We’re ba-ack…

Ellen Parker and I asked our panel of writers and editors the following questions:

As a writer, what are your thoughts and feelings about “the slush”? What do you believe happens when you submit your work for consideration?

As an editor, do you actually read submissions in the slush? How much of each submission do you actually read? Do you read blindly, or are the authors’ names available to you? How much content is published from the slush? And why is it called “slush”? Is this term derogatory?

Here’s what they said:

Ann Amodeo lives and writes fiction in Woodstock, NY. Her stories can be found online at Hobart, Ghoti, The Beat, and others. Her novel, Quiet at the End of the World, will be finished very soon, goddamnit.

A necessary evil — I’m sure there are tons of writers, writing students and teachers laboring under the notion that submitting just about anything is “worth a try.” So the slush will always be a formidable presence. I don’t want to be too negative about it, though, because it can easily be the wrong people who get discouraged — when I taught creative writing, my best students were shy and polite. I know it’s not necessarily the rule, but the pushy, annoying ones just about barely achieved coherence.

The effect on writing is slightly more worrisome — we know that our work is being judged by the opening lines and pages. There are even books coaching writers on this point. Many of the works we consider classics might not pass this test, and I don’t think they should have to. I have read a number of recent books with polished openings but the book doesn’t live up to the setup. There are even loads of typos. It’s frustrating as a reader, too.

Matt Baker is a writer. His favorite snack food is a hardboiled egg with Louisiana hot sauce.

The slush pile is part of the unsolicited submission process. I believe that my story gets read and if the first reader likes it then it gets passed on and so on. It’s certainly a very subjective process and is prone to human error and mishaps. I’ve had submissions get lost. I’ve had comments written on my rejection slip that made no sense. I’ve had cover letters from other people included in my SASE. A few months ago I got a note: “Dear Patricia, your story, “Quarterback Sack”…” My name’s obviously not Patricia and I’ve never written a story about football. You just never know and that’s why it’s so important to be committed and diligent in submitting your work.

Jill Barth lives just outside of Chicago with her husband and three young children in a house built before the Civil War. She is a recent contributor to Boston Literary Magazine and Virtual Writer.

I think this all depends on the publication. I have received personal responses from the person in charge at some publications. I have also received what is clearly a slush-generated response from an unknown staffer at other publications. I will discuss those types of responses in this comment.

I can imagine that the amount of manuscripts, particularly at places that read short stories with many thousands of words per story, would be overwhelming for any publication during a reading period. Common sense tells me that someone needs to pre-approve stories before the editors take the time to read the pieces. I envision a slush pile (yes, I picture a big wooden desk with an over-flowing inbox) that is manned by a few junior editors. These folks can check to see that submission guidelines were met, evaluate pieces for standard unacceptable errors, and make a judgment on overall fit. They then recommend a selection of the pieces for review by the editors. I see no problem with a filter stage; in fact I find that to be good business practice. An editor doesn’t need to be bothered with work that just won’t work objectively.

Pieces that might not be good enough, but qualify for editorial review will likely get touched by the editor, hopefully read by the editor before being rejected. All writers would like to know that if their work was not in draft form and met the guidelines, it should be honored with at least a moment of the editor’s attention.

Digby Beaumont is based in Brighton on the south coast of England. He worked as a nonfiction author for many years, with numerous publications, and his short fiction work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies.

The existence of slush piles doesn’t evoke much feeling in me; I accept it as an inevitable part of a business in which there is an oversupply of material. I submit mostly short fiction, to particular publishers, and I proceed under the assumption that it is read and evaluated according to their individual tastes and needs. Maybe they read the whole piece or only the first couple of sentences. That’s their prerogative. My feeling is, if the work has enough merit, it will find a good home.

Mark Budman is the editor of Vestal Review magazine and the author of My Life at first Try. (Counterpoint, Winter 2008)

As a writer, I hate slush. I envision a stoned, drunk, much too much partied student reading through the slush and rejecting stories just because accepting them is more work for him or her.

As an editor, I know it’s a necessary evil. At Vestal Review, we have first readers, so what I read has already been pre-screened. I know that none of our first readers are stoned or drunk when they read our slush.

We don’t read blindly. Human being have eyes not for nothing.

As for the term itself, I don’t have any feeling about the word. It’s just a term.

