Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention.

I hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.

For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it's needed, whether it's publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there's that.

You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.

I'm more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I've found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I've felt, especially at first, when we'd put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together.

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.

Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention.