Question:

Why is religion a taboo subject in literary journals? A story can contain violence, drugs, sex, etc. but if religion is involved, the story seems to inevitably get rejected. Has this happened to you? If you’re an editor, do you shy away from stories with religious themes? If so, why? In general, how do you feel about religion in fiction?

Mary Akers writes and obsesses in Western, NY. She is currently trying not to think about the pending offers for her non-fiction book.

I’m not an editor, but I have heard / read interviews with editors who have said they don’t touch religious-referenced stories mostly because they don’t want to hear from the wackos and crackpots.

For example, say they print a story that depicts a born-again Christian behaving badly. One (or many) born-again Christians who read the story may get offended by the depiction. Because they feel that their faith is under attack, they write a letter, or cancel a subscription, or even make veiled threats. (So, then you have art reflecting life–religious people behaving badly.) But my question surrounding this, is twofold:

One, why, in a democracy, would we let religious extremist readers dictate what we print? Isn’t that a form of complicit censorship? Extremists behave badly so we shy away in response? Hmm, are we then reinforcing the notion that wackos who make a stink will get what they want? Sure seems like it to me.

And two, why are believer-readers so touchy that they’ll react in such a fashion? Are we supposed to believe that not one single Seventh Day Adventist has ever behaved badly and so all should be exempt from a critical lens? Literature is an exploration and it should reflect, amplify, and expand on real-life people and experiences. And religion–like it or not–is a huge part of our everyday lives, even if we don’t consider ourselves to be believers.

Our own president says, “God bless America.” Our news media spends weeks covering the removal of a feeding tube for one long brain-dead woman. We follow every newsy detail of the segregationist Mormon cult with its teenaged wives and mothers. Our country’s greatest modern tragedy was orchestrated by Muslim extremists. Religion is everywhere in our country! Everywhere except in the literary journals. Why? I really do want to know.

Mostly I want to know because I also believe that religion is part and parcel of the universal human condition. Who among us has not struggled at some time with what and how to believe? Even Bob Dylan went through a born-again phase. And I guess I feel that writing about religion has come to carry its own Catch-22. If I write something that favorably depicts religion, I am seen as proselytizing, which no one wants to touch. If I write something negative about religion, it is seen as a taboo subject and something no one wants to touch. I’m not sure how we get around this and still manage to represent modern life in all its complexity.

Ann Amodeo blogs at www.zenofwriting.com.

I welcome religion, or spirituality, in fiction as long as it’s not fundamentalist, preachy and transparent. In fact, I look for stories of personal quest-type spirituality — they’re hard to find. I’ve never written a story with a religious theme, but my science fiction novel has a bit of a religious theme, one of the characters is on a religious quest, and the book is getting some attention from agents, although it’s post-apocalyptic and that is a popular topic.

It doesn’t seem like religion itself is interesting to most readers or editors — maybe the secular nature of our society? Organized religion has bad connotations, a bad rep, and deservedly, much of the time.

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

I’ve never had any experience with it personally because I don’t typically use religion as anything more than a descriptive device. I don’t think there’s any taboo against it. There are plenty of hugely popular novels and films that deal with religious redemption and struggles with belief. They don’t show up in literary journals, most likely, because not many people choose to write about it in literary short fiction form.

In general, I’m neither here nor there regarding religion in fiction. It often helps shape the character, setting, etc. On the other hand, sometimes it can turn into disquieting digressions that never go anywhere except back to the same place–faith. Personally, I’m not interested in what characters believe or don’t believe as much as I am in what they do and say.

Ramon Collins lives on the NE edge of the Mojave Desert and is often seen running with a pack of scruffy coyotes.

It might be caused by the old saying, “Don’t talk about politics or religion.”

With LINNET’S WINGS, I have no taboos, just tell an interesting story. But know the difference between exaggeration and the grotesque.

A story in the religion genre shouldn’t be a disguised sermon and a politically-based story can’t be a speech.

It’s the difference between erotica and pornography.

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 can’t really look at the stories I’ve published without getting vertigo from excessive eye crossing; I’m still too close to them to be usefully analytical. But I think many of them deal with faith on some level and have religious themes. One in particular, titled “What God Has Made Crooked,” was published in FRiGG. So, I haven’t really felt any prejudice on this topic.

As an editor, I welcome good fiction no matter the subject matter. I’m not sure how many religious stories we’ve published. None immediately come to mind, but I’m pretty sure we’ve published quite a few stories dealing with the age-old questions that humanity grapples with—generation after generation—and that religion was created to make sense of. I suppose by this definition, you could argue all stories that are worth a damn have some kind of religious component.