Dave Clapper is the founding editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He occasionally writes, most recently appearing in FRiGG Magazine and Per Contra.

Well. Truth is, I’ve started to write an answer to this a few times and I just wasn’t feelin’ it, yo. But… I’ve now had two reposado margaritas I mixed myself, so… whee, right? The slush. If I had my druthers, we’d never solicit one damned thing. I’ve reported (I think) that our acceptance rate runs about 4%. Actually, I think that was even in our form rejection for a while, as in, “Our acceptance rate is only 4%, so it’s very tough.” Gag! We got rid of that line. And 4%, I’m here to tell you, is overselling things. Our acceptance rate from the slush is more like about 2%. We input our solicitations into the same online admin center where the “unsolicited” subs go. (I put unsolicited in quotes, because frankly, anything that comes in through the online submission form is solicited, via the guidelines and the form itself. We want “unsolicited” submissions.)

So… 2%. That’s one in fifty. But if what was in the slush warranted it, I’d be ecstatic to never ever ever solicit one single solitary thing. I want to be dazzled by everything that comes in. I want to publish lots of stuff by folks who’ve never been published before. Do you know the cred that goes to an editor for “discovering” a great writer? If we could “discover” eighty new writers a year, we’d be selling our shit for millions on eBay, it’d smell so good.

But.

It doesn’t happen.

Here’s why. I read the 12th issue of Quick Fiction the other night. I was blown away. I was inspired. I was awed. My beloved just told me that our last issue of SLQ was as good, that she leaned into her monitor with her mouth open while reading. Hallelujah! That, my friends, is what we want! From where I sit, it’s hard to be blown away in quite the same way from story to story to story. By the time we put an issue of the magazine to bed, I know the stories awfully damned well. When one knows twenty stories as well as I do by the time we publish, it’s hard to read them with one’s mouth ajar. But lemme tell ya… if a magazine’s put together right, that’s the effect. Quick Fiction did that to me. SmokeLong, hallelujah, did that to at least one writer I really respect.

And that’s why. The stuff we receive needs to make me drool on my desk, at least a little, if it’s going to make it in. Or, rather, it needs to have that effect on at least one of our editors. We’ve run stuff that only one editor voted yes on, but whose yea was so enthusiastic that the rest of us had to look askance at our own nays. And we’ve turned away stuff that was almost a unanimous yes, but the yeas were moderate.

In light of that, yes, we solicit. We don’t particularly want to. If the slush read like that issue of Quick Fiction that so awed me, we could publish twenty stories weekly, and I’d do a happy happy joy joy dance. The reality is, though, that because we have our own subjective versions of what we like and because those are sometimes startlingly specific (yet nearly impossible to define)… 2%.

Stepping outside of that for a sec… just because we don’t want to print something doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are a lot of venues out there that are great that may better suit a writer’s sensibilities. I know that a lot of editors virtually beg submitting writers to read their publications before submitting. I’m not gonna do that. But. As a (terribly lazy, of late) writer myself, I’ve gotten to a point where I have zero interest in submitting to a magazine I don’t already personally love to read. My stuff is splattered all over the place from a phase when I wanted to be as many places as possible. Ooh, look at that Dave Clapper, he’s so talented. Fuck that. At this point, if/when I submit, it’s only going to be to places I already love to read. Those would include Quick Fiction, Night Train, elimae, and a few places I’ve been before. If, for example, my work only appeared for the rest of my life in FRiGG, I could be pretty damned happy with that. Writers: it’s not a crime to find a publication you like and get comfortable there. You do not have to appear in a hundred different publications to be successful. If SmokeLong happens to be a place that you love to read, then hit us hard (within the guidelines). But if it’s not… why are you submitting? If you’re submitting, you’re either a) trying to fit stuff where it won’t, or b) trying to change your voice to match our vision. Neither is productive.

And shit, I shouldn’t say that, because quite often it’s the voice that comes at us from a direction we never even thought of that makes us all hurl hosannas at the heavens.

(On an unrelated note, I love the slush (yeah, sure, you’re saying, but it’s true, I do) but… if you’re one of a thousand MySpace “friends” who “know” me only from there, or from someplace else totally peripherally… please don’t ask me to read your entire blog to find something I might like… figure out for yourself which of two or three of the two hundred blogged stories is your best work and submit it like everyone else. We have (as of right now) over a hundred stories in the slush we want to give the proper attention… reading your entire blog takes time away from those fine folks.)

