Seventeen years ago, Greg Schutz was sitting in a laundromat in Ann Arbor, Michigan, waiting for the spin cycle to end, working on a short story that he had been struggling with for weeks. He decided to rewrite a scene from a secondary character’s perspective, and “the story unlocked itself,” he says. “New sources of conflict emerged, strange points of tension between two ways of seeing the same situation. Before long the story became about that tension.” The piece would go on to become the title story of Schutz’s debut collection, Joyriders (University of Massachusetts Press, March 2025), which explores those very tensions between a range of characters living in the Midwest and Appalachia. Schutz’s lyrical stories chart characters’ heartbreaks, separations, regrets, and commitments over the course of decades, with a tender and clear-eyed understanding of the unknowability of so many relationships.
Greg Schutz, author of the debut story collection Joyriders. (Credit: Nicole LaBrie)
In 2010 the story Schutz worked on in the laundromat was published by guest editor Jim Shepard in Ploughshares, the print quarterly out of Emerson College in Boston. In circulation for more than fifty years, Ploughshares features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with two guest editors a year, a practice Schutz appreciates. “For a reader, each issue is fresh, surprising, different—each clearly shaped by a new editorial sensibility—and for a writer submitting work, this yields a sense of breadth and possibility that feels deeply welcoming,” he says. In 2024, Ploughshares launched a redesigned website and announced that Ladette Randolph, who helmed the magazine as editor in chief for sixteen years, would retire. Submissions are open every year from June 1 to January 15.
Landscape, especially the lakes and fields of the Midwest, plays a big role in Schutz’s imagistic fiction, often standing in for the changes and powers outside of his characters’ control. It seems apt, then, that he placed a story in Third Coast, a biannual edited by English graduate students at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Schutz’s piece “Ten Thousand Years,” about a man haunted by his past and struggling to recover from an alcohol-use disorder, appears in the journal’s Spring 2013 issue. Submissions in all genres, including book criticism and interviews, are accepted annually from October 15 to November 15.
Some of the stories in Joyriders are under five hundred words; the longest, titled “Breeders’ Cup,” in contrast, clocks in at about fourteen thousand words. While Schutz was proud of the story, he knew only a few venues would consider a piece of that length. He found a home for it with the biannual Alaska Quarterly Review, which publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and photo essays. “For print publications, where budgets are typically tight and ink and paper come at a cost, the willingness to publish long stories like ‘Breeders’ Cup’ is an act of real generosity,” Schutz says. “Alaska Quarterly Review is exactly that sort of generous. This generosity is evident, too, in the sheer size of its issues, each as thick and heavy as a novel.” The Summer/Fall 2024 issue, for example, featured poems by Kim Addonizio, Derrick Austin, and Jane Hirshfield; fiction by Josh Bell and Lindsey Drager; and essays by T. C. Boyle and Emily Raboteau, alongside work by more than fifty other contributors. Submissions will open by genre through June.
“As an evangelist for the short story form myself, I think I sensed a natural ally,” says Schutz of the Masters Review, a platform based in Bend, Oregon, and focused on emerging prose writers. “I was drawn to [it] by the sheer quality and impressive variety of fiction being published there, alongside thoughtful craft essays and book reviews that often focus on story collections.” The editors host regular contests, through which Schutz has published two stories. He won the 2024 Reprint Prize, awarded for a previously published prose piece. He was also one of the awardees of the tenth annual Anthology Contest, through which ten fiction writers each received $1,000, publication in a print anthology, and exposure to over fifty literary agencies, among other perks. Story submissions from writers who have not published a novel or book-length work of narrative nonfiction with a major press are open year-round, as are submissions from writers of book reviews, craft essays, and interviews.
Another outlet Schutz was drawn to for championing the short story form was American Short Fiction. His piece “A High School Production of Titus Andronicus” won the print triquarterly’s 2022 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, given for a story under fifteen hundred words. “American Short Fiction’s covers are always bright, punchy, eye-catching—good indicators of the work inside,” he says. American Short Fiction, which is located in Austin, also hosts conversations, workshops, and master classes with writers such as Jamel Brinkley, Susan Choi, and Karen Russell. General fiction submissions open in September; the journal’s annual Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, which awards $2,500 for a short story, opens in April with a $20 entry fee.
Dana Isokawa is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine and the editor in chief of the Margins.
