On the effort and sacrifice of editors

  

          My first full-length poetry collection is coming out this summer, and just the other day, my second full-length collection was accepted by a publisher. At age forty-seven, with two forthcoming books, I couldn’t be happier to embrace my unusual status as both a midlife and an emerging poet.

The fact is, I spent a dozen years publishing other people’s work instead of my own. As the editor-in-chief of a major journal, I made many good professional contacts and built some friendships in the field, but an unexpected effect was that my relationships with other editors made submitting awkward. I didn’t want even a sniff of quid pro quo where my poems were concerned; instead, I wanted them to get by on their own merits. During these years, for the most part I didn’t attempt to publish in journals, and I certainly didn’t pursue a full-length book. I did, however, publish two chapbooks, one with the Wick Poetry Series at Kent State University and the other with the independent press Winged City. I’m very proud of both of those skinny books.

            Serving the broader literary community made life varied and fun and meaningful for me during my editor-in-chief years, but I can’t deny that doing so held me back a good bit. Sure, some editors are content to reap the benefits of connections to publish their own work and gain a following. And still others do the same hard work that all submitters do and are left to question the source of the progress they make. I skirted both of these ethical quandaries by just biding my time.

            In a previous post, I raised the question of cronyism in the publishing field. It strikes me as a significant problem. Today, though, I want to highlight the sacrifice that editors make. Obviously, I’m candid about my own self-sacrifice (yay, me), but many editors are quiet on the point. They do their work, both editorial and creative (few editors are not also writers themselves), and they are quiet about the personal cost.

            Editors are often criticized—even here. I pick apart their rejection language, as if forgetting the times that I sat in front of a computer and labored over the verbiage of a just-right rejection slip. Sometimes they fail to deliver the critical message and bypass the whole “we’re rejecting this” part of the note (yesterday’s blog post gave an example of this). Sometimes they appear to whinge over their own extreme effort, perhaps forgetting that it takes less than half a minute to reject terrible writing.

            Editors are also viewed with extreme suspicion by submitters. Are they taking work from the submission pool or just soliciting famous names? Are they really considering work or just rejecting it unread? Do they ignore the unpublished or the bookless? Do they have something against men, or women, or people of color, or certain aesthetics?

            Certainly, many do have an aversion to certain people or certain types of work. (The latter is part of the job—pursuing an editorial aesthetic is perfectly valid, provided it is communicated openly with would-be submitters and it does not stem from cultural bias.) But I suspect that most editors are receiving work on its own terms and trying to do the best they can by using their own judgment. Cultural biases creep in and are examined and dealt with, if an editor is worth her salt.

            But editors have a big job, and a vital one. They must consider submissions—more and more all the time. They have to raise money for publication from a potential audience (mostly writers) that resents being approached with a subscription offer or a donation solicitation. They do all of this while under a curtain of suspicion from submitters whose default position is to doubt editors’ ethos. And as a reward, a majority of these editors get paid … nothing at all.

            In the final assessment, I’m glad I waited until after my term as an editor concluded to pursue my own publishing goals. Editing was a labor of love, and I treasure the friendships that came from that period in my life. All in all, though, I’m glad to be where I am now—slowly but surely making my way, without any sense that I owe anything to anyone.

I did my time on the other side of the transom, and I’m proud to have served. Now I get to embrace my new life—as a published poet. It has been a long road, and often a difficult one, but I’m so glad to have ended up right where I am.

Reading the Tea Leaves of Rejection: The basic necessity of "no"

What information do we seek from rejections?

To an extent, the answer varies from writer to writer. You know by now my feelings about the importance of a “thank you” from editors—for every submission, every time—and we all scan for any hint of coded language that says, “We like you!” or “You came close!” or “Send more!”

But when it comes right down to it, we want to know the editor’s decision on our work. We’re hoping for a yes. Numbers-wise, it’s more likely to be a no. Whatever it is, we want to see it.

That’s what makes today’s rejection slip so odd. The journal, which I won’t name (editing is hard enough without some blogger calling you out), is a good one. I’ve submitted to it many times, and I would love to be in one of its always-beautiful issues—but rejections are not its strong suit.

See for yourself:

Dear XXX, Thank you very much for sharing your story "XXX" with us on [date]. You know, each work we receive is important to us—deserving the same kind of attention it most likely took to create it—which makes us especially grateful for your patience in awaiting our response.

So even if this particular submission wasn't a fit for us, we're very appreciative of the opportunity you've given us to both read and consider it for our pages and therefore encourage you to share more work with us in the not too distant future. Thank you for thinking of us now! Sincerely, [Editor]

The big surprise in this rejection slip is that it lacks a rejection. The closest it comes is the dependent clause that reads, “So even if this particular submission wasn’t a fit for us ….”