To anyone who actually read all of this, if you’re ever in Seattle, I’ll mix you a very fine margarita.

Kathy Fish’s stories are published or forthcoming in Quick Fiction, The Denver Quarterly, Storyglossia, New South, and elsewhere. A collection of her short shorts will appear in a book published by Rose Metal Press at the end of March, 2008.

I think it’s terrifically hard to get a story past a slushpile reader. I think you have to grab that reader in the first paragraph or it’s getting tossed. I also think that many, many things can cause your story to get tossed that are completely to do with outside forces: the slushpile reader’s mood, the quality of the last several stories the reader read, the reader’s own particular prejudices, etc. There is a huge degree of plain old luck involved with getting past that first reader. Many worthy stories do not.

My guess is that when slushpiles are huge, the stories sit and sit and sit and then, are responded to en masse. I honestly believe a lot of stories don’t get read at all but I could be wrong.

If, as a writer, you have any means of bypassing the slushpile, by all means take advantage of it! This is where I think making contacts with higher level editors is a great thing. Your story will get a deeper, more considerate read and your chances of getting accepted about a million times higher. Having said that, I’m not particularly good, myself, at making these sorts of contacts.

Clifford Garstang is a fiction writer and student of the art of rejection-slip reading who also ruminates at Perpetual Folly.

I believe: (a) it doesn’t matter what I believe; (b) every magazine is different; and (c) slush is slush, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher.

Writer

I’ve always thought there is a certain cynicism in the term ‘slush’. After all, the other type of slush is messy, unstructured, wet, neither one thing nor the other (snow, rain, road-dirt…) and as a writer I used to feel slightly sick at the thought of my work being lost under a pile of this stuff.

But that’s life, and if you want to be part of the writing world, you can’t afford to go around feeling sick. You have to toughen up.

What do I believe happens? It depends on the publication. I’m sure some solicit/read until they have enough to fill the pages, then reject the rest. Others sift. Others publish everything they get. Others only want submissions from agents. Part of making your way through the maze is learning the codes, the keys, and learning the rules of the game.

Editor

Yes, for Tom’s Voice I read everything I am sent, with names attached. For this particular publication it is important that the writers understand our ethos and are happy to explain why, in their bios. In the publication, readers see the writers’ bios before the writing. So that’s how I read the submissions.

I also solicit work, but not often. So the vast majority of Tom’s content comes from the slush pile. (Can I call it something a bit more attractive, please? The snowdrift. That’ll do.)

Alicia Gifford writes short fiction and is currently working on a novel-in-stories. She is the Fiction Editor for the online literary journal Night Train.

As a writer I can get caught up in the reading-tea-leaves aspects of the slush. I can get into Slush Mysteries. I watch Duotrope, and if I see rejections for submissions sent after I sent in mine, I imagine that mine has gone up a level, and I get hopeful, and then the inevitable form rejection. I recently received a rejection for a submission that I believe was not read. I queried the editor via email, and he forwarded my query to a reader/student, who sent me an email saying they were rejecting the piece. And it’s the first time that I strongly felt that a submission was rejected without reading. I think some student editor didn’t take the time to look for my submission in a pile, just, NO. But that was the first time I felt blown off. Or that I remember feeling truly blown off. Oh, other places have blown me off, but I’ve forgotten them now.

I get terribly frustrated at the waiting game, really hate it, but whatareyagonnado? Overall, I think I’m mid-level slush crazy. I know there are some writers that don’t trust the slush, don’t trust the first level readers to “get” their stories, who think their work is rejected by know-nothings before the real editors can appraise them. I have more faith than that. Nor do I have elaborate “Slush Theories” about cherry-picking and slush pecking orders, etc. But I’m not one of the very laid back types either, that send out their submissions and then forget about them, and who find all this “has-anyone-heard-from-so-and-so?” stuff coo-coo making. I like to know who’s heard from so-and-so. I can get into studying Duotrope’s What’s New? like I’m reading the I Ching and planning my life by it. And sometimes I can be more laid back. Overall, I have faith in the slush.

