A Pact

Some awfully good students, another professor, and I agreed that we would each send a bundle of at least three poems to three different journals/small magazines by today. They did not have to be brand new poems, and they could been sent already to other places, but we were to get them out today. I am pleased to say that I kept my part in this pact, and I am confident the others did as well.

Last Friday, though, I received a rejection slip from a publication. Having worked for a number of years for The Black Warrior Review, I understand this situation from both sides. As a staffer, I would sometimes see almost one hundred new submissions a week. This situation was complicated by the fact that most of the BWR staff was not around during the summer months, because graduate students, most of them in the MFA program, composed the staff and would need the summer to have adventures, earn money, and write. (If you are a person given to sending creative writing to literary journals, please pay attention to the reading times they post, because you may be setting yourself up for disappointment merely by mailing in submissions at the wrong time of year.) In any case, when there was a big pile of submissions (unfortunately often referred to as "the slush pile"), material had to be spectacular just to survive the first cut. Poems would have to catch attention in just the first few lines; prose had to snare a reader by the top of the second page. In a slush pile, material that did not start strong would not have a chance to finish. For the BWR, the worse times for material to show up would be during the summer right up to the fall semester and during the winter break--both of these times would result in slush piles at the beginning of a semester. It was better for a submission to arrive about a month into the sorting process, so that it could get a better reading and, with any luck, perhaps be superior to pieces already kept. I know this process sounds brutal, and it does bruise egos, but that is how it worked for us then. I see no reason for it to work any new way now.

I should also note that, usually, the longer a journal has a piece, the more likely that its editors are giving that piece consideration. Up to a few months, that poem, article, or story has captured someone's attention. If I have not heard from a publication after six months, I am concerned that perhaps the piece has been forgotten, but I do not mind the hope in the first five months. As discouraging as it can be to receive a submission back within a couple of weeks, I prefer the anticipation of a few months' wait.

The other matter one must keep in mind has to do with the fact that the sheer number of pieces these journals receive means that work of merit will not be included for publication. These journals have budgets, they have only so many pages to allot to content, and, as is often the case, they begin to build an issue around one or two notable pieces that they have decided to accept. Even if the editorial staffs have only subconsciously put a theme or a correlation together, these choices matter as they develop the entire issue. A wonderful piece of material just may not fit with what the staff has already developed. When a person receives a rejection slip that says, "Your work does not fit our current needs," that note does not automatically mean, "we think you are a talentless hack, and, if you had any soul at all, you would not inflict your demented, illiterate, cliched, sociopathic, immature, hackneyed bear spoor on anyone ever again." That note usually means precisely what it says--it does not mean that your submission will never find a place at all. In the past, I have gotten the prefab rejection note with scribbled encouragement to send something else. I do not interpret the slip as a sign to stop. I send that journal something new.

I will also send the returned material somewhere else. There are many fine journals out there, established by people who want to encourage creativity, who hope they will have the opportunity to discover a new worthy talent, who understand that in a culture of vanity presses and internet submersion that permits anybody to place any digital presentation on the web practically forever (sort of like, you know, a blog entry), we still value the confidence an editor grants when sending the acceptance note, affirming that one's accomplishment deserves the attention of like-minded others.

I kept my pact with some like-minded others, and I look forward to hearing that they have kept their pact with me.