Editor’s Desk is a column about literary journals: the submission process, the evaluation process, and everything else.
Our submissions are open again at Hypertext Review. While I’m excited to dive in, I know that my job involves a lot of saying “no.”
In the past year, “no” became a common refrain for my own applications: residencies, workshops, conferences, and prizes. Did it hurt? Yes. However not nearly as much as it used to, when I was a young writer and I yearned for an acceptance because it would somehow give me validation in what I was doing.
In my few years of working as an editor and having to send out rejections, knowing full well the recipient is going to get that message and feel some disappointment, I have come to understand several things about rejection:
It’s not personal. When I am reading work, I admire that someone has taken the time and energy to craft something and get it done. It’s a chosen few that can sit down and actually complete a short story, an essay, a book. There are a myriad of reasons I have to reject an essay. Sometimes it isn’t fully done. Other times I have accepted several pieces on the same topic and I can’t take another on that theme.
Evaluate the rejection. With lit journal responses, I use Rejection Wiki to figure out if I’m receiving a standard rejection or a tiered one. I keep track. When I have a piece that has moved from getting flat rejections to tiered ones, I know I’m on the right path.
Rejection is subjective. I’ve written essays where I was so certain that they would take it as I knew it aligned with their submission process or they had published pieces with similar bent. Still got rejected. I realize that there is no one way to do this. And you don’t know the tastes of the readers or juries evaluating your work.
When we say send more work, we mean it. Many writers have confessed to me that they don’t believe it when journals encourage them to send more work. We mean it! I used to have this feeling like a rejection meant forever and I would not submit more work to that place. In that case, I was making the rejection inevitable by not even allowing myself to try in the first place. When a journal says they would be interested in seeing more work, do take note of that. Do send them another piece down the road, maybe mention in your cover letter that they had recommended you send work.
Embrace it as a teaching tool. For me, receiving a rejection, standard or tiered, is a signal for me to get back to working on that essay. I know I am never done, but that rejection tells me that I’m not there yet. I know a lot of people who dwell on feeling frustrated after a rejection, but honestly, the only real balm for me is getting right back to work. Because then, with the keyboard underneath my fingers, my thoughts flowing, I feel in control again. I am devoting the hours I need to for this project that means so much to me. And the more important I find it, the more I can craft it in a way that others will find it engaging as well.
We’re watching you. Crap that sounds bad. What I want to say is that we notice the names of our submitters, especially those that have sent us work a few times. When we open your work, we hope to witness what your persistence to writing has incurred. We hope that this will be the yes. Getting rejections from fellowships means that a panel of judges reviewed your work, and you are now on their radar. Those judges may later be the people nominating for those weirdly-secret-but-prestigious prizes like the Whiting Award. So keep at it, and your work will find its place.
This was really helpful, thank you. So glad to learn about Rejection Wiki (!!).