To me, a religious story doesn’t necessarily mean Father McKenzie and Mother Theresa or Moses. I mean, the closer you identify with the great pillars of any faith, the harder it is to overcome the layers of rote and clichéd systems that have been deposited there over the centuries, and then the narrative becomes heavy handed, ham-handed even. Just like it’s easier to parody a public figure than a character you’ve made up for a particular story because the public figure comes with baggage. Anyway. I’m a bit off topic here. The bottom line for me is quality of narrative, does it move me and all that regardless of subject matter. At least that’s what I hope is true.

Debbie Ice’s work has been online and in small print. She’s written a novel like everyone. Two actually, if the first bad one counts. (they all count) She lives, writes, fishes in Connecticut. She used to live, read, fish, get in trouble, in Georgia. She has no idea what happened. But here she is.

I am not an editor, so I can’t speak for them. I would think there are probably more practical reasons than emotional/faith based reasons why stories with religious themes are rarely accepted. Good stories generally reflect upon a basic human condition, a truth that resonates with all of us regardless of religious belief, sexual proclivity, race. I think a story about faith, God, may have a tangential relationship to a basic common emotional experience; nevertheless, that first round reader will probably not see these themes as common to everyone. I also think religion is just plain hard to write. Flannery O’Connor was such a terrific writer, she succeeded. And set a high standard for everyone to follow.

Personally, organized religion is not important to me; spirituality is. When I think of spirituality, I think of our innate desire for spiritual completeness, grounded in redemption, forgiveness and soulful yearning for unconditional love. This may or may not include a God. For example, many Buddhists are very spiritual, but worship no God.

I think stories with spiritual themes are the most complex and intense. I would go so far as to say I’ve never read a short story I thought was “great” that didn’t tackle spiritual completeness. I’ve read very good ones– funny, tragic, true etc–but not great ones, which leave me pondering them for days. Jill McCorkle’s “Intervention” was very spiritual and one of the most profoundly moving stories I have ever read. “Drummond and Sons” by Charles D’Ambrosio moved me tremendously. Alice Munro’s “The Progress of Love” and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” have spiritual themes that were intense and thought provoking. I have no idea whether or not these writers believe in a God or a religious philosophy. Probably not. Their writing is still spiritual.

I wish I could read all the journals out there and talk about trends in spiritual themes and writing, but I haven’t, so I can’t. I just don’t know. I usually only find these themes in well known writers–the ones who land in all the anthologies and receive all the awards. It may be due to the fact that these themes are so difficult to write that only the best succeed at it. When I tackle spiritual themes (usually when I write about tragedy or parenting) I think of it as aiming very high. I feel overwhelmed by it. I do think I succeed at some, but still have a hard time placing them. It would be presumptuous of me to guess why.

I did have some experiences, one that was rather funny. I sent this surreal, strange, and kind of funny story with spiritual themes to this small print, and it came back with the editor’s ink all over it. There was no rejection or acceptance, just his scribbles here and there. One long scribble at the end suggested that his big problem concerned my theme. He then proceeded to tell me what my character should do in the order to promote what seemed to be his world view –you don’t forgive, you tell people who hurt you to go f-k themselves and that is that. I am not sure, but I think he truly expected me to rewrite the story to reflect his way of being in the world as opposed to my way of being in the world.

I never contacted this editor to ask the purpose of his response. I folded the first page into an airplane and sent it flying down my hall.

I sometimes wonder if this editor is not really different from others. He is simply more honest. Maybe the well-known writers can get away with anything, but if you are not there yet, they all expect not only conformity of style, but also conformity of world view.

But to say this one man reflects the lit world is unfair, because I really have no idea what goes through everyone’s mind, just as no one knows what goes through mine.

There is no answer. I think eventually you come to realize the best thing to do is not think about it. You put what everyone else wants aside. You push the competitive, political writers aside. You push what the world thinks, how it judges aside. Maybe you even push reality aside. Screw realism!

You go off to a corner by yourself, write your heart, your soul, and let the world decide.

Jason Makansi, author of Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You, as well as two previous books and six published short stories, is an electricity industry consultant by day and by night gropes around in the dark for something else to do.

I’m not sure editors are queasy about religion or religious topics, or even overtones, in fiction, but I gotta believe that they would strongly prefer that religion be worked in metaphorically or allegorically. Whether it’s religion, politics, the social cause du jour, etc, I think the writer’s responsibility is to not beat the reader over the head with a baseball bat but instead pitch to him or her over nine innings, and play small ball.

