I am thrilled to join the team at Bacopa as the editor of creative nonfiction! I bring to the task my long-time love of language along with decades of reading and writing experience.
When reading creative nonfiction, I want to feel completely drawn in. A clear narrative voice captivates me. I love being swept up into circumstances and particulars that may be very different from my own.
I appreciate and rely on details of place to make the narrator’s story believable and compelling. For me, the best writing offers surprise and avoids cliché. I want to read language that lets me feel the emotion, the tension in the narrator’s predicament. As a poet, I celebrate precision and risk (the vivid image, for example, carefully chosen) as well as unexpected development or an intriguing turn of phrase.
A brief note on what to avoid: I’ll always decline a submission that’s overly cliched, vague, or includes even a hint of racism, homophobia, ableism, or condescension to groups or other cultures. I’ll likely decline a submission that is too much of a straightforward essay, developed perhaps but without depth or enough weave between the “I,” the events, and the setting.
Creative Nonfiction Editor, Aliesa Zoecklein taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Santa Fe College. Her poems are published in several journals. Her chapbook won the Peter Meinke Poetry Prize and was published by YellowJacket Press.
