Meet the Editor: Kasey Peters
In this Meet the Editor series, we’re asking our assistant editors about their work on the Schooner and thoughts on their respective genres. Read our first installment with assistant fiction editor Kasey Peters below.
Kasey Peters
Assistant Fiction Editor
What brought you to UNL and to working with the Schooner?
I started my graduate work here a few years ago, after a long hiatus from higher education during which I worked on small-scale farms. I gradually realized I needed to be in a world of language, in community with people who think about language. As soon as I began my graduate work here, I began reading for the Schooner. I’ve moved from reader to Nonfiction Editor to Fiction Editor.
What do you look for when reading submissions?
I look for a feeling. A sparking sensation in my brain. It’s sometimes a combination of premise and the gradual reveal, it’s sometimes a character or voice, it’s sometimes the shape of sentences. I approach each piece with an openness, a readiness to learn it. A story has to keep rewarding that engagement.
Can you recall one piece you were moved by and why?
Oh, many. I remember one piece that opens with a young woman getting her hair done, and fielding comments by her family about her weight and appearance. The story has such gorgeous juxtaposition of her tender, pragmatic interiority working to keep itself from hardening into self-loathing in the face of her family’s (and society’s) caustic love/hate language. The story follows the young woman into unsettling situations as she balances on this tight rope of self-protection and self-love. She lives. She owns herself. You love her, too. That piece was moving for me because of the language, the transparency and sly agency of the protagonist, and because it went beyond articulating the crisis and made the almost-impossible turn toward ebullience, toward joy.
Has working as an editor for Prairie Schooner impacted your own creative work?
It certainly has! I pay much more attention to the first page—the first paragraph, the first sentence—of each of my own projects, now that I have a sense of just how crucial those moments are for a reader who’s reading A LOT of submissions.
Also, frankly, it’s made me much less vulnerable to rejections of my work. If we accept something, it’s because we think it’s really good. But the reverse is not necessarily true: sometimes we reject things that we think are really good, but maybe we’ve recently accepted not just one but TWO really good stories dealing with the similar premise of, say, ten year old boys and queer awakening. Or it could be the case that the voice feels somewhat tonally similar to the other voices in our lineup. Or it could be that some of us like it and some of us felt fine about it, and it’s good but not quite in our collective top-five. Rejection is, in that sense, a numbers game. I would like to believe that the good stuff eventually finds a place. Case in point, I recently read a contest winning story (from another journal) that I recognized immediately. I rejected that story. (I hemmed and hawed about it a little; it took me a week to reject it; the hemming and hawing was the deciding factor). There is a kind of inexplicable chemistry between reader and story, and that chemistry is malleable, dependent on everything else the reader has ever read, what they’ve read recently, and maybe even what they’ve encountered on the street just this morning. This is not a hard science. We are trying to fall in love.
What draws you into a short story?
Language. The sentence. The rate of revelation of the world. I like a story that teaches me to read it, but also stays one step ahead of me. This is a kind of care, an invitation to ride a well-built roller coaster.
How do you balance narrative clarity with artistic risks?
I think you don’t. You move toward connection. Which of those things—clarity or ‘artistic risk’—serves connection? What language, form, tone, sensibility, etc., do you need to communicate this story? What material does the story demand, in order to be felt by the reader? Maybe it demands your home language, or a kind of cacophonous clutter, or a narrow, blinding interiority. If you are imagining a reader in awe of the abstraction of your visual description, you are not imagining connection with me. Imagine me holding my throat while I read, or floating out of my seat. Imagine me shouting into the screen.
What would you like to see more of in contemporary fiction?
Good sex. Also, unrelatedly or maybe relatedly, sports drama.
Kasey Peters is a queer writer from Nebraska. A 2025 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant; the winner of the Porter House Review 2023-2024 Editor’s Prize judged by Elisa Gabbert; and a winner of a 2022 AWP Intro Journals Award, their writing is in Pinch, Grist, South Carolina Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Their work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts and the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Before this, Peters farmed for a decade.