Yes, editor, I hear you, but what if it were a fit? What if it is? I see no clear indication that it isn’t. Therefore, as a glass-half-full kind of gal, I’m counting this one as a yes, and I look forward to seeing my work in an issue.

I’ve written rejection language before, and I’ve sent rejections to thousands of writers. It’s hard to do. Personally, I’m thick-skinned about the whole matter, and I started out that way—I never invested any emotion in whether a stranger said yes or no to me. Knowing the numbers were working against me, I figured I’d probably be rejected, but I always opened a response with a gentle optimism in the face of the numbers.

Likewise, an editor’s “yes” doesn’t rock my world, either. I prefer them, but I’m not staking my self-opinion on the matter. I don’t think a “yes” is a full measure of my work. Sometimes people just resonate with what you’re saying, even when the poem isn’t strong. Sometimes they don’t. In part, it all comes down to chance.

Editors know that a lot of submitters, maybe the majority of them, are not like me. They’re opening an e-mail with shaky hands and bated breath. If they get a “yes,” it might change their lives. If they get a “no,” it might be the last straw—one more rejection in a string of them, whether poetry related or otherwise. It’s important to be kind.

It is a mistake, though, for editors to gentle up a rejection too much. At the very least, they have to say no, directly and respectfully. This journal fails to do so, and as a result, it fails the writer.

A writer who receives this rejection can take heart in the invitation to “share more work … in the not too distant future.” Editors don’t ask if they don’t mean it, and a writer receiving this rejection should offer another manuscript soon—not immediately, I would recommend, but within three to six months, with a note of thanks for the encouragement and the invitation to submit again.

The rejection language clearly needs to be reworked, but where this journal absolutely does not fail is in the kindness department. When kindness is in the foreground, errors can always be forgiven.

Ask the Moon: How to get off the newsletter mailing list

Richard, the friend who originated the idea of the Ask the Moon column, sends this question:

An online journal that published a poem of mine a couple years ago has since then sent me junk e-mail—not issues of the journal, but just various announcements related to the journal— about every two months. The e-mail sender is the journal editor's work address, bob@fakecollege.edu. There is no unsubscribe link or instruction. Do I e-mail the editor and ask to be taken off their mailing list? Wouldn't that be burning a bridge? Hurting someone who has helped me? I suppose I could block the sender, but I don't really want to cut off all communication. Help!

First, kudos to Richard for perfectly emulating the desperation of an actual advice column. “Help!” was a good touch. It’s much easier to channel my inner Abby when we all approach this thing in the right mindset.

But the question is real enough, funny verisimilitude aside. I think all of us who submit to journals find ourselves on lists like these, and that can mean daily notifications from a bunch of journals we submitted to, perhaps months or years ago.

In the period before most journals were accepting online submissions, I was actually one of the pioneers of the e-mail newsletter when I was editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review. In the 2000s, when postal submissions came, the cover letters almost always included an e-mail address for ease of collaboration with writers whose work we accepted. These addresses seemed like a useful marketing tool, and I started keeping them. In those days we would have interns type e-mail addresses, which they did with all of the enthusiasm and cheer of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

I used my personal e-mail address, and when I sent out my very first edition of the e-mail newsletter, I made a rookie error by putting all of the addresses in the “To” window. I think my computer got hung up with a rainbow wheel for a few hours, although I don’t remember the particulars. Many of the newsletters went through,  and a ton were blocked, insultingly enough, by spam filters.

I received a lot of e-mails from kind-hearted writers who suggested that I use the “BCC” line instead of the “To” or “CC” line, thus making the recipient list private. I also received a lot of angry e-mails from people who called me everything but what Mom named me. It became apparent that people did not necessarily want a newsletter, even from a magazine they apparently supported, at least to the extent that they would send me work to consider.

From the start, I had two ideas in mind with a newsletter. First, I needed to send it infrequently, so I opted for a long e-mail separated into parts, and I tried to cover anything and everything I thought writers would want to know. Following up with a correction or additional information was not an option under this rule I set for myself, so I had to write it carefully and get it right the first time.

More importantly, I needed to make sure that I had a positive purpose in mind. Honest to God, I saw my newsletter as an attempt to build community with writers. I wanted to extend a friendly hand and let them know that I was responsive and accountable to them. I wanted to answer their questions and to be accessible. My newsletters always led off with a call for submissions and an explanation of our current needs.

Make no mistake: my e-mail newsletter also had the goals of building our subscriber base and of bringing in more revenue from contest submissions. There is this perception that university-based journals are fully supported by their institutions, but our annual allocation from the university was under $3,000 most of the years I was at that journal. We had to pay our own way, to the extent that I once sponsored the printing of an issue out of my own pocket. We paid our own way to conferences and bookfairs, and we often sponsored visits by writers. Raising money is important when you’re the one going to Office Depot and springing for the colored paper that you cut by hand into rejection slips.