And this observation may have little bearing on reality, but I suspect that what people want out of literary fiction is diametrically opposed to what they get out of all of the other stuff they are exposed to on a daily basis. The last thing I want to read in a short story or creative essay is a repackaged version of something I just got whacked with on the news, in a documentary, on the Web, by a neighbor, etc etc. I have an adverse reaction to the word, “blessed,” right now, because I sense that everyone is using it to “hint” at their religion (usually Christian) and it is short for “God Bless You” but since it’s not PC to say inject God into the discussion…anyway, if I see it in a story, I’m liable to go ballistic. I’ve had similar spells with words like palpable and luminous–they enter the lexicon like hi-test, super, supra, and ultra at the gas pumps.

Sometimes I look at it as the difference between fiction being “spiritual” and being “religious.” I can handle spiritual…

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.

We don’t have any problem publishing material with religious themes, especially if it portrays the holy as dumb, dangerous, ignorant or influential.

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 haven’t experienced a closed door to a religious themed story, but it’s not really the type of story I write. By analogy, though, after 9/11 I began collecting a lot of rejections with comments such as “great writing, but too dark,” “we’re looking for stories that are more uplifting,” etc. That went on for a few years and then those same stories began getting accepted and published. So I do think themes, styles, and subject matter go out favor and fall victim to cultural group think.

As an editor I don’t have any bias against religious themed stories. What I expect is that it be organic to the work, and not, for example, a disguised polemic, or a thin plot wrapped around dialogue where one character is trying to “convert” another. I’ll reject work such as that regardless the theme. I actually don’t see very many submissions where religion figures prominently, at least to the point that I think, oh, that’s a “religious” story. And if I publish stories about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, it’s because the devil made me do it. Nah, it’s because I enjoy (reading about) sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

I’m quite curious to hear what others have to say on this topic as it never occurred to me that this might be an issue. But I can see how it might be. Religion is already one of the dominant discourses: The Bible after all is “The Book” communicating “The Word.” Literary journals–at least the university sponsored variety–seem generally teed-up to provide the humanist counterexample to the dominance of “The Book” and its influence. Non-university sponsored journals tend to be “alternative,” with all that entails, thus not a likely haven for religious themed stories. Given those dynamics we shouldn’t be surprised if religious stories are not universally welcomed. Still, there must be plenty of journals out there that would be eager for religious themed stories. Probably just requires being more selective when submitting.

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

If religion is a “taboo” subject, then FRiGG is interested in it! We tend to like stories or poems having to do with any subjects that make people uncomfortable. We would be especially drawn to stories about religion that would piss off your relatives or proponents of a religion that you’ve turned away from. So you might want to keep it in mind that if your story appears in FRiGG, it’ll be online forever and anyone in the world can read it at anytime. Suffice it to say, if you’re Salman Rushdie, maybe you shouldn’t cultivate a large presence on the Web.

J. M. Patrick lives in Connecticut with a small cactus and a squirrel named Todd. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Summerset Review, Night Train, and NOÖ Journal, among others. She can be found online at www.jmpatrick.org.

I don’t know why religion is such a taboo subject in literary journals. Religion is one of my favorite topics, though I have very little filter for what is normally socially taboo, anyway. It often gets me into trouble.

Perhaps the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to publishing fiction about religion, but to me, it would matter how it was done. Admittedly, I would have a hard time reading a journal or story that was preachy or that extolled the virtues of one belief or another. No one wants to feel as though religion is being shoved down their throats, and it’s a fine line to dance on because it’s subjective and so very personal.

I wrote a piece recently about an Iranian couple who slowly loses faith after immigrating to America. The wife, at one point, masturbates while her husband is praying. As you can imagine, I had a hard time placing that one. Thankfully, The Summerset Review was not afraid. It’s refreshing to know that there are literary journals that don’t shy away from pushing the envelope. It’s also refreshing to know that there is still an envelope to be pushed.

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’d think that editors shy away from religion/faith in stories because they often push a particular POV, interesting to a limited audience. Violence, drugs, sex, etc are POV neutral, they just happen. Stuff like violence is never-the-less interesting and is the stuff around which a moral can be woven.

But what does this atheist know?

