Blogger Interview

Blogger Interview 

What a pleasure it is to feature a discussion with fellow blogger Thomas Page. Thomas is the head editor of the Academy of the Heart and Mind. He is an MFA candidate studying poetry at the University of South Florida. He is also branching out to children’s, literary, and horror fiction in his work. I look forward to featuring Thomas's poetry in the future - if he'll let us - and perhaps discussing the world of writing from an poet/author's perspective too. For now, however, let's learn more about what it takes to run Academy of the Heart and Mind. Visit Thomas @: https://academyoftheheartandmind.wordpress.com -&- @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thomaspagepoet

Q: When did you get the idea to launch your own blog? (or begin working for the blog owners)

A: Academy of the Heart and Mind was co-founded by John and Jessica Page in May 2017. Since John is my brother, he approached me in the same month about working with them. Their primary idea was to create a place where new and emerging writers could share their work with the world. They also wanted it to be a daily journal. John and Jessica are fiction and essay writers so they were focused on writing and reading those types of posts. Jessica also wrote a comic about their relationship. 

I was asked if I had any work that they could share because they did not have enough submissions to post daily. I had just taken a poetry seminar for my English degree at Catholic University. Before then, my main focus was on playwriting but I found it hard to write in that genre. I had penned some practice haiku using many of the ideas I learned about in the poetry class. I shared these with John and he posted them on the website. I soon became the de facto poetry editor for the website. I transitioned to reviewing all submissions in the next couple of months. 

Q: Why does this blog matter to you?

A: I think this blog matters because it is for writers of all levels. There is a major hurdle for people entering the literary world because they need prior publications but they need places to accept their work first. What John, Jessica, and I have always wanted Heart and Mind to be was that starting place. We wanted to harbor a community of writers to begin their literary journal and see all the support they have from their peers. I really like it when I read an email from one of our contributing artists and they’re telling us that “I shared this with my family and they loved my work and they’re so proud of me.” Those emails make my heart all warm and fuzzy.

The other aspect is that this blog is for everyone. We have artists that come from all over the world. I think that writers are sometimes very insular, focused on who they are and where they are in life. This isn’t bad but it limits how you see the world. As a writer, I get a lot  from reading about what the cultural zeitgeist is in India or how people are reacting to conflict in Nigeria or how athletes prepare for cross-country skiing in Switzerland. It really opens up my eyes to how others live and how they write about their lives. 

Q: How do you manage content?

A: Because most of our content is submitted to us, we have a strict principle when reviewing work. This principle is “is it accessible for all readers?” There is a fine line that I have to balance when I am reviewing a piece. When John was going over his vision for what counted as Heart and Mind content, he stressed the “family-friendly” aspect of this principle. What this means varies from person to person. For us, this means that the work doesn’t tackle content that would garner an adult rating if it were a movie or television show. Basically, we don’t want to read something that feels exploitative or explicit. 

We also try to share work that can be a point of discussion with everyone. There are some topics that are important but we feel deserve the proper place to discuss them such as mental health, sexual assault victim advocacy, and drug abuse. Of course, we look at each story on its own and see if it would be an appropriate starting place for discussion for all of our readers. We also look out for stories that we are excited about. 

Q: How much time do you dedicate to your blog?

A: I would say that running this blog is a second job. I am the head editor so I am doing most of the work on our end. How much time depends on the week. Some weeks we have no submissions to review so I do some light management. Other weeks we have a giant stack of submissions that take several hours to review and prepare for publication. I never really know when those weeks are coming. In my tenure, I believe that our busiest time was December 2021. We had around 100 open submissions in our email that came in at the same time. I think that there will always be an influx because of a post on our, or someone else’s, blog that prompts people to submit work to us. 

In terms of hard numbers, I would say that it takes different amounts of time to review different genres. Poetry is the fastest for me to review because poems are generally short. Poems also do not hide what they are about. I don’t have to hunt for problematic content in a work with under a 100 words. Poems usually take me about ten minutes to review completely. 

Fiction varies. People will submit pieces ranging from flash fiction to whole novels. Fiction also has blocks of text that can be difficult to review as an editor. There will be hidden content that I will miss on my first read-through so I have to be very careful when I am reviewing them for publication. This generally takes about thirty minutes. 

Occasionally, we receive visual art and other genres. These vary on how they take to review so I would say about twenty minutes for these on average. 

In total, I usually work on the website for about ten hours a week. 

Q: Thank you for sharing that. So few out there really understand what it takes to manage an organization like yours. What, in your opinion, should every new blogger know?

A: Every new blogger should know that getting an audience takes a while. The three of us were really trying to get an audience at the beginning but were mostly our friends and family. New bloggers have to exercise patience. There is going to be one post that will really click with your audience. 

I have spoken with other artists about what was their breakout work. In all cases, they never could have predicted what it ended up being. I’m not even sure what our breakout was because all of us were working at different times. I do know that once we got into the poetry scene around summer / autumn of 2017 that our submissions really shot up. 

That may sound short to an outsider but it represented hours of work to get there. Readers will not see all the work we do behind the scenes but that’s fine with me. I knew we really were connected with our audience when some of our artists were getting publishing deals and their editors were reaching out to us to talk about their work. 

Q: What are some common mistakes bloggers make, and how can they remedy them?

A: Gaiman’s Law is a major issue. This is a rule that you will always miss an error in a text. I’m sure that I have messed something up in my original text of this interview. However, it can be remedied by just reviewing a post after you drafted it. We had three editors scheduling posts so there were going to be things we assumed the other two fixed. I’ve gotten emails about some major grammatical or other issues with a post. These used to freak me out. Now, I calmly review the issue and fix it. As the owner of a blog, you can fix things whenever it is needed. New bloggers need to have the editorial philosophy of do it well the first time then do it better when you review it. 

Another issue is optics. When you are reviewing posts, context is very important. A word may seem innocuous when I read it but appear inflammatory to a reader. Bloggers will learn what garners the right type of attention to your blog. Your readers will respect you for having a clear idea of what content works with your blog’s goal. I would say use your common sense to know what type of posts will be appropriate for your readers. 

I remember the Poetry Foundation’s editorial blunder in 2020 of publishing without regard to the social context of the word in question in the poem. Despite living in 2022, I will still receive submissions that seem to be stuck in the prejudices that we as a culture are trying to move away from. Bloggers have a heart that will tell them what is right. They should follow it. 

Q: How do you go about improving your skills?

A: Being a good blogger and editor requires being an active member in whatever field you are blogging about. You are always a student when you participate in a field. I am branching out to all the opportunities within the literary world. 

Connections are very important to see what people want from literary work. This will be the same no matter what you blog about. These people will give you feedback about what is working in your writing. You can use this as an example to give feedback to others. 

When you are reviewing submissions, you have to keep in mind about how you will talk to the artist behind the work. They are hungry for feedback. A lot of time in the beginning, I didn’t have the words to describe what made a submission unpublishable. Sometimes I would think, “erm, it doesn’t work.” That is really unhelpful to the writer who wants to know how to improve their writing. Now I know how to pinpoint an element of the piece. 

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