As an editor I most often read an entire submission. A story has to be really bad for me to put it down and reject it without finishing it. I find most submissions worthy of a careful, thorough reading. Even if a story seems like it will certainly be rejected, I get into it and want to know what happens.

One of the dangers of slush-reading is that you read a lot of competent but unaffecting work, and then you read something that’s a tad above, and you think it’s really good. When it’s not. It’s important to keep perspective. I do it by reading really good stuff in published collections, anthologies or fine literary journals to keep perspective.

At Night Train, we read slush more or less in order. Sometimes we read the Firebox Fiction submissions first, because we publish them weekly and like to get ahead if we can. Work comes in under “user” names into our system, and unless the name is on the manuscript (often it’s not) or there’s a cover letter with a name, it can get read anonymously. We always have the option to peek at the user’s data and find out who’s sending it. I skim cover letters but if they’re very wordy I may not read the whole thing. If someone lists a lot of prestigious credits and an MFA, I might look forward to reading the story more than, say, someone who’s never been published or someone listing credits in obscure ezines, but they all get the same attention. They really do. Prestigious credits don’t guarantee a story full of wow factor. We’ve rejected writers with Pushcart and BASS credits because we didn’t like their stories.

Nor do we cherry-pick. It would be too tedious to open each submission to see who wrote it. Our “slush pile” only shows story titles, not authors.

At Night Train, 99.9% of the work we publish comes from the slush. Personally, I don’t find the term “slush” offensive. People who find the word offensive need to hear really offensive stuff and get some perspective. Come on to my house. The word “slush” will sound like a prayer.

Why is it called “slush”? I guess cuz you have to slog through it. It could be called a haystack, too. That works.

Steve Hansen has had limited success as a writer, having published stories over the past 10 years at FRiGG, The Danforth Review, The Paumanok Review, and a few other online “reviews.” He currently spends his time and energy trying to meld the worlds of high finance, literature, and comic books at www.tqrstories.com.

As a writer, I have no feelings about “the slush” other than I hope my story is scooped up from out of “the slush” and freeze dried and given a good once over and found to be the work of genius I know it is down in my bones and then is promptly published.

Over at TQR we read “the slush.” Everything we publish is from “the slush.” “The Slush” has the authors’ names connected to it. In short, we revere and love “the slush.” To alleviate the baggage of bad press “the slush” has accumulated over the many years of its existence, we at TQR have opted to coin it the “venture capital vortex” instead of “the slush,” even though it be “the slush” by any other name. Adieu!

Beverly Jackson is a poet, writer, and artist (and former publisher/editor) living in North Carolina.

I don’t care what kind of pile they throw me on, (call it what you like) but the TIME it takes to read submissions is obscene at many venues. If my work isn’t rejected/accepted in three months time, I will NEVER send them another piece. There’s no excuse for some of the practices of some publishers. 1. If you are understaffed, then reduce the submissions by limiting the window for them. 2. If you have a committee of readers/editors who lollygag with submissions, or are too busy to give final approval, then you should change your procedures to be more respectful of the writers who are your bread and butter. 3. If you pay nothing and get paid nothing, then you probably ought to look at WHY you’re in the business–and if it isn’t to support literature (and thus writers), and if you feel victimized by your slush pile then you probably ought to find other endeavors. RESPECT WRITERS. A rejection slip doesn’t take long, and most of the slush pile is rejected.

Do I sound like I’m yelling? This was one of the reasons I got into the publishing business! To give writers some respect!

Ink Pot and Lit Pot read every single submission. I kept hiring editors as soon as our response rate got longer than two weeks to a month. That was the MAXIMUM. Usually we turned submissions around in a week or less. And we worked really hard. There were plenty of submissions! There were only isolated stories or isolated writers that we did not read all the way through. But always half way through “just in case.” Writers deserve that much respect. We did not read blind except during contests.

I don’t know why it’s called slush. My staff never called it that because we didn’t have a slush pile. We were always reading, and had enough of us to stay on top. Once in awhile a flash editor would pitch in and read with the story editors and vice versa when the demands were heavy. Or we started looking for another editor.

I don’t think there should be slush piles when a venue is properly staffed and organized. But I’ve never had the quantity of submissions that perhaps The New Yorker gets, either.