Anyway;

On the Corner of Religion and Jazz

He didn’t believe, still don’t,
he tries sayin’ no but he listens;
’cause ole Jesus is out there singin’,
shaking he tambourine and lettin out an oh yeah
Jesus be da man with the message and with the music.
so go hear da word, my friend, get with my man Jesus and his
rinky-tinky band that play every night in the honky tonk;
you know the one with the big neon sign says come on in an’
join the real Jesus; hear he word at the corner of Religion and Jazz

Yeah, that Jesus. He’s doin’ the talkin’. –GC Smith

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

Yeah, religion in fiction. Not my thing. BUT. I would never reject a story outright because it contains religious or faith-based content. When Mary first came to me with this topic, I thought: ooooh, this is me! I don’t like to read stories that contain scripture, or talk about God, or, worst of all, come across as a lecture on how a person should live and what they should believe. Ewww. But then she reminded me that I liked her story “Strandings” which questioned faith and belief. And yes, yes I do. I like that story a lot, and I have no idea why it hasn’t been picked up by a good journal. I think the difference is that in Mary’s story, this questioning of faith is inherent to the plot. It feels very natural that her character would be exploring the role of faith in his life considering what he’s going through. It is NOT a plot built to satisfy a religious agenda. Send one of those my way and I will be very displeased. It would be like trying to sell me a stolen truck by telling me you’re a Christian. And yes, that’s a true story.

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.

I have had “bad luck” with my stories involving religious topics. I think it is a touchy theme for editors and I understand why. I just need to put myself in their shoes. I don’t like to read about overly “gooey” themes which are obviously written with ulterior motives, i.e. “god is great,” “the wonderfulness of my life since I found The Lord.” The author’s own voice comes across too often in these stories. The minute I hear the churchbells ringing in the background, I stop reading.

However, my stories don’t fall into the above category; they’re about people whose faith does not work for them. All of these stories have been very soundly rejected. So, from my own experience, I would say that something else is operating when an editor reads and rejects “religious” stories. It could be that the religion issue must serve to enhance the story in an unusual way. It must be a part of, rather than the end result of the story.

In truth, I think that editors do not necessarily shy away from topics of religion. I often come across stories dealing with religions other than Christianity. Laila Lalami has a collection which addresses the Muslim faith in many different contexts. Also, the journal Image consistently publishes stories pertaining to all denominations.

Probably the key is steering away from coming across as proselytizing.

Craig Terlson’s fiction has appeared inCarve, Smokelong Quarterly, Cezanne’s Carrot, Hobart and elsewhere. He is currently working on a novel and still goes to church every Sunday.

This is a topic somewhat close to my heart – I am a part-time pastor and practicing Christian (does that mean I am not that good at it?) It seems like certain magazines are more open to stories with a “spiritual” component, rather than a Christian one. Cezanne’s Carrot comes to mind. My story, “The Days are Numbered” mentions the Book of Revelations, but it is more a story of obsession rather than faith. Another one of my stories deals with baptism, but it is more about the judgment of others than some religious message. Incidentally, this story is laced with profanity – I have a fondness for the word “fuck”, especially as used by David Mamet and Lewis Black.

So I say Christian because that is what comes to mind when the word “religious” is used. Religion carries a negative connotation with it – usually associated with strict laws against sex, drugs and rock and roll (two of which I am quite fond of) or linked with fire and brimstone preachers that call down storms of locusts on the uncleansed. Who, when thinking of religious stories thinks of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Zoroastrian fiction?

Now, I know there is a brand of fiction out there that is dripping in the sentimentalities of Christian imagery; or worse, drenched in Aesop-like morality tales of “seeing the true light.” I don’t write those and reading them is akin to wolfing down mayonnaise sandwiches. But my faith will be a part of my world-view, in the same way that someone involved deeply in social justice will reflect those values in their fiction.

I received a rejection recently where the editor said the story was too didactic. Some other things he said implied it had to do with an underlying spirituality in the piece. I re-read and admitted there were sections that drifted into that arena, so I cut them. Not because they were religious, but because they were heavy-handed, forced, as is any story that pushes its morality. Again, certain views of the world and of the human condition will emerge out of the writer’s personal views. I think this is natural.

My best guide for this is Flannery O’Connor’s quote (which may be apocryphal, I know I heard it somewhere) when asked why she didn’t write more Christian stories, she responded, “That’s all I write.”

Marilyn Marie Wilkins hails from San Antonio, Texas. Her most notable recent accomplishment was being named to Laura Hird’s Best of 2006.

