Embracing Rejection, Part 4: Where to Submit Your Stuff?

 

The dirty little not-so-secret concerning the state of contemporary literature (and art) is that teaching lies at the center of it all. Most writers and artists are subsidized by their positions teaching others how to be artists, who in turn look for teaching gigs to…

 

If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme to you, trust your instinct. The last students to get creative writing degrees when the programs shut their doors behind the last tenured professor to retire will be left holding the bag--filled with student debt. This isn't to say that some artists don't manage to make money from their art. Some even make enough to live on. And some grow rich. But not you. Or me.  We are slugging it out in the slush pile, hoping for a few publication credits to add to our brief biographies.

 

But every cloud, right? The silver lining here is that there are thousands of small journals out there. There have to be, since schools need them in order to train their students, and they all need one another, since they can't just publish their own writers all the time. This symbiotic relationship between the various writing programs doesn't leave a lot of room there for you and me, but it leaves some. And there are blessed souls out there who are on a mission to democratize art who have set up their own independent journals, apart from the colleges and universities that underwrite most of them. And I have found them to be more receptive to my particular style of poetry.

 

But with thousands of journals to choose from, where to begin? When I started, I used Poet's Market (the niche version of Writer's Market). The book was updated annually with contact information and a description of what the publication was looking for. Today, I look to the web for this, since it's updated continually.  Poets and Writers maintains a good list (www.pw.org), and there are many others that will give you a good idea of what's out there. But for the last decade, I have relied on Duotrope (www.duotrope.com). It costs $50 a year, but it has a list of 4,000 journals, the information is accurate, and it includes links to their websites.

 

Still, 4,000 journals is overwhelming. How to narrow it down? You may have a few journals you have come across already. Start there. And (if you are using Duotrope) you can try several ways of filtering your search results until you get a manageable list. They even include some lists of their own to help you: the most competitive, or least competitive, or shortest response time, or ones that pay, or ones that don't require a fee.

 

Here is a shortcut that may or may not work for you. Look at the list kept by Clifford Garstang. (His current list is here: https://cliffordgarstang.com/2023-literary-magazine-rankings-overview/). He keeps a ranked list of journals, based upon their representation in the Pushcart Prize results each year. It's a kind of moving average that takes into account past years. And the result is generally 200 or so journals. Because these journals have submitted poems for prize recognition--and have achieved some recognition--they are more competitive than others.

 

If that seems like too large a pool to swim in at the start, consider some of the least competitive journals. Duotrope allows you to search by acceptance rate (journals with an acceptance rate between two numbers). Remember, I said the rule of thumb was 1%. So maybe you search for journals with acceptance rates of 5-10%, or more.

 

Then, once you have your subset, read through the descriptions on Duotrope. Then visit the sites and read whatever is available there. Order a copy of the journal (subscriptions will often allow you to jump the line or submit "out of season.") And build your list.

 

Keep track of when the various journals are open for submissions, and put your packets of poems together. Then send them out! And good luck!

Embracing Rejection, Part 3: Playing the Odds

I’ve written in the past about the need to get a thick skin when sending your writing out into the world. But to truly embrace rejection, you need to actually learn to play the poor odds and turn them in your favor.  Here is one way.

Consider this: for your typical poetry journal, there are in the neighborhood of one hundred poems vying for each slot in the magazine. If you are a typically competent poet (as technically good as any other, except that an editor hasn’t warmed to your particular poems), you can expect an acceptance rate of 1%.

Now, poetry journals are not all created equal. For some of the most widely-read, most-competitive places (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Atlantic, etc), you might recalibrate your odds as nil. And if you are just starting out, even the newest, most wide-open journal with no reputation to speak of might be beyond your reach. But for the sake of argument, let’s just accept that 1% is as good a figure as any other.

The good news is that the odds aren’t as bad as they may first seem. Most journals ask for multiple submissions, usually five poems. So the odds of one poem in your packet being selected for publication is now 5%. Still slim, but not hopeless. Your odds are now one in twenty. 

I feel comfortable sending the same packet of poems to five journals at a time. When one of those five rejects all the poems in a packet, I turn it around and send it out to the next journal, with the goal of keeping it under consideration by five journals at a time.

Embracing Rejection -- Part Three

Embracing Rejection -- Part Three

On the eve of General Discharge being published, I thought I would share the story of its finding its way into print.

I write poetry about a number of subjects, from nature, to books and movies, to personal recollections about childhood--and the military. After 9/11, I imagined that poetry from a military point of view might be of interest, since we were once again a nation at war. To paraphrase "The Big Short," I wasn't wrong. I was just early (which, as one of the book's/movie's characters retorts, is the same thing.). Most of the military poems I wrote remained unpublished. But others (including musings on nature, books and movies, and recollections of childhood) were picked up by journals from time to time. Still, I continued to write military-themed poems (because I had to).

