Rick Rofihe is a Scorpio. Rick Rofihe is sort of like an owl, though nicer. He is not concerned with, “Who, Who?” But rather, “What What?” Rick Rofihe sat down with me for an interview in his office for two hours. Rick Rofihe sent me home with a bag of sweets and an armful of books. In this bag of sweets, Rick Rofihe inadvertently reminded me that there is nowhere is the world where a person can get a pastry like New York.

Rick Rofihe has had more stories in the New Yorker than just about anybody, nine. The New Yorker has a 1 to 20,000 publish to submission rate. This means Rick Rofihe has a 1 to 180,000 publishing rate. Rick Rofihe once crashed on his friend’s couch in Boston. Rick Rofihe was a publisher at twenty years old. Rick Rofihe says, “If a publisher commits to a book, everybody in the publishing house should be behind the book. My sympathies are with the people in publishing houses, by the way. Those people have to pay the rent.”

I came to ask Rick Rofihe for advice on publishing and how to keep journals afloat, I came to ask Rick Rofihe for advice on writing. “If you want your literary journal to succeed, you have to do it on the cheap,” Rick Rofihe told me. He told me the Anderbo legend. “A student came to me to start it up. I said, ‘I can’t do it because I can’t type,’ he said, ‘We’ll do it on my computer.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it because I don’t have any money.’ So I got two of my students and one learned to build HTML. We’re still on our first issue in our 4th year. 80 poets, 40 story-writers.”

Rick Rofihe published Susan Breen’s story on anderbo.com and it is in Best Non-Required Reading 2009. Rick Rofihe and Anderbo.com have an average 24-36 hour reading/response turn-around rate. On the internet, Rick Rofihe: “It’s all right. The possibilities. I’ve gone from being a Luddite to a spammer. 4,000 people are on the mailing list. Not everyone asked to be on our list, but we provide them free entertainment.” When Rick Rofihe had more time he was reading 6-7 newspapers a day. Now he reads 2-3, which is still 6-7 dollars day. Rick Rofihe “came from a town which had no bookstore, no library, not even in school.” Rick Rofihe has work published on slushpilemag.com and says, “I’m so happy with it because it’s available at anyone’s computer.”

Anderbo.com is worth more than the Boston Globe is now, technically speaking; you can look into the figures published from when the Times bought it out and what it’s worth/not worth now. Rick Rofihe champions free work on the internet. “Now, some people are mad at me for giving it away for free, but the print book is not long for this world. “Three Point Back” was a story that I published on epiphanyzine.com and I had more feedback on that story than the nine stories I had in the New Yorker. It was also in print, it was a good-looking journal and they gave me six copies and that was nice but I was like, ‘What am I going to do with these? Send them to people? Why not just email them a link?’ You can read anderbo.com on your iphone, by the way.”

Rick Rofihe let me ask him about writing. “I advise anybody who wants to be a writer to live a very narrow life. Stop going to movies, stop reading books, and be a writer.” Rick Rofihe was patient when I asked him to spell 19th-Century novelist’s George Gissing’s name because he quoted him. “Gissing says writing is a mug’s game. I say, If it is a fool’s game, publishing is worse.” On writing: “I’m more concerned personally with the integrity of the story than anything. If a person accepts that a story, like a joke in western civilization, must be structured a certain way for it to be funny. A story must be structured a certain way. A story is not like life. There must be form. Fiction is completely unlike any other medium. In movies, you can’t tell what is going on inside a character, only in fiction do you get a chance to have any omniscience. To find what the character, another person, is thinking. Also, as a writer, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of you, it’s what you end up thinking of yourself.”

Nicolle Elizabeth will check in with a group again next Friday. Matt Briggs recently discussed Rick Rofihe’s Father Must on the Fictionaut blog.


  1. John

    Interesting interview… A few points:

    “Rick Rofihe holds the record for most stories published in the New Yorker ever. I think the number is 9 stories.”

