Geoff Mak is a Fiction editor at The Offing, and the site’s designer. He is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. He is currently at work on a novel.
What doors do you open at The Offing?
I send a lot of emails, push contracts, solicit writers, send reminders, organize discussions within the staff, manage Submittable and Trello accounts, make the wheels turn and the trains run on time so that the team can discover and publish some of the best short fiction I’ve ever read.
What doors does The Offing open for you?
The Offing brings to me work that restructures my thinking and makes me revise what I thought was possible aesthetically, politically, emotionally. That includes works in translation, work by marginalized voices, work that’s experimental and intelligent and gut-wrenching all at the same time. Literature is not confined to what we can find at bookstores, and frankly, I don’t go to bookstores to read what’s never been done before. I go to our slush pile.
Is there a piece you’ve worked on or found at The Offing that’s been especially meaningful to you?
My personal favorite is a story called “Leda in Glass,” by Siouxzi L Mernagh. In America, there is a stereotype that experimental writing (e.g. Gass, Pynchon) is done by straight white male writers, and that female and queer writers (e.g. Munro, Baldwin) write straightforward fiction which relies more on subject matter and point of view. “Leda in Glass” shows that we can have it both ways, and it’s exactly the kind of fiction that we created this magazine to discover.
What would you like to see us do with the donations we receive during our fundraiser?
I’d want the money to go straight back to the writers and to the community. We would pay writers more for their work, host events across the country, start a small press, throw panels and readings and parties, because there is a real demand for the fiction we publish — our remarkable growth in the last seven months proved that beyond any of our expectations — and I want The Offing to play an active role in ushering this new generation of American publishing.
Anything else? Tell us something about your experience with The Offing and why this work is meaningful to you.
We publish work by unpublished writers on a regular basis, and that alone is enough to keep me doing what I do here.