Michael Leone used to live in Brooklyn; now he lives in southern New Jersey. He has been published in Wind, Green Mountains Review, North Atlantic Review, The Ledge, and The Jabberwock Review, and has a story forthcoming in Sou’wester. He’s also a book reviewer for the SF Chronicle, the Plain Dealer, the Kansas City Star, and other newspapers.

Here is a secret: I had a story rejected from a journal about a year ago. I met the editor of same journal, was asked if I had anything to submit, and handed her a piece. It was accepted.

What is the logic here? Connections? Maybe. Just that you need the most privileged read you can get. The slushpile is like a lottery, but the better your stories are, the more doggedly you submit, you will eventually get hits, hopefully before you’re eighty years old.

Joseph Levens has been published in The Florida Review, Other Voices, Swink, AGNI, New Orleans Review, and other publications. He is the editor of The Summerset Review.

We don’t have a slush pile, and we don’t solicit stories and essays from specific writers. So we give every submission a fair try. As to how much of a submission we read, we feel we can make an accurate assessment of whether the piece may be right for us simply by reading the first one hundred words or so, and sometimes by briefly scanning the piece to get the gist of it. About 75% of the submissions we receive are rejected based on this preliminary scan. Most of the other 25% are read to completion, and those still in the running are put aside and read again about a month later to ensure a lasting impression. Final decisions are made keeping in mind that we want to publish a variety of voices and premises in each issue.

The preliminary scan is done on the computer since we receive submissions electronically. The pieces we decide to read to completion are printed out – the writer’s name is removed, the text is converted to single space and 11pt font to save paper and ink. Then, out come the colored markers, a different color for each day of the week, to mix it up a little. We’ve never had the luxury of publishing a story without at least a few markups (agreed with the writer, of course). As I write this, it is Monday, and Monday means orange. But it is St. Patrick’s Day. So, for today, and today only, Monday is green.

Jacob McArthur Mooney is a poetry editor with ThievesJargon.com and the founder of The Facebook Review. His first collection of poems, The New Layman’s Almanac, is due in March from McClelland & Stewart. He lives in Toronto.

Thieves Jargon reads everything that comes through. The only slush in our lives is yellow snow, and that season’s almost over.

I’d rather read submissions blindly, but I do most of my reading straight from email, and I haven’t found a pleasing way to anonymize.

Steven J. McDermott is the editor of Storyglossia. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and in his collection of stories Winter of Different Directions.

As a writer, I’m influenced by my experiences as an editor. Consequently I try to submit mostly to journals where a single editor or senior editors do the reading. The odds are so much lower when a piece has to make its way through first readers—who are frequently just starting out in publishing—and then also has to make it through the committee vote.

“Slush” is a term from the print world and probably has a colorful etymology I’m not aware of, but I’ve always always understood the term to refer to unsolicited submissions or un-agented submissions. Which tells you plenty about how they operate in the NYC publishing dens. The term is only derogatory in the sense that if you are a big NYC editor you’d obviously rather be reading agented submissions than a pile of unsolicited submissions.

When it come to editing Storyglossia, the term” slush” is meaningless. I don’t receive any submissions from agents, and in 27 issues have only solicited a couple of submissions. So every submission is unsolicited and read with equal attention. Submissions are only accepted via email so usually the author’s name is readily apparent. But a lot of people have email addresses that don’t include their name and you’d be surprised how many submissions come in without the author’s name anywhere on the submission. Knowing who the author is makes no difference to me. I’ve rejected well-known and decorated writers just as quickly as I’ve rejected writers who are unknown to me. I do confess to giving previous contributors the benefit of the doubt. Their writing has won me over before, so if the story doesn’t work for me on the first read, I’m more likely to give a previous contributor’s work a second read just to make sure.