I have a story about an abused Mexican child who loves to write and aspires to be a writer. But his alcoholic father burns his notebook. In the end, I do mention that God will heal that hurt and other stories will come to him and he will be successful. I doubt it will ever be accepted. It’s a bit preachy. Yet I have run out of places to submit it. I can entirely change the end and I may do that. That’s my experience.

Editors: Do you solicit? If so, why? Where do you solicit from? Do you solicit particular stories, or do you just ask good writers to submit stuff? What do the writers say when they’re solicited?

Writers: Have you been solicited? What were the circumstances? Were you glad to be solicited? Has an editor approached you after seeing your work elsewhere, asked you to submit, only to reject you? If so, did this create hard feelings?

The answers:

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.

I have had publishers say “we’d like to see more of your work” or words to that effect. This has happened, for example, when they have accepted a piece I have sent them, or when they have passed on something, and in a couple of cases where I had withdrawn work because it had been taken up elsewhere. I would usually find it encouraging to have them say this, I think, though I am aware that it may be part of some publishers’ standard rejection. I have had editors accept and reject work after asking me to submit. Rejection didn’t create any hard feelings. I can’t really see why it should. I would expect the work to be evaluated by the same criteria whether it had been “solicited” or not. “We’d like to see more” doesn’t mean “We’ll publish any old crap you send us.”

Matt Bell lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with his wife Jessica. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Hobart, Barrelhouse, Caketrain, and Juked. He is also the Book Review Editor for NewPages.com and can be found on the web at www.mdbell.com.

I’ve been solicited a couple of times, always by newer independent magazines, who obviously have a harder time getting submissions for their early issues. I was glad to be solicited, and I have always sent the editor a story. It feels important to note that I have always sent something that I felt was one of my best available works, no matter what the venue. I would never send a B-list story to any publication, and certainly not to an editor who likes my work. Perhaps because of that, I’ve never had a story that was solicited not get published (although I did have one magazine go under before my story came out). I would not, however, take a solicitation as a promise of an instant acceptance. Editors should take a critical look at any submission, even one they’ve asked for.

I’m no longer a literary magazine editor, but when I worked with SmokeLong Quarterly I regularly solicited work. The first issue I worked there, when I was a guest editor, I solicited perhaps half of what we eventually published. I think that’s probably the case for most magazines, and in some cases the proportion is probably much higher. I don’t really have a problem with this as a writer or an editor, as long as there is still some opportunity for writers to get in from the slush pile. The simple fact is that every editor has writers (both established and emerging) who excite them, and it’s their right to try and get submissions from those writers. And I’m thankful for that–as a writer, wouldn’t you hope that one day you’d have editors who wanted to champion your work, who wanted to expose it to their audience over and over?

At the best magazines, that is always the point of soliciting work: Not getting the biggest names into print, but the best work. We should all be so lucky, both as editors and writers, to be a part of that process.

Fleur Bradley is a crime fiction writer from Colorado. Check out her Web site.

I’ve been solicited before. Usually it was by editor friends who know my writing style, so the acceptance was implied.

It’s nice. It saves saves me time and rejection. But to be honest, I always feel like I’m cheating a little by bypassing the submission process.

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

Yes to all of your questions.

I solicit as an editor, approaching the writers I like. I get solicited as a writer.

When I solicit, I get all kinds of responses: from an instant submission to silence (as if some people follow Groucho Marx’s quip: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”) Yes, sometimes I reject the people I solicit, but I never send a form rejection.

When I submit, responding to a solicitation, I get angry only if I receive a form reply. And when I get angry, I am never silent.

Ramon Collins lives on the NE edge of the Mojave Desert and is often seen running with a pack of scruffy coyotes.

I manage the Micro page on LINNET’S WINGS, a relatively new Irish e-zine (I say “manage” because I’m far too good-looking and humble to be an editor).

I did solicit material for edition one because I wanted a professional start. I asked Mary Miller and Jesse Patrick to submit stories as an indication of what I looked for. Some stories came in “over the transom” that weren’t as refined but I let them stand for a pilot edition. Pepe Nero submitted a solid micro that had a knot in the log but we worked around it.

LW uses four to seven micros (under 400 words) per quarter and I hope word-of-keyboard will bring in submissions. The spring edition is due on April 15 with five excellent stories.

