Q: How do you tell a writer that his or her work isn’t good enough for the magazine?

A: Well, we just started taking online submissions only, in fiction and poetry, which means that we get a lot more submissions, because it’s so much easier for people to submit now. So lots of times we get work that’s very half-baked, and you can tell that they just thought, "Well, I finished this story; why not send it out to everyone I know?" Sometimes you can tell that an author hasn’t read your magazine; they don’t know what sort of thing you’re looking for. Then you don’t feel so bad. You can just say, "Your work doesn’t really suit our needs right now." But lots of times, there are a lot of writing that’s good, but it’s just not good enough. It’s not things that excite you. It’s harder to say no to those people. But we’re usually very encouraging, because there’s a lot of literary magazines out there. You never know; they might find someone else who loves it, and that it hits the right way, but it just didn’t happen to hit us.

Q: You said sometimes you approach writers rather than waiting for submissions?

A: One of the things they wanted to do when they founded the magazine was that they intended to do it completely that way: approaching writers that they read in other literary magazines — maybe they hadn’t heard of them, they don’t have books out — and then approaching them and asking them to submit. I think it just ended up that that was a lot of work. Also, they didn’t want to seem elitist and not have a slush pile. So eventually we adopted a slush pile. We probably get most of our submissions that way, but I know if I’ve seen something I love in a different magazine, sometimes I track down that writer and say, "Please submit to us." I think we probably all do that.

Q: Do you get writers who say, "I’m not interested"?

A: Yeah, sure. There’s a lot of writers who can afford to not be interested in non-paying literary magazines, which is fine. They’ve earned it somehow. We definitely do get people who say that. But it’s not that often. When we approach writers to write recommendations, that happens. Half the time they don’t have time to do it, which is understandable. But then it’s just amazing that we get so many people who are willing to do it, and who are doing it for nothing. We’re really grateful to writers. They’re very kind to us.

Q: There were a lot of literary magazines coming onto the scene right around the time that you guys were. What’s the climate like these days for these kinds of publications? Is there still a lot of support for them?

A: I think McSweeney’s isn’t really a good model, because they just manage to be fantastically successful at everything they do. You want to look at that and say, "Oh, look, people are still excited by literary magazines," but they have a different thing going. They manage to wrap it around something perfectly. But for the rest of us, I think we do have a supportive environment. We just got back from the AWP [Association of Writers & Writing Programs] conference, and it’s just great. You meet all these other people who are in the same boat, who are running literary magazines, usually on low budgets, trying to get readership. But they’re all managing to stay there, and so I think that’s impressive. No one’s going to get as many readers as they want, or sell as many issues as would be nice, but still, you’ve got a lot of people writing, and I think as long as you have writers who are interested in publishing, you’re going to have a lot of readers. There’s things you can do; we’re trying to do more to get more readers, too, but it takes time.

Q: What do you see as the biggest changes to the magazine over the last 10 issues?

A: With the 10th issue, we redesigned the magazine, because we wanted to spice it up a little. So we ended up doing artwork on the cover, which is something we really couldn’t afford to do before. So that’s actually a good sign, too, that we can afford to do it now. The first two issues are that small size, which I really love, and I wish we could’ve kept that, but we finally got distribution at Barnes & Noble, and they didn’t want the small size, because they would fall back in the magazine stacks and you couldn’t see them. So we had to modify that.

Q: You sometimes have to make sacrifices for Barnes & Noble, I guess.

A: Exactly. When you want to be distributed, you sort of have to do what Barnes & Noble wants. It’s sad thinking about it, because they [were] such cute magazines. But they got bigger, so I guess that’s good; there’s more writing in them now. The original idea was to have it be a pocket-sized magazine that you could just slip in your bag and go.

Q: Do you have trouble explaining to people that it is meant to be a magazine? You look at it and you think it’s a book.

A: When I tried to tell my family about what I was doing, they thought it would come out monthly, and that it would be glossy. So yeah, a lot of people don’t really have an idea of what a literary magazine is, and what it takes to put it together. I can’t imagine putting one of these out more than twice a year, because it just seems like we’re always doing something; the process never ends. In a way, it feels like it is more of a book, just because it takes so long in the process.

Q: What are your future goals for the magazine, for the next year, five years, and so on?

A: My fiancé and I, our goal is to start up a bookstore, and we would love to run the magazine out of the bookstore, and have a small press based out of that, and just have more of a community built around Post Road. That’s our goal that we’re aiming for. But in the meantime we’re trying to do more events, do more things that get people involved. We’re trying to get people to sign up for our mailing list; at AWP we advertised that we’re having a raffle, and we got [writers] Amy Hempel and Sven Birkerts and Robert Pinsky to say that they would judge manuscripts with us, so anyone that signs up for our e-mail list, they get a chance to [get a] manuscript evaluation from one of these people. A lot of people have been signing up and are excited about it. I think we’re going to try to do more things like that, that give something back to people so that they can get more involved. We’d love to set up workshops and things like that someday, too.

Q: Grand plans, it sounds like.

A: What’s the point of having plans if they’re not grand?

Post Road celebrates the publication of its 10th issue with a party at Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass Ave, in Cambridge, on April 30, from 5 to 7 p.m. The magazine’s Web site is at www.postroadmag.com. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com