As for how much of a submission I read? I usually read until something pushes me out of the story. After that I’ll skim the rest to see if there’s redeeming qualities or the possibility the story’s a keeper with revision. The sad fact is that 99% of submissions have lousy beginnings. That doesn’t mean I quit reading right away, but it does mean that I’ll start skipping ahead to where the piece comes to life, if it does. I do that because every now and then I’ll find a piece that kicks ass once the throat clearing first couple of paragraphs have been jettisoned. I’d say I’m a tolerant reader in that regard. I won’t reject a piece just because I don’t like the first sentence, but you better get it together damn quick after your opening clunker. Pretty much any submission that hooks me at the start and keeps me reading all the way through to the end is getting accepted. That doesn’t happen all that often so I trust it when it does. Usually on the first read I’m fighting to get through a piece and typically will set aside a stack of maybes that I’ll come back to and reread several times. Those that stand up best to repeated readings get accepted. Usually I find more to like in those pieces with each reading, which is important, because by the time a story is published I’ll have read it half-a-dozen times or more. The last thing I want to do is publish a story I’m sick of, so for those stories that didn’t get me on the first read, I usually read them at least three times before deciding whether to accept. The vast majority of stories are rejected after—or during—the first reading. A small percentage of accepted stories, 5% or less, are accepted on the first read. The bulk of acceptances must make their way through a gauntlet of three or more readings.

Stefani Nellen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Inkwell, Apex Digest, Cosmos Magazine, FRiGG, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Her stories have been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 Anthology and shortlisted for the 2008 Fish Short Story Prize. Stefani splits her time between the US and the Netherlands.

I notice that I feel less and less strongly about slush pile mechanics the longer and more I’m writing, and the more familiar I’m becoming with the submission process and the inevitable rejections.

When I started out, I was nervous about submitting, and of course intimidated by all these images of insanely huge stacks of manuscripts that more or less rot away in some windowless dungeon where the interns work. I used to wonder what particular rejections “meant” and speculate how far up the ladder my submissions had made it. Every remotely personal comment was worthy of enthusiasm: hey, I got a *personal* rejection! (I should mention that I almost never get them, though.)

As time went on, I became, well, not indifferent, but somehow…stoic? By now, rejection has become a sort of background noise to writing. Sure, there’s still a pang of disappointment when a piece is rejected by a mag that I thought was right for my work. But I’m not analyzing it as much anymore. I’m afraid I’m still at a stage where I should worry more about the quality of my writing than about the parameters of the slush pile.

I guess I would be more passionate about slush mechanics (such as the ludicrously small odds of acceptance, the eternal response times, the likelihood of your story not even getting a first read) — I guess I’d be more passionate about this if I had written my Big Book — the one that I really, really want to see published. Right now, I’m still experimenting as a writer — lots of different short stories in different styles. The slush pile will do for the moment.

Okay, what do I think happens to my submission? In the case of your typical (print) mag, I think someone probably “files” them (index cards? spread sheets? hastily drawn tables on a white board? We will never know). Then they are passed on to readers. The readers are having a presumably busy life. If they don’t like your story, they stop reading without feeling bad about it at all. However, they are only humans with their own specific taste, and they might make the wrong call from time to time.

I also think that many readers like to read (hence their job) and are looking for a good story they can pass on. The process repeats in a couple of echelons, with the readings becoming more generous with each increase in editorial status (lower workload b/c much has been filtered out). In the end, the editor’s taste and approximately 10.000 other factors decide whether your story gets in or not.

I believe that sometimes submissions aren’t read — e.g. if the issues are filled until 2010. In that case, there’s no reading but much stuffing of rejection slips into envelopes.

I think the process is sometimes slow and inefficient, biased against new writers, but basically reasonable and fair. I guess most mags try to read their unsolicited subs as fast as they can, and give each submission a fair shot. It’s just a feeling I have.

On a good day, I like to think of slush-submitting as character building. It’s a great method of self-validation. If you continue writing in the face of almost certain rejection and overwhelming indifference, and you *know* what the odds are, but you *still* do it — it means you’re serious about he writing thing. I guess.

Nevertheless I sort of look forward to my post-slush days, if they ever come, and be it only because it’ll save me a lot of time.

New Yorker Carol Novack is a former criminal defense/constitutional lawyer, the publisher of the multi-media collaborative e-journal Mad Hatters’ Review, a former grant recipient, and the author of a chapbook of poetry, a play, and several collaborative projects. Recent writings in print may or will be found in journals including American Letters & Commentary, First Intensity, Gargoyle, Fiction International, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Knock, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Salt Flats Annual, and in the anthology Online Writings: The Best of the First Years; links to online publications are accessible via Carol’s blog.