    Do you mean stories that were unsolicited? Surely John Updike holds the record for most stories published in the New Yorker. He’s published nearly 1,000 articles in the New Yorker… not sure how many of them are fiction, but quite a few are fiction and poetry.

    “The New Yorker has a 1 to 20,000 publish to submission rate. This means Rick Rofihe has a 1 to 180,000 publishing rate.”

    Unless I misunderstand what you’re saying here, I think you mean 9 in 20,000 which reduces to 1 in 2,222, meaning he has a BETTER chance of getting published. 1 to 180,000 would imply he has a worse chance.

  2. Rick Rofihe

    As for the 1-in-20,000 number, that was stated in 1990 by Dan Menaker, one of the NY’er’s fiction editors then, as the acceptance rate for an unsolicited, unagented, non-referred “over-the transom” fiction submission. (It’s probably one in 20 million now.)
    As for the “9 stories” thing, what I said was, “I’ve had 9 stories in The New Yorker, J.D. Salinger’s had 8 — but we’re both still available.”

  3. John

    That makes more sense. I suspected it was referring to unsolicited… My issue was mainly with the math. If you have published MORE stories, your probability goes down, not up. That is, you don’t go from a 1 in 20k shot to a 1 in 180k shot.

    “As for the 1-in-20,000 number, that was stated in 1990 by Dan Menaker, one of the NY’er’s fiction editors then, as the acceptance rate for an unsolicited, unagented, non-referred “over-the transom” fiction submission. (It’s probably one in 20 million now.)”

    Ha! A while back I read something by current New York fiction czar Deborah Treisman that effectively said that if you’re submitting to the New Yorker blind (ie, not knowing anyone) that you obviously don’t know anything about publishing and shouldn’t be published anyway. She’s since tried to retract that comment in various interviews, but, there you go. Pretty funny, really.

    ‘As for the “9 stories” thing, what I said was, “I’ve had 9 stories in The New Yorker, J.D. Salinger’s had 8 — but we’re both still available.”’

    Good line! So you were taken a little out of context. That quote should have gone in the article!

  4. Rick Rofihe

    After The New Yorker published my first story, ” Boys Who Do the Bop”, which was the only story I’d ever written at the time — and it took me 6 years to write it and another 6 to sell it — they wanted more stories, and somehow I obliged. It ended up that I sold them a total of 5 stories in a 365-day period, and a total of 9 in a 3-year period, neither of which had ever happened in the history of the magazine (and it’s very unlikely that it will ever happen again.) They’re collected together at http://www.anderbo.com/bop9.html

  5. Jarred McGinnis

    Great interview (and not just because it agrees with my world view). Okay, maybe a little.

  6. Rachel Branwen

    Rick, you’re amazing. This interview is great and, however it came up, I was tickled pink at the mention of Slush Pile.

    Also, “Boys Who Do the Bop” is one of my favorite stories.

  7. Richard Thomas

    Great interview, lots of interesting things to chew on here. I know that us writers are all out here fighting – fighting to get it down on paper or into the computer, fighting to get it edited down to near perfection, fighting to get it out there and read and appreciated, fighting to impact lives with just words. Here’s hoping we can all grow and learn and keep creating stories worthy of the time that is spend tracking them down and reading them.

    Peace,
    Richard

    PS-I had a recent column go up debating with Larina about this very subject. You all might find it interesting, here:

    http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2009/10/24/dc2-printvsonline/

    also, one on simultaneous submissions:

    http://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2009/08/31/simultaneous/

  8. Adsnan

    H’es my cousin i love you Rick

  9. Rick Rofihe

    I guess I misspoke — the late, great Salinger had 13 “stories” in The New Yorker, not 8; I was not including these 5 below, which are more in the novella, shortnovel range (but stories nevertheless.)

    “Franny” (January 29, 1955)

    “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (November 19, 1955)

    “Zooey” (May 4, 1957)

    “Seymour: An Introduction” (June 6, 1959)

    “Hapworth 16, 1924” (June 19, 1965)

    Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2010/01/postscript-j-d-salinger.html#ixzz1PrIfBUUY

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