The e-mail newsletter was a labor of love for me. I spent hours composing it in just the right way, and I spent more hours sending it off by myself in groups of fifty addresses, pasted one after the other into a new e-mail's BCC area, and responding to writers who had questions or queries about submissions or complaints or friendly hellos, even as I was still in the middle of distributing the thing.

That’s a lot of context, I know, to answer Richard’s question about what he should do to avoid the annoyance of an unwanted e-mail every two months, but it does allow us to consider the question: Why is the journal sending the e-mails? There may be many motives, but as my experience shows (I hope), most of these are admirable ones.

A dirty little (open) secret of literary publishing is that everyone submits but only handfuls subscribe. Fewer than 1 percent of submitters to the journal I edited were also subscribers, in fact, before I began the newsletter, and that percentage actually decreased as the newsletter brought in more submissions with the handful of subscriptions it would yield. Journals use newsletters to sustain themselves in various ways, and often the purpose is to try to turn submitters into readers. We want people to see the work that we publish; it’s why we do what we do.

A practical answer: Richard has a few options. He can commit these directly to the junk folder without reading them. That’s a bit dangerous; after all, the editor might be sending them from her own address, which means that an acceptance can be trashed right along with the e-mail.

He can automatically delete without reading, as he undoubtedly does with a whole category of e-mails every time he opens his in-box. I do.

He can write to the editor and ask to unsubscribe. There’s really no problem with this, although I would urge him to do so politely. No explanation is necessary, and the note asking to unsubscribe won’t be memorable to the editor; dozens of these always come in after a newsletter is released.

Ultimately, my suggestion is that he open the newsletter and read what it has to say, or at least skim it. He suggested that he cared about the journal when he sent work its way. Should he break into the journal, I know he’d want to be assured that the editor is doing everything in his power to build a readership for his work. And communication is always a gesture toward community.

Ask the Moon: There's no such thing as rejection

Today begins a new feature for us: “Ask the Moon.”

It’s surprisingly hard to think of a writing topic to address each and every day. Some days I feel like I have dozens of ideas to choose from, and some days I’m blank. I think we all know how it feels to stare at a screen for long minutes when nothing comes. And really, this is a blog about writing, by a writer who wants to be, well, writing. Poems and stuff.

In the interest of time, I’ve asked readers to submit questions they would like to see addressed here. A number of them have come through with some fascinating—and challenging—queries.

If you have a question about writing or editing, or if you would like the language of a rejection “translated” from editorese into English, you may contact me on Twitter @karenkawrites or via e-mail at karen.craigo@gmail.com.

Melissa asks …

How do you remain optimistic about your work despite rejection?

There’s a simple answer to that, Melissa. I’m kick-ass.

No, really—I’m a terrific poet. I say things that are worth saying, and I am bold and innovative in the saying. I have meticulous control of line and form and rhetoric.

I spell correctly. I grammar … good.

And much of that is true some of the time. But you know, I do believe in myself. Whether or not I pull off what I’m hoping and trying to in a poem, I know my motives when I come to the page, and they’re pure ones. I’m trying to make discoveries through language.

Like every writer, I have differing levels of success from piece to piece. Sometimes I’m quite pleased with what comes out on the page. Sometimes I end up with a mess on my hands.

Worst of all, sometimes I am pleased and I don’t realize I have a mess on my hands—or at least not until much later. Let’s not talk about those times.

With each poem, I can honestly say that I made an attempt and I took the work of thinking and drafting seriously. That’s true if I’m on a writing retreat and I have all of the space and time I need to work on words, and it’s true if I’m trying to write left-handed because on my right there’s a toddler who won’t let go of my arm. I don’t always have the luxury of silence or privacy or time to myself, but I still write in the best way that I can—smaller ideas, captured now and refined later.

I write because I want to puzzle through something, or I want to capture a bit of beauty, or I want to be present with myself. Not all writing efforts lead to successful finished products, but the little acts of faith sometimes earn me gifts that show up on the page, and that’s when it’s no longer meaningful to think of writing as “good” or “bad.” That’s when writing is holy.

Getting back to the question—how do I power through when rejection is part of the game?—I think it comes down to this: I know what I’m about, and I know that I am entirely humble in the presence of the word. Instead of indulging in my cleverness (and I delight in being clever at times!), my writing serves as an act of faith. I keep going because I continue to be faithful.

(And sometimes I continue to pray—even though I have yet to win the lottery.)

Earning an editor’s good opinion certainly pleases me. When I don’t find favor with editors, it doesn’t bother me (provided they are direct and polite in their rejection). I’m not actually writing for them. I’m writing for me—the “me” in me, and the “me” that is a miniscule but essential component of everything there is.

When we present the very best part of us, editors may turn it down, but the universe accepts what we offer, joyfully.