Reflecting Back: An Interview with Assistant Poetry Editor Rachel Whalen

For the final staff micro-interview, I spoke to Rachel Whalen, the assistant poetry editor at Washington Square Review. Rachel is a poet and playwright from Buffalo, New York. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University, where they also teach.


WSR: How long have you been at NYU and in New York City in general?

RW: This is my first year at NYU, and I moved here at the start of the program in August of 2019.

WSR: And what’s the function of your position at Washington Square?

RW: I am an assistant poetry editor. We have a poetry team, which is great. Basically, we read all the submissions that come in from Submittable, which ends up being a lot of submissions, and we solicit poems from poets that we admire. Then, we narrow down those poems to the ones that we include in the issue.

WSR: What have been some of your better experiences as a poetry editor? Your best experiences soliciting, or maybe finding a poem in slush that you really liked? 

RW: Both soliciting and reading through submissions are great experiences within themselves. When you’re soliciting, you have an excuse to reach out to any poet that you love. It’s really amazing to be sending emails off to these poets who I admire so much and then they get back to you with new work. [With submissions,] I think it’s always wonderful to be surprised—you spend hours and hours reading through hundreds of submissions, so when you stumble across one or two that really strike you, it can be a really powerful experience to interact with that poem that way. To share someone’s work who may never have been published before, and give it to the world, is an amazing side of that as well.

WSR: Do you work back and forth with the people you solicit?

RW: Yeah! So, for example, I just solicited some poems from Kayleb Rae Candrilli, whose work I was introduced to at KGB, and I’ve since loved everything they write. They had a bunch of poems, and we ended up picking one. They wanted to edit it a bit after we picked it, and then they had a new version. So just talking through that kind of thing and working through the poem, which is a very new poem that they’re putting in the world through us. And then, of course, there’s the subtler versions of that; there’s copyediting, tweaking words, and working with the copyeditor to tweak poems that we end up accepting.

WSR: How has your work at Washington Square impacted your own editing process? Your own writing?

RW: Having the opportunity to preview new, unpublished poems has done a lot for my writing. Going through all the submissions and seeing what kind of things people are working on, working towards, it really kind of feels like we’re in a privileged position, where we have our fingers on this pulse of new poems and poetry that’s happening all over the world. Especially reading the poems that haven’t been given the light of day yet, or poets who haven’t published anything yet. I think that always helps me reflect on my own work and see how my own work reflects what I read in all the poems that we get to read for Washington Square.

WSR: Yeah, I think last semester I chose something from slush that got published, that was someone that was relatively unknown, and that was a really cool feeling. Has Washington Square been anyone’s first publication? 

RW: I think it definitely has. I was uploading some poems that we just submitted for our next issue today, and I was looking at one of the bios for a poem, and it said that it was their first publication. I think that happens more commonly than one might think. Which is really exciting; it’s really cool to facilitate that. It makes me feel really proud that we can give that to someone and then give their work to the world, as well.

WSR: That’s amazing; I love that. Would you mind speaking just generally to the way your work has changed over the course of your time at NYU?

RW: I think the thing that NYU has allowed me to do, both in classes and also with hanging out with friends, talking about poetry within and without of the classroom, it helps me to locate my own voice and to hear it better. It was something I was just starting to listen to before I came to NYU, but being around so much artistic stimulus has helped me to hear how I think, and how I write, and how I talk, with much more clarity.

WSR: Oh man, you saying that makes me miss it so much.

RW: Yeah, me too. Zoom classrooms are not the same—they’re not the same for the classroom, and then there’s so much in the fabric of New York that’s gone at the moment. 

WSR: Yeah, I do miss it. Do you have anything that you would like to tell students who are moving to New York for NYU?

RW: One thing would be to trust yourself and your own work. My first semester I was so nervous, and so sure that I didn’t belong there, and just felt really overwhelmed. But once I got into it, and once I started to plug into the wider community and experience of the program and the city, I started to realize I totally do belong there. Being able to tap into my own voice and my own work and to hear that in chorus with everything around me was one of the best things that the program gave me. It’s totally natural for all of us to feel overwhelmed by starting the program and especially [by] moving to New York City. But I would say just trust that you’re meant to be there and that you’re going into it with your own unique thing that you have to offer. And to listen, again, not only to your own voice, but to listen to everything around you and let that help you fit into this sort of chorus that everything becomes. 

WSR: I know that you started the Manderley Collective. Can you talk about how the community at NYU informed that?

RW: Yeah, totally. I was hoping for some way to tap into the artistic community we have at NYU outside of the classroom. I talked to a few friends about this, including Marissa Davis and Hannah Matheson. And once everything went online because of Covid, it seemed even more important to get something off the ground, to sort of preserve that sense of community that we all felt strongly just being around the writer’s house. Manderley was started because of that tangible, communal feeling we all had being around each other and hearing each other’s work. We wanted to open up the opportunities for us to collaborate together and to hear the things that we’re working on right now. And we wanted to extend it as a way to keep us together, and to keep that feeling going as much as possible, now that we’re physically isolated and isolated in all kinds of ways.

WSR: I love that, and I’d definitely love to get involved with that moving forward. Is there anything else you want to say?

RW: Maybe just to affirm that the program is such an incredible experience because it’s not—as you know—it’s not cut-throat, and the goal is one of enrichment. I think that comes from us just being together and caring about each other. And that’s between professors and students, between fiction and poetry and non-fiction, between us as students, and I think that kind of care is so important to not only my work, but myself. That’s why I love the program so much, and it’s been such a wonderful experience. 

WSR: I feel super similarly, and I actually think the biggest disruption that this whole thing has caused is a disruption to my work and the feedback I was getting. I don’t even mean that in, like, “Zoom workshops are different,” but that there’s something about being around a group of people who care as much about the thing you’re doing as you do. It’s lovely to be in a space where you hear that conversation occurring. It’s really nice, and something I miss very much. So I really appreciate your efforts to move it online a bit. Combatting isolation is such an important thing. 

RW: Yeah, I think, especially now, I’m like, “What’s the point of poetry, this is such an intense crisis, what’s the point.” But then, I think it is really important to fight these isolating feelings. It’s really critical, if you think about it.