Meet the Editors: Taylor Corkill
In celebration of submissions opening, we are reintroducing ourselves! Get to know our editors—starting today with Art and Fiction Editor, Taylor Corkill!
What got you into editing in the first place?
Puzzles. I’m a puzzle gal and when someone hands me their work and goes—can you edit this? I see it as a puzzle I’m helping them finish. I think I get just as much of a thrill as the people writing their stories when I’m editing them because I’m helping hone their “big picture” that I can see with them.
Who or what is your biggest inspiration as a writer/editor/artist?
I’ve got a bunch of authors who I could site and painters I obsessed over from dawn till dusk, but recently over the past two years I’ve taken the biggest inspiration from the friends who also write. We pretty much write in polar opposite genres, but when I’m stuck on a piece or a scene I know I can start spewing mindless nonsense at them and they get it. They understand why I’m frustrated that the word I’m using doesn’t fit the rhythm I’m trying to create or how brutal I should actually go to make the reader uncomfortable. And when we all want to distress, we’ll write the most chaotic, strange, weird shit and put it in one giant Google Doc. where we all read each other’s work and comment on it. They keep me going, even when I’m not actively writing.
Do you have a go-to reading/editing spot?
Normally at my desk. Recently, I’ve been planting myself on the floor in my cozy little den with my back to the couch, my dog laying on the couch behind me, a small space heater to my left, and my cat sitting in the yellow chair across from me staring out the window for squirrels.
What’s the coolest reading spot you know of?
That’s an incredibly easy question—though incredibly hard to get to. When I was traveling in Prague, there was a state park called Petrin Hill which is really just an extremely steep hill that has been curated to look like someone smashed the lazy beauty of Romanesque architecture and the twisting, pastel gardens of the French Renaissance. If you looked hard enough, you could find an old, run-down lily pond on the West face of the hill that was supposed to look like it came out of a fairy tale.
Tucked between spindly, not-quite-birch trees, it felt like I had stepped into a lost Monet. The lily pads had grown to massive size, bumping against the sides of the cracked boulder edges of the iodized seal statue in the center, and if you stayed still, koi fish glittered in the shadowed pockets created by the foliage. And the best part: no one was around.
I stayed there for the entire day, picking my way around the back of the pond where the larger boulders stacked on top of each other and tucked myself onto the lower shelf of a dried-up waterfall feature, letting the June sun back into my shoulders. It was also the place I witnessed the nastiest spider I have ever seen in my entire life.
What draws you to literary and/or art spaces?
They remind me of a bathtub, which is a little funny without any context. I love taking baths because you can soak in hot water, surround yourself with a different environment for as long as you like before returning back to reality. But for those of us who like to grab a bath bomb that may or may not have a crap ton of glitter in it, you find the glitter sticks to you even days after.
Literary spaces, or any space that has the freedom to curate art, surrounds me with new sensations—even if I’ve been there for a hundred thousandth time. It transports me to someplace different, and I love the feeling it gives me, days after, when I’m staring at a blank wall or running my hands through the grass and realize I’m thinking about a dance or a book or whatever.
Taylor Corkill lives in Chicago and received her BA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago, but calls the evergreen forests of the Northwest home. She often finds any excuse to be at the gym or go outside.
She has been a production and assistant editor for Hair Trigger Magazine. Her work has been published in Fterota Logia, and she has a long, long list of projects always in the works. She believes in making it a great day, rather than having one.