By 2017, I had over two dozen poems in respectable literary journals. And so I thought I would see if I had enough for a book. I tried organizing the poems around a number of themes. But then, an interesting thing happened. In 2017, my military-themed poems found an audience. A number of them were published all at once. And so I thought that their time might have finally come, and that I might build a book around them.

Why did this happen? I don't know. My guess is that it had something to do with the 2016 election. And as people realized there were large swaths of the American population they had never met, some journal editors decided to introduce their readers to these other people through my poems. I know the poems themselves hadn't changed. And one of them ("Compline, Camp Casey") had been around--and submitted to journals--for over 25 years before being published last summer.

By August of 2018, I had a book that I felt good about. So I sent it out to a few small publishers. One of them was Blackstone Books. Within a month, I heard back from Larry Moore, the publisher--and it was, as I had come to expect, a rejection letter.

But it was the kindest, the best rejection letter I have ever received. He thanked me, of course, and he said that he really liked the book. He even quoted lines of my poems to me (which I took as high praise). And then he let me down softly, saying that as much as he liked it, it didn't make his cut. But  then, in act of generosity, he suggested I contact Fomite Press, as Broadstone and Fomite share an author in common, and he thought my work might be a better fit there.

This was a rejection truly worth embracing.

And so I contacted Marc Estrin, and I sent him a sample of the book. He liked what he saw, and he asked to see the whole book. And we made a match.

I am very pleased with the whole process of working with Marc Estrin and Donna Bister at Fomite. I think Larry was right that this was where my book belonged. But it would have taken me much longer to find them (if I ever did) without the act of kindness and the sense of belonging to a community shown by Larry Moore at Broadstone. Thank you!

Embracing Rejection -- Part Two

Embracing Rejection -- Part Two

Don't become a victim of your own success. But be sure you know what "success" actually is!

After a long spell in which I submitted nothing (see part one of this discussion), I began sending off my writing again. And almost immediately, I found an editor who wanted not one, but two of my poems. And the publication paid in actual dollars, not just copies!

And what does an author do when he or she finds this kind of success? Naturally, I questioned my judgment. Clearly I had aimed too low. Clearly there were greater things in store for me, and I only needed to reach for the stars. My biggest risk, I thought, is that I would sell my genius too cheaply. My work would appear in journals that were lesser lights in the literary universe, and these were not poems that belonged under a bushel basket in some university library.

And so, for a long while after that, I submitted only to the kinds of journals that I had once imagined beyond my reach, but was now certain were within my grasp. And as a result, I didn't publish anything else for a long time.

When I got published by another journal, I was much more grateful. And this allowed my success to sustain me instead of eat at me.

It has also meant that I became much more careful about where I submitted my work. I have in mind a hierarchy of journals (you should, too). And I tend to send the poems I think are my best to those journals first. That way, they get their shot before I entertain other possibilities. And I don't entertain any journal in which I wouldn't be proud to find my poetry.

But this approach has also meant that I have had to come to terms with rejection. Because now I know myself better. I have thin skin, so I don't like rejection. But I also don't want a success that doesn't matter. And that means that I have to be clear about what matters. To me. The money didn't matter, but being considered alongside poetry I admired--and then having my work find a home there--that mattered. And if achieving that success requires me to brace myself for rejection, then I brace myself. It's part of the deal.

Each of us needs to define what is meaningful to us. For me, that means being tested against journals with some standing in the literary community. For you, it likely means something else. But if you don't know what you are aiming for, you are just shooting in the dark.

Embracing Rejection--Part One

Embracing Rejection--Part One

When I first decided to write, I bought a typewriter (a Sears knockoff of the IBM Selectric I really wanted), and I went to work. In reasonably short order, I finished a short story and sent it off to a literary journal of some reputation. And it was--as you might guess--rejected.

No big deal, right? But I had no experience in this kind of thing, so I had no idea what to expect or how to prepare myself for what happened. And what happened was that the editor wrote a rather lengthy response to the piece, saying how much he liked much of it, but that he thought a key episode in the story seemed too far-fetched to be believed.

This was (as you know, and as I now have figured out for myself) a gift. I was close to success! But it didn't feel that way to me.

You see, the part he couldn't believe was the only part of the story I had actually drawn from my own personal experience. And so I dismissed the editor as an idiot, and I decided that the story was too good for him--and for anyone else for that matter.

I didn't submit any writing again for a long time.

You know you are going to be rejected.  A lot. Everyone tells you so. So you brace yourself and hope that You Are Different. But likely, you will have to slug your way out of the slush pile like everyone else.

That's what makes the small victories so precious--all the rejection and self doubt that led to them. But without the doubts to test you, how would you learn that this really matters? And without the rejection, how would the success be meaningful.

But for God's sake--if someone actually comments on your work, pay attention! And get back to it as soon as you can. It's as close to a sign as you are likely to receive that someone out there is interested.