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**Interview with Up Yours! Editor and Publisher Charlie Fishead**

This interview was conducted on Dec. 4, 2025 by Writing Style reporter Llib Epot in the London headquarters of Up Yours!, a UK literary journal founded and run by Charlie Fishead, editor and publisher. The magazine has been the foremost online publication on the Small Press landscape since 1996, making it one of the oldest purveyors of literary fiction on the web. Fishead greeted our reporter in the anteroom of the corporate office. Fishead arrived dressed in a clown suit, with round, stick-on nose, huge floppy shoes and red frizzy wig. He immediately squirted Epot in the face with a bottle of seltzer and then invited our intrepid reporter into the sanctum sanctorum of Up Yours!

Llib Epot: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Charlie. It’ll be a feather in my cap.

Fishead: It’s my pleasure, Llib. Consider it a professional courtesy. Ask me whatever’s on your mind.

Epot: What gave you the impetus for starting your own journal, back in the day?

Fishead: I guess I got fed up with journals that charged excessive submissions fees, didn’t provide timely responses and were hyper-selective. You know, mags with a <5% acceptance rate.

Epot: What is the current acceptance rate of Up Yours!?

Fishead: Just south of 2%.

Epot: So, over the years, you found yourself becoming more selective?

Fishead: When you’re the top banana, it is incumbent on you to separate the wheat from the chaff, to disregard the vast majority of frankly untalented scribblers, no matter how well-meaning they are. They must be erased!

Epot: Is there ever a problem with hurt feelings on the part of unsuccessful submitters?

Fishead: No. We at Up Yours! merely regard that as a bonus.

Epot: Tell me, where did the name of the journal come from?

Fishead: It’s more a philosophical statement than anything else. Although, in my youth I did aspire to become a proctologist.

Epot: Understood. What do you look for in short fiction?

Fishead: Sex–but only between consenting adults, or adults and animals. I adore stories about teenaged hookers, randy football players and so-called experimental sex, like BDSM. I’m planning a month-long showcase of sexual bondage and discipline fiction. It’ll be rad!

Epot: Do you have any favorites among the stories you’ve run? Any favorite plots?

Fishead: Indeed I do. I ran one piece last year in which a pet cat’s spine was, for no apparent reason, crushed in a door. In another, a 5-year-old girl, sweet as could be, was brutally bludgeoned to death with a 28-ounce ball peen hammer. But, my favorite was probably the short fiction in which all of civilized man was converted by dark magic into a vast field of carrots.

Epot: Carrots? Was that it?

Fishead: The purveyors of the Black Arts turned out to be humanoid rabbits; get it? Cannibalism as a literary theme is ascendant on the horizon of zines nowadays!

Epot: Do you ever run into problems with censors or others who may try to delimit your publishing choices?

Fishead: No. Never.

Epot: What if you did?

Fishead: Then I’d fold like a cheap umbrella.

Epot: What are your editorial bugaboos?

Fishead: Sentence fragments, run-on sentences, spelling errors, sentence sprawl, wordiness, faulty parallelism, misplaced, dangling and squinting modifiers, improper punctuation, lack of subject-verb agreement…

Epot: That’s quite a list. What is the single worst sin a writer can commit in a submission to Up Yours!?

Fishead: I’ll narrow it down to two: exposition and fucking adverbs!

Epot: In your day job you’re a screenwriter. Have you written scripts for any films our readers might recognize?

Fishead: Yes, I had a part in writing the screenplays for Last Tango in Paris; Crash; Deep Throat; Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; I am Curious (Yellow) and Fritz the Cat.

Epot: You’re married and have 19 children. Are they boys or girls?

Fishead: Yes.

Epot: This year you’ll turn 45. Any regrets so far?

Fishead: Candidly, yes. I wish I’d started my family sooner.

Epot: How does the submisson process work at Up Yours!?

Fishead: I have a 6-member team of editorial assistants and readers who whittle down the slush pile.

Epot: What makes the ideal reader?

Fishead: A sadistic disregard for human dignity–if I have to narrow it down to one quality. Plus, they need to be quick-witted, fast with the put-down and basically, to be able to effect ridicule and humiliation at a moment’s notice. Also, an appetite for illegal drugs is a plus.

Epot: With the acceptance rate so low, why would someone want to submit to Up Yours!’

Fishead: Bragging rights, basically. Also, to become part of our writing community. And last, but not least, Up Yours! serves to provide an outlet for those who morbidly crave rejection; the masochists of the literary world. We envision our contributors as receiving their rejection note and saying ‘Thank you sir, may I have another?’

Epot: May I ask why you have such an aversion to brevity? You insist on stories in excess of 1,000 words.

Fishead: I detest brevity in any context: sex, flagellation, dental procedures. I’m a professional, Llib, and I’m old school. I pound out 20 words a day on a vintage Underwood typewriter, in order to construct a literary story in no less than 6 months.

Epot: You’ve put no restrictions on the number of times a writer may submit during a given reading period. Does that ever become a problem?

Fishead: I’ll say! From time to time you get a writer–well, we’ll call them writers–who submit repeatedly and frankly bog down the machinery that is our selection process. I’ve found it useful to dispatch to these individuals lethal letter bombs.

Epot: What does the future hold for Up Yours! and for Charlie Fishead?

Fishead: The journal will continue to thrive. As for me, diversification is the key. In 10- years-time I see myself owning and running a lucrative chain of bordellos and X-rated movie emporia and a string of porn shops in all the major UK cities.

Epot: It’s been a pleasure, Charlie.

Fishead: I hope the interview goes over well with readers and with the editors of Writing Style.

Epot: I can almost guarantee it, Charlie. And thanks for the check.

About the artist

Bill Tope is a retired caseworker, construction laborer, Hilton Hotel line cook and one-time nude model for university art classes. He lives in the American Midwest with his mean little cat Baby.