Meet the Editor: Travis Cohen Acosta
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 seventh installment with assistant fiction editor Travis Cohen Acosta below.
Travis Cohen Acosta
Assistant Fiction Editor
What brought you to UNL and to working with the Schooner?
I came to Lincoln because of three authors: Joy Castro, Stacey Waite, and Natalia Martinez. Joy is one of my favorite authors, and the way she writes about identity and belonging, about loss and trauma and resilience, has had a huge influence on my own work. She has a mind I admire and want to learn from. She’s just an exquisitely honest writer. One of my mentors, Julie Marie Wade, introduced me to Stacey’s writing (Julie’s another big reason I’m here) and I was obsessed with her work. There’s an authenticity and unabashedness in Stacey’s books, qualities that are also ingrained in her personality, and they make her exactly the kind of teacher I want to work with and work towards growing into. Natalia was the one who convinced me to apply to UNL in the first place. She studied here and has always spoken highly of the program, and she is the best poet and short story writer I know. I trust her. That’s how I got to Nebraska.
As for the Schooner, I worked as an editor for the literary magazine at my MFA program, Gulf Stream Magazine, and I loved the work. I’ve been a huge fan of Prairie Schooner for a long time, since before I even knew it was associated with the university, so to wind up getting to join this program and then getting to work with this magazine, it just feels like kismet.
What do you look for when reading submissions?
I look for work that surprises me. I don’t need a piece of writing to show me something I didn’t know existed (although that’s always nice to find), but I do need it to make me feel something in a way that I didn’t already feel it at the beginning of the reading. Sometimes that means changing my thinking, sometimes it means elevating the resonance of an emotion I’m already situationally attuned to, a deepening of feeling. I want language that feels like it has blood going to it or flowing out of it, prose that doesn’t just feel like dead language arranged on the page. I like writing that asks questions, especially ones it doesn’t have answers for, but that asks them with the confidence of knowing they need asking.
Can you recall one piece you were moved by and why?
The first story that comes to mind was one we printed at Gulf Stream. It was a speculative piece set on another planet that this group of scientists with different backgrounds had set out to terraform and colonize and for all the worldbuilding that premise sounds like it would require, all the weight and emotional charge of the story were really in the relationships, in the losses they were enduring, the sadness tied up in complicated love, and the bittersweet optimism of a possible future. It was this incredibly human, grounded piece of storytelling that was restrained but also devastating. It made me think of something Octavia Butler might have written. Which isn’t to say that I want to see more work that reads like Octavia Butler, because I don’t particularly care whether a story is set in the South of France or the Southside of Chicago or on the other side of the Horsehead Nebula—the story should be set where it’s set because it needs to be there to tell the story, to show the characters, to break me or rebuild me in a meaningful way. This story was exactly what it needed to be and that made it quite special.
Has working as an editor for Prairie Schooner impacted your own creative work?
Prairie Schooner is interesting because we don’t have a hard word cap. I’ve never worked on a magazine that didn’t have one and it’s had a surprising effect on how I read and how I write. For one thing, I’m more open to the long story, because I’m not thinking about whether something’s gone over a prescribed ceiling. At the same time, seeing stories that are thirty or forty or fifty-two pages has made me that much more cognizant of how precious the extra time that goes into reading the long story is—as well as how much some stories really need that extra time. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for how much care I need to make sure I put into a long story (or a short one, for that matter), but it’s also offered a permission to write long and let the story breathe. And I love permissions.
What draws you into a short story?
When a story takes me and grips me in the first page, first paragraph, first sentences, when those firsts have a sort of undeniability in the DNA at the line level, I’m in. A story that knows it’s a story from the start and keeps that certainty, that’s usually the kind of writing that carries off the magic trick, makes me forget I’m reading, makes me want to live there. I also want a plot that works, where the math adds up. A wonderful plot has questions and answers and choices that not only come together, when they do come together, they feel like the only ones that could and it sort of takes your breath away. By the way, nobody in the world speaks more brilliantly about plot than Lynne Barrett, and if you ever have the chance to learn from her, take it. But as John Dufresne has said (nota bene: this is not so much meant to be incessant namedropping as sharing a long list of writers I adore with you)—if a story doesn’t have a plot, it better have a point.
How do you balance narrative clarity with artistic risks?
¿Y por qué no los dos?
What would you like to see more of in contemporary fiction?
Hybridity. Genre is, more often than not, very silly. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Jean Toomer’s Cane, books that took these breathtaking chances with language and form and that still feel fresh and prescient and ahead of their time. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a marvelous contemporary piece of fiction that’s rich with hybridity and that everyone should read. I want to see more prose that takes poetic license. I want to see more lines of unapologetic language that go beyond the lingua franca. I want to see more narratives that are also lyric and braided and difficult to place into neat taxonomies of genre and subgenre. I want to see more writers who take their permissions freely.
Travis Cohen Acosta is a Cuban American author and poet born and raised in Miami, Florida. He received an MFA from Florida International University and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His manuscript, School of Dead Birds, was recently longlisted for the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, The South Dakota Review, Action, Spectacle, and The Sonora Review, among other publications.