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’ve had work solicited directly from Zoetrope and I’ve also had work solicited from editors who have read my published stories elsewhere. In one case, I had an editor solicit work for a planned special issue of a magazine. It was to be all women writers, all very short fiction, and featuring Edith Perlman. I was so excited and sent off several pieces. The planned issue never came to fruition though. It was disappointing, but these things happen. And I’ve had other times where solicited work was then turned down. I think it’s just one of those things you have to understand. It’s a great honor to be asked, but don’t expect the work will be automatically accepted. No, it doesn’t create hard feelings for me. Just part of the biz. The worst part is the feeling that you’ve let down an editor who is otherwise enthusiastic about your work.

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

Editor:

Yes I have solicited work. Not often, but I have, when I saw a piece by chance that fitted what I was looking for.

Writer:

I must be a strange creature. It is flattering to be asked to submit work to a publication I have time for. But I get less of a sense of achievement when it is published. Why? Because it wasn’t weighed in the balance in the same way as other work…it didn’t find its own way out there in the world.

I am also very aware of mates publishing mates… it happens, and means zilch… it may get writers a few credits but in the end your work has to make its own way out there, and being published by mates might not help you in the long run.

On the other hand, it might. The writing world is an unpredictable place.

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’ve been solicited a few times with happy results, and that’s about all I have to say about that.

I haven’t done much soliciting as an editor. At Night Train we rely on the slush. I did some soliciting when I guest-edited at SmokeLong, and it’s great if you ask someone and they send a story and you’re thrilled with it. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s not so pleasant to solicit someone and then you don’t want what they send. It’s one of those many sticky situations inherent in the bidneth that makes me cringe. It did happen that a couple of writers that I solicited sent in several pieces of work that we turned down. You feel bad. Anyone who gets solicited should realize it’s not a sure thing.

I don’t have strong feelings about literary magazines that rely heavily on solicitations. Who cares?

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.

If I have the time and inclination, I’ll troll the read page of this place for work that trips my trigger. One of the year’s best at our publication came from just such a fishing expedition wherein I landed the great Spanky Jones written by the equally great Hunter Whitcomb. So, yeah, we solicit, and sometimes to great effect. As I recall, Hunter was happy to be solicited.

I had a story solicited by Don Capone for the initial offering of his publishing house, Rebel Press. The book was called Rebellion and I was very happy to be in it with other Zoetropers. I think I bought a box of twenty. Every time I go to the local indie bookstore that I gave 12 copies to on consignment, I’m stymied to see the same 12 copies are still sneering back at me from the shelf. Hmf.

Debbie Ice lives in Connecticut with her husband, two boys, and English bulldog.

Yes, I have been. An editor, or probably the guest editor, of a popular online journal asked for a story he read online. A print editor read a story online and asked me to send them something. An online editor, a few, have read me and asked me to send stuff. (No specific story, just stuff.) An editor saw me read at a tiny reading once and asked me to write him a story after I told him the one I read was already published. I did that. I wrote a story specifically for him and sent it. I was surprised he liked it.

I have a couple of wonderful friends who are editors and liked my stuff and asked for stories. One published one, the other one showed it to the staff and the staff eventually rejected it. I loved how honest she was with me. And completely respected the process.

Obviously it is flattering to be solicited, and as a writer I appreciate an editor making me feel good about my writing. There is not much of that–feeling good–in writing and if a good writer, a good editor, anyone, besides my husband, dog and mama, make me feel good, well, it’s a good thing.

The slush is impossible and you really have to have a foot in the door nowadays. Just the way things are. I do think that too much soliciting soils the business if the SLUSH IS IGNORED. If all that happens is solicitation, or lifting from slush due to hype or connections, then publishing becomes “who do you know.” Which makes it all feel like Washington DC.

The big driving question is this–is the world of art, the one that offers itself to writers not readers, finding the best? Is quality driving art?

If, due to many complex factors, the answer to the above becomes well, not really, then what will a publishing credit mean? When we see publishing credits will we start thinking, right off, not– wow, they must write well– but, instead, I wonder who they know, I wonder where they got their MFA, I wonder what they are like in person–can they effusively flatter, walk lightly, never boldly, over egos (particularly if they are a woman), are they outgoing and, most importantly, I wonder if they are young and gorgeous. We may even stop asking–I wonder what the story was about.

Darby Larson’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Opium Magazine, Monkeybicycle, and various other places. His short story, Electroencephalography, published in Greatest Uncommon Denominator, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He served as Guest Editor for Smokelong Quarterly’s Issue 8, and also served as Web Editor for a six month stint at Pindeldyboz. He lives in Northern California.

I don’t like the idea of soliciting material, or rather I don’t like that