Like a lot of teens who came of age during the early days of the internet, Justin Carter spent a lot of his online time reading and posting on message boards. He is such a fan of the format of these online forums that he decided to create a literary magazine based on the message board structure. The result: the retro-looking lit mag Some Words. Since going live some six months ago, Some Words has published over 120 stories and poems, including a poem each day during National Poetry Month (April). I was honored to have one of my poems (“A Cure for Doomscrolling“) included in the April lineup.
When he isn’t running the lit mag–or perhaps moderating is the more appropriate term–Justin writes poetry and short stories, as well as freelance articles about women’s basketball, racing, and the NFL from his home in Des Moines, Iowa. He also is a relatively new dad. Justin’s first poetry collection, Brazos, was published in 2024 by Belle Point Press. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin holds degrees from the University of Houston, Bowling Green State University and the University of North Texas, where he graduated in 2019 with a PhD in English. His poetry appears widely, including work in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, The Journal, Sonora Review and Sycamore Review. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Daily Science Fiction, HAD, Passages North, and other spaces.
Read on for more about Justin’s reasons for creating Some Words, his advice to submitters, writing poetry versus writing fiction, and more.
1. Structuring Some Words as a message board is a pretty cool trick. How did you come up with this idea?
It was kind of just a random, throwaway thought that I ended up pursuing. I’d noticed a lot of journals starting that used Neocities as their host instead of WordPress, which harkened back to the older days of the internet, and I think I posted something on BlueSky like “a literary journal hosted on a message board” just as an off-hand comment coming off of this trend. The post got a lot more likes than I expected, so I was just like…sure, let me see what it takes to actually do this. What it took was signing up for a free Proboards account, so…I did it.
I spent a LOT of time in my youth on message boards, specifically on high school football ones. Those were huge in Texas in the early/mid 2000s, and I’d spend way way way more time than I should have on them, to the point where players on my high school’s team figured out who I was and would jokingly threaten me if I said things like “I don’t think the Roughnecks are winning this week.” And so, yeah—it just felt like the right medium for me to create something with.
2. What advice do you have for writers wanting to submit to Some Words?
Send me things. That’s about it. I have fairly eclectic tastes, and I’m down to publish almost anything as long as I like it. Sometimes I might go through phases where I’m a little down on certain things because I’ve published too many of them—right now, for example, I’m not fully on board with, like, the kind of super tiny micros that have become fashionable lately, but that could always still change.
I will say that if you’re reading this and you have any work that crosses over with sports, I’m probably the best audience you could ever find for that work, so send it my way.
3. You write both poetry and fiction (as well as non-fiction) and have found success getting published in both realms. Where do your ideas for writing come from, and how do you determine whether an idea will become a poem versus a short story?
Everything starts, in some way, with my life, and then the question becomes if I want to dive into my life or not. If I want to go into my own experience, it becomes a poem. If I want to use my own experience as the basis for building something new, it becomes fiction.
I’ve been writing a lot about the day-to-day aspects of parenting lately, and that always emerges in the form of a poem because it’s a feeling and a moment I want to capture. But then other times, I’ll remember something from my childhood and I’ll want to write about it, but I don’t have the right connection with it to go with the poem as the container. For example, when I was like…14-ish…I was the Chaplain’s Aide for my Boy Scout troop, so I led grace before meals and troop meetings. This one time, a boy asked me to baptize him in the pool at camp. I tried a few years ago to write a poem about it, but it just didn’t work—it was a memory, an anecdote even, more than it was a feeling, and it didn’t feel right for a poem—but the idea of baptizing another kid at camp still felt like something I wanted to do something with, so I’ve recently been trying to work on a longer short story about it, and the short story isn’t beholden to my actual memory of that event. Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense. The short story version draws on a real thing, but the people in it aren’t the real people who were there and the path to get to that final moment is far different than the path in real life.
Here’s a short story I wrote about a giant bird made out of fire who goes to a biker bar in search of illegal body modifications in a post-apocalyptic world. The character is from comic books I drew as an elementary age kid, the setting is from a bar my dad used to frequent—everything starts somewhere, but how I decide to explore it depends on how I feel about it in the moment. Maybe there’s another universe where the giant bird made of fire wound up as a reference in a poem instead. I don’t know. This answer is getting really long but it all boils down to just…what feels right for the thing I want to write about. The poem offers a kind of immediacy. The short story offers a chance to create a new universe around the memory.
4. What two or three writers have most influenced you, and why?
Well, I am a mid-30s white man, so Denis Johnson is the obvious answer here. Jesus’ Son was a huge influence on me back in undergrad. As far as fiction goes, I think Lorrie Moore and Willy Vlautin are currently my big influences. A lot of that is stylistic—Johnson helped me with voice, Moore helped me with description, Vlautin—my most recent discovery—is helping me with characterization and dialogue.
As far as poetry goes, I’d say Dean Young has had the biggest impact on my work. There’s this conversational aspect to his work that I admire, but he’s also not afraid to change registers out of thin air. He wrote a craft book called The Art of Recklessness, and I think that idea—recklessness—is vital to my understanding of what makes a good poem. I could also list a bunch of other people here for poetry—Jane Mead, Vievee Francis, Matthew Olzmann, Susan Yuzna—but I think influence in poetry tends to be a bit harder to talk about. Maybe that’s also because I’m more confident as a poet than a fiction writer—I mean, I went to school for it, I’ve got one poetry collection out and another forthcoming, it’s something I’ve lived with longer, so it’s harder to really trace the influences now. I’ve done fiction off and on, took some classes, published a few short stories, but it’s really only been since 2022 or so that I got serious about fiction, while I’ve been serious about poetry since a professor told me in his office hours back in 2010 that I needed to leave and not come back until I was ready to be serious about poetry.
5. Talk a bit about your current writing project.
I’m in the final stage of revising a novel about a small-town death metal scene, male friendship, and addiction, though this current draft is going very slowly, because once your kid learns to talk, it’s significantly harder to find moments to work on a novel! Hoping to have revisions wrapped up by the end of the summer so I can start querying agents. I have no idea how to do that, though. Is anyone reading this an agent? If so, would you like to be my agent? Thanks.
I’m also in the beginning stages of working on my third poetry collection, a process that’s been made easier by realizing that what I originally viewed as my third collection kinda sucked, so I’m taking the 50 percent or so of it that didn’t suck, combining it with the poems I’ve been working on over the last couple of years, and hoping something useful comes of that.
Follow Justin on X/Twitter at @justcarts. Follow Some Words on X/Twitter at @SomeWordsLit.
Andrew Careaga 