This derogatory term (yes, the word you’ve used immediately came to mind) conveys disrespect for the vast majority of serious writers, as well as bad family values. “Slush pile” implies that every unsolicited submission –by a completely or relatively unknown writer who doesn’t lend “prestige” to the publication, or one who isn’t chummy with the editor/s– is relegated to the “highly unlikely” pile, to be dealt with when the grad student readers or editor/s have time to send out rejection letters. Fortunately, not every excellent journal assumes this snooty, archaic attitude. One shouldn’t waste one’s time on journals that do until one’s won at least one big award and published an acclaimed novel.

We don’t have a “slush pile” at MHR. We or generally I solicit submissions from a few authors and consider the unsolicited submissions in the order in which they arrive. Period. Sometimes we get submissions from well-known writers or at least writers with a whole string of “prestigious” credits. The editorial posse reviews all submissions blindly. One editor posts the submissions in our secret office and the editors come by to comment and vote.

Ellen Parker writes fiction and edits the online literary journal FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry.

As a writer, I have not submitted very often, and not very recently, but when I submitted I always imagined that my stories were being read–and being read closely by the chief editor. Why did I imagine this? Lack of experience, probably. I also pictured that the entire story was being read, every word of it. Actually, imagining your story is being closely read by the chief editor makes the rejection feel even more painful-which is probably why I imagined this scenario. An esteemed editor who has read a mountain of stories and published many brilliant ones reads my story all the way through (painstakingly, critically, and with great contempt)–and summarily rejects it. Why? Because it sucks. I think I pictured the most dispiriting scenario possible. Anything less and I couldn’t have tortured myself as much.

As an editor, I read all of the submissions in the “slush” and they come to us by e-mail so I can see the author’s name if he or she has provided it. I don’t read all of every submission. In fact, I don’t read most of every submission. Sometimes I read the first sentence and that tells me pretty much all I need to know about whether the story is going to interest me. I could compile a book of first lines I have never read past, like the fillers you see in The New Yorker, “Letters We Never Finished Reading.”

Here’s a first line from a recent submission:

“I woke up this morning feeling like tar, riding the slippery slope of sobriety, then finding myself heaving into my pee stained toilet.”

Folks, an opening sentence like that makes me skip right to the end, but even so I’m still a teeny bit hopeful that the rest of the story might be better. Here’s how it ends, though:

“‘Why Frank? Why?’ I heard Rachel say as I drifted into punishing blackness. Listening to the question, I’d asked my whole life.”

I really am not going to read all 3,422 words of this story. I truly do want to be respectful of writers, but do I have to read every word of stories like that? Do I????

As for the origins of the term “slush pile,” here’s what I found when I Googled:

“Back in the days when writers would actually hand-deliver manuscripts to the magazine’s offices, when the editors came to work, or in some cases back from lunch, they would have to wade through the piles of manuscripts that had been tossed over the transom. Perhaps someone thought this was similar to wading through slushy snow and thus the phrase ’slush pile’ was coined.” (from www.everything2.com)

So then I was like, What’s a “transom”? Here’s what:

“A transom is a small, hinged window above a door. . . . In the days before air conditioning, publishers would often leave these windows open, even overnight, for circulation. Writers were said to hurl their unsolicited pieces through that window.”
(from www.aboutfreelancewriting.com)

So writers would actually throw their manuscripts through editors’ windows, creating a high “slush pile” of manuscripts on editors’ desks!

I would say the term “slush pile” is derogatory, yes.

It connotes something large, messy, and uninvited that one wants to shovel aside.

But, hmm, the thing is, it’s also where editors get most of the stuff they publish. There’s some great stuff in the slush. I loves me some slush! FRiGG gets most of its stuff from the slush. I think a lot of literary journals get most of their stuff from the slush. The New Yorker doesn’t, yeah, but The New Yorker is “special.” The rest of us wade daily, or at least weekly, into the slush.

I have one more anecdote and I’ll tell it quickly (I’ll try). Make of it what you will.

