I'm pretty happy, generally, to not have a specific formal or stylistic preference. In my own writing, I hope to produce a formally diverse body of work, because I've loved a formally diverse body of work. I hope to publish many styles of fiction. That said, I'm not interested in cleverness for its own sake. I'm not interested in seeing a good trick. There was a magician every Tuesday night at the Pizza Hut where I worked in high school. That's about all the tricks I need to see for the rest of my life.

I've had a fantasy submission with the phrase "literary novel" in the query's subject line. I've had mystery novels and romances submitted. I think people misunderstand the term "literary" when we editors specify it in submission guidelines: They think it just means "good." But it has a specific connotation, if not a dictionary definition. It was taught to me by Kevin McIlvoy and Robert Boswell (who I'm sure got it somewhere, though I don't know where) as this: The story of everyday life made worthy of art.

Stories of everyday life can be made worthy through a variety of avenues: details, imagery, voice, pacing. All the tools of the writer's craft. But the story of a formulaic romance cannot--those are not realistic stories. A story set on a fantastical world is not the story of everyday life. A whole lot of writers seem to waste their energy submitting to literary presses what should be sent to genre publishers, insisting on the literariness of their work, rather than finding it the best possible avenue to reach the readers who want it.

JH: One of your first releases is a memoir by Debra Monroe, On the Outskirts of Normal. So many people want to tell their story. What makes a good life story a great read?

VB: You know, I'm not a big memoir person. I can count on one hand the memoirs I have deeply loved: Outskirts, Tom Andrews' Codeine Diary, and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. They are vastly different from one another, but each has something more than who its author is or what happened at stake. Each one explores complicated, difficult material and shares the work of understanding that material with its reader.

I am, whole-hog, a fiction girl. I prefer reading fiction over doing almost anything else in the world. People who say, "I don't like fiction," are missing the point of being human, which is to fully empathize with one another, in a deeply imaginative, generous way. Reading stories is the only full-time practice, the only thing we teach in schools, that absolutely requires practitioners to empathize. If you cannot reach into the heart and mind of another human being by inhabiting their story, you aren't really living.

JH: Isn't that also what makes a great memoir? The ability to inhabit the story?

VB: I suppose all of that last bit can be said of memoir, too. But I find that too many readers of memoir are fascinated with the "it really happened" angle, and too little with the story's humanity, with the struggle to understand. Readers of memoir often say things like, "I can't imagine going through what s/he went through." That reaction is not at play in fiction, where you are not asked to believe that something did happen, but that the story at hand is one possibility for human life, an avenue to explore humanity, to have the world, and perhaps your own place in it, illuminated. To be shown the world anew. It's a more complex and difficult engagement with storytelling than simple belief. And of course many readers approach serious, complex memoirs the same way. But too many memoirs let their readers off the hook with the easy reaction-they focus simply on the events that took place.

Engine Books is a fiction press. I had the opportunity to obtain the paperback and eBook rights to Outskirts, and I knew the book well, and knew I loved it, but from this point forward I am only considering fiction submissions. If I had to suggest to someone how to make their life story fascinating, I would tell them to write it as a novel.

JH: Tell me why Patricia Henley's new collection of short stories, Other Heartbreaks, appeals to you as an editor and a reader.

VB: Well, Patricia Henley's work appeals to me. She is a precise, artful crafter of sentences and paragraphs, but the sentences and paragraphs are not--have never been--the point. Her characters' lives are the point. I love the way her work delves into memory, into the relationship between memory and the present, how life is informed and formed by the past, how the future will be informed by the present. Her story "Same Old Big Magic" from her 1992 collection The Secret of Cartwheels taught me a lot about how fiction works, how it changes the way you feel about life.

The stories in Other Heartbreaks are mostly stories of women navigating very complicated relationships, and their own space within them. Obviously, considering EB's pro-lady stance, this is important to me on all fronts. They take the lives of women seriously, treat them with profound respect, without requiring the women to be angelic or faultless. (Angelic, faultless characters are both dishonest and uninteresting.) But more importantly, these stories get at something that feels true but not obvious, something that broadens my sense of the world, in all its sadness and hope. Plus, wow, does she write a great ending every single time.

JH: Does this new venture mean that you're taking some of the focus in your life off of writing?

VB: There is always something else going on. In 2006, my husband and I bought a house, gutted it, and remodeled. We finished that sometime around last year-ish. I do work for a few local nonprofits. I garden. I sew.

I am not a writer who works every day. On days when I do write, I find that anything over four pages feels forced, stilted, arrhythmic, and those four pages generally only take me a couple of hours. Time is only one part of the struggle to write: More of that struggle, for me, is quieting the jangling nerves and minimizing the mental interruptions. During the first few months after launching the press, in fact, my writing pace increased steadily because I was attuned, every day, to thinking about fiction. This work keeps me engaged in the practice of mental generosity that writing requires--builds those muscles.

JH: Will Engine Books be publishing any of your work?

VB: I don't believe anybody does their best work when they self-publish. A big part of the point of Engine Books, for me, is the editing. My goal with everything I consider--and I give feedback to every manuscript I read--is to begin by recognizing the author's vision, then to find ways to further enhance that vision. I think, so far, that my authors would agree that I've been helpful in that way.

I can't do that for my own work. I actually don't think anyone can--that's what editors are for. It's a terrible shame that many of the big publishers are no longer devoting substantial resources to editing. Our literature, as a culture, will suffer for it. This is not to say that all small presses edit strenuously-they don't. But Engine Books does.