to anything that can give him a sense of purpose. This is a pretty extreme version of that character type—he has to be searching so frantically with so little success or direction that this hallway adventure seems like a strong option. And once he’s invested, it’s like any other big ambition: he studies it, he approaches it from different angles, he arrives over and over again at junctures where he might reasonably decide it’s not worth the trouble, and every time he chooses to press ahead, he invests more of himself into the project, he makes it more and more this grand, totemic thing that has very little to do with his concrete goal and a lot to do with the heat of the ambition itself, everything else in his life is either incorporated into the ambition or discarded, and eventually he douses himself in peanut oil.

AK: The story walks a fine line between the straight-faced and the absurd, and the dialogue follows suit—a single spoken line can feel at once comical and vaguely sinister. Do you have a particular process for writing dialogue that feels so alive and believable on the page?

RED: Oh! My process is: I talk to myself a lot. I stage a scene in my head and kind of improvise through it over and over again and make a lot of dramatic facial expressions. When a phrase starts to feel resonant, I’ll iterate on that for a while and eventually write it down. This technique is easier to practice at home than at the library.

AK: Do you see this story as being part of a particular tradition of fiction writing? Who are some authors who have had an impact on you, either for this piece specifically or else as a writer in general?

RED: One possible influence for this piece that sticks out in my mind: I’d recently read the Brian Evenson story “Watson’s Boy,” which is about a family living a very narrow, ritualistic life in a labyrinth that is never explained or justified to the reader. It’s a real “begin with a blank space, then add a few elements” kind of story where the whole narrative universe is a handful of people in a fixed space, and it really drives home the lesson that any narrative circumstance can be visceral and affecting as long as the writer takes the characters’ experiences seriously. For a while after I read it, I was treating weird, implausible ideas for stories with a deeper respect. I probably wouldn’t have written this story if I hadn’t read that one. I definitely wouldn’t have written it so earnestly. Some other big names for me are Karen Joy Fowler, Steven Millhauser, Charles Portis, and Karen Russell, whose impact is maybe kind of traceable in this story, and Samuel R. Delany, Ted Chiang, E. L. Doctorow, and Annie Dillard, whose impact here is probably just about invisible.


Ryan Eric Dull lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in the Missouri Review and the Pushcart Prize Anthology and is upcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Andrew Kane is a writer and editor currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He writes for NPR’s Ask Me Another, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Rumpus, Rupture, the Normal School, Rattle, and elsewhere.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Andrew Kane, Ryan Eric Dull


Vol. 43, No. 2

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NER Digital

David Ryan

Behind the Byline

David Ryan

NER’s Elizabeth Sutton speaks with 43.2 contributor David Ryan about juxtaposition, character development, and writing around gaps in his story “Elision.”

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