Just a few days ago I got a bunch of responses from Sean Farragher (FRiGG’s poetry editor) to poetry submissions he’d just read. One of them was a strong “yes” (like, “I LOVE ALL OF THESE! ACCEPT ALL OF THEM RIGHT AWAY!”) to a poetry submission we’d gotten a few months ago from a writer whose fiction we’d published in FRiGG in the past. I thought we’d already turned down this writer’s poems. I searched my old e-mails and, sure enough, we’d declined the poems. Sean had originally said he they were well-crafted, the writer had done all the right things, used good words, yada yada, but so what??? NO. (All caps.) So I forwarded his previous response to him and I asked him, How do you explain that three months ago you firmly turned down these poems, but now you’re all in conniptions over them and you want to accept all of them right away? And he said, I don’t have a good explanation. All I can say is that three months ago, I was asking “so what?” a lot. I was demanding that everything have some sort of “so what.” But now I feel like, why does there have to be a “so what”? F*ck “so what”! All I can say is I’m a different person than I was three months ago. I love those poems.

I totally understood. My mindset three months ago is vastly different from how it is now. A story I read a few months ago might hit me a different way if I read it today.

So what should I do about this submission? I thought, Maybe we should just let this rest. I sent the writer a rejection letter and that’s that. Maybe she’ll submit more work again and maybe she won’t. But then I thought: Nah, those are really good poems. What the heck, I’ll ask her if they’re still available. So e-mailed the writer and I told her the poetry editor read her poems again and he loved them and I know we’re flakes but can I ask, Are the poems still available??? She laughed at us for being flakes (and she said she was a flake, too) and she threw the poems back at us over the transom.

Gerard C. (Jerry) Smith is a southerner. He’s a writer. He writes novels, short stories, flash fiction, poems. His work can be found in a bunch of different print and cyber zines.

I think Slush as applied to literary rags, print or electronic, is the only way. Agents don’t rep stuff that we send so we writers must be our own advocates. We advocate through submission. Editors read what’s sent (at least partially) and presumably make positive judgments if what they read strikes their fancy. I think this is as it should be.

Now, as to the Novel, slush is entirely different. It’s an exercise in futility for the writers with some few small print houses excepted. Get an agent if you can, but getting one is not easy.

Jill Stegman is a high school teacher from California’s central coast. She has published in several journals including South Dakota Review, Isotope, Storyglossia, and RE:AL.

What happens in “the slush” really depends on the particular journal and how carefully the editors consider the work, aka slush that comes in. I think the best journals try to give every writer due consideration. They have a specific procedure for reviewing and passing stories up a level to the fiction editors.

I know some editors read all the work themselves. This is especially true of online journals. I get the feeling that these editors read only a small part of the story because they really have no time. They know what they like, and they can determine if a story meets their specific criteria very quickly.

Didi Wood’sstories have appeared in Vestal Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, and other print and online publications. She is an editor for flashquake, an online journal of flash literature.

All submissions to flashquake are “slush” - or none, if you want to look at it that way. Every submission that meets the requirements (correct length, formatting, etc.) is forwarded to one of three teams of editors, and if they like it, everyone else reads it. All submissions are read blind, and all authors receive the editors’ comments with their notifications, unless they specify otherwise.

Additionally, each editor gets to save one submission s/he particularly likes and publish it in our “Editor’s Picks” section. This is one of my favorite flashquake features. Not everyone feels the same about everything, and it’s a relief to know that I can promote a story or poem about which I feel strongly. Once or twice, the submission I’ve rescued has been my favorite submission of the entire reading period; it would have been heartbreaking to have to let those go.

Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal and blogs here.

As an editor, I read every submission I get. The word “slush” doesn’t arrive in my brain except when discussing the “submission process” in the abstract. Referring to actual stories and poems, I always think the word “submission.” Which isn’t any great shakes of a word. I mean, it’s almost “choke hold.” But whatever.

I’ll read each submission until I’m bored or certain of something. Certainty of publication doesn’t arrive until after I’ve read the submission three or four times.

I don’t read blindly.

In NOÖ [eight], 4.5/6 stories came from the “slush.” Two stories I asked for after reading them on blogs. The half story came from a project I heard about on a message board and expressed enthusiasm about. Several months later, the author sent me an excerpt from that project as a submission. 5/8 poems came from the “slush.” One of those is a larger art project comprised of several poems plus photographs, but I don’t know how to translate that mathematically.

“Slush” sounds a little callous to me. Then again: think of July. Small town street fair. Sweaty vendor. Some blue syrup, then red. I don’t know where I’m going with this. Remember: snowcones aren’t made out of language. Snowcones are real.


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