Katie Naughton ‘08
Rachel Lu: What was your involvement in Red Weather like when you were on campus? Did you have a specific vision for Red Weather?
Katie Naughton: I don’t think I was on the editorial board until I was the editor-in-chief my senior year. I don't know why. I don't know how that happened and looking back on it, I was like, man, it would've been helpful to have been in it first before running it. But I was interested in creating more of a community around the journal. I think a lot of times, I mean you know this as an editor, but that publication schedule is so insane and so fast. The semester starts and you really have to be on it right away or you’re already too late. I think sometimes the journal came out shortly before people went home for the semester. We really wanted to work on just getting it released earlier, doing a launch party, having editorial meetings in which we would read and discuss together, and build a community around the journal rather than have it be just a publication that kind of anonymously dropped when people were already busy with finals.
In terms of aesthetic or visions like that, I don’t think there was anything super particular we were looking for. I remember Naomi Guttman at some point was like, “You know, make sure you’re not just publishing your friends,” so we decided to read anonymously. We read anonymously so that we could try to have a cross section of writers who were doing serious work. We reincorporated art too. I don’t think our first issue had art, and then we got more funding for the second issue so that we could print art.
I worked with a co-editor. I was editor in chief for poetry, but I worked with a co-editor-in-chief for fiction. I’m not sure if people before us or after us had done that. We also had a designer to just sort of split the tasks between people's main skill sets so that there's a fiction expert doing fiction, I was doing poetry, and then we had a designer who was committed to doing the issue design and layout. The three of us worked closely together.
RL: That's so interesting with the blind submissions being new because I spoke to Jo Pitkin the other day who founded Red Weather, and she mentioned that they started off with blind submissions. I’m really curious what happened down the road when people made the decision to stray away from blind submissions.
KN: Maybe they were doing blind submissions before us, but I remember that was something we committed to. It’s a lot of work, right, editorially. They weren't blind to me, but I had to create some sort of system where I could organize them and name them in such a way that I could present them to my board blindly. I could imagine if you were just in a rush, you might not do it blind for that reason. We did everything over email. I don’t know if you guys have a different submission system or anything now.
RL: What is your favorite memory from Red Weather?
KN: Oh, yeah, something else we started—I worked with Rachel Richardson my first semester who was a junior studying abroad in the spring, so then Emily Tang took over as fiction editor-in-chief, but I can’t remember if it was the first or second semester—was doing interviews with visiting writers. When a visiting writer would come to campus, we would ask if we could interview them for the journal and then publish those in the journal as well to try to take advantage of what was already happening on campus. We were talking to Peter Meinke as part of this. I think he was probably around eighty at the time and was an alum of the College. He had been there in the fifties, forties, I don’t know, but he was an older alum of the College for sure. He had all these great stories about drinking milk punch and sitting in the graveyard and sitting on the graves of, like, Melancthon Woolsey Stryker reading poems. It was really interesting to just sort of imagine an earlier version of the College and yet there was some continuity in some ways that we were all working as poets in the same space. I still remember one of the lines from one of his poems that has been sort of influential on my work. I think it was the first poem that I had read that mentioned money directly. He talked about how his garden takes time, takes love, and takes money, and so I've been writing about money and debt directly or indirectly for a long time and, you know, not unrelated to having those words in my head. We organized a reading too. We got funding to organize our own invited writer in which we brought fiction writer, Kevin Moffett, to campus and hosted a dinner beforehand which was really fun. Tina [Hall] had us over to her house, and I made these black bean vegetarian burritos that I was really into at that moment in time. It was one of my three first recipes I cooked regularly. I’m sure it was chaotic and we were running late and everything, but Tina was very gracious about it. I mean, it was fun to just build a little bit of community around the journal.
RL: How has Red Weather influenced or affected where you are now in your life?
KN: It was my first experience working on a publication, which I still do now. It was the moment when I realized to make a deadline you should plan back from when that deadline is and block things out and figure out when you need to start so that you can get through everything by the deadline. It’s been an invaluable skill and one that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t really acquired prior to that moment. I do remember the sort of lightbulb moment that was like, oh, okay, well if we need to publish in December and we need to do this and it takes that long, we need to send this first email out September 30th. That's really soon. Like that sort of planning, which is so useful and often overlooked. The ability to back-plan was a huge skill.
Beyond that, I think it was a very successful moment of enacting my values around community and inclusion at the same time as aesthetics or quality or excellence. It was good to do both of those things simultaneously and that sort of informs how I think about a lot of the work that I do. And the sort of non-hierarchical organization, like the sharing of editorship, is also, I think, a good way to work. The press I work at now is sort of collectively run. We all have our own domains so that's Essay Press. Travis Sharp is our editor-in-chief, but everyone has their own task that they're semi-autonomous with and it's just efficient. Small presses are often run on shoestrings by volunteer labor, and so to trust people with their own domains is an efficient way to run something, especially when you’re working with a lot of smart, excellent people whom you know you can trust. I also learned to proofread when editing Red Weather. Emily Tang was a fiction editor with me in the spring and was a much more careful proofreader. I remember I had made one thousand errors with “its” and “it's” in one of the interviews, and she was like, “You have to catch this. We can't put it out like this,” so it was then that I learned to mind my itses, I guess.
RL: Who was your favorite writer/artist in college and who is your favorite now?
KN: I feel like I was still learning about poets when I was at Hamilton. I don’t know that I had a strong favorite. I once blew an interview for a small press internship by saying that T. S. Eliot was my favorite poet. But I was really into Modernism. I loved a few Eliot poems. I still stand by that. I think he has a couple great poems, but he's definitely not my favorite anymore. I was also really into Virginia Woolf. I think that's probably a safer answer. I was definitely very into Woolf, who is a fiction writer but, you know, is so poetic, so lyric in her descriptions that I feel like she was sort of an inspiration for poetry for me also. Now, I have to say, if I was choosing a Modernist, I would choose Pound over Eliot at this point. He went to Hamilton for a while—the College has a little archive of his too. Have you ever seen it?
RL: No, but they don’t let you forget that Pound went to Hamilton for a bit.
KN: Yeah, after he failed out of Penn or whatever that story was. But now, Bernadette Mayer is one of my favorites, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, are all people I’m writing about in my dissertation because they're the best. More contemporary, sort of seventies-and-later women experimentalists who I think just do really gorgeous things with language and observation but also with unsettling poetic stability or certainty. There's just so much capaciousness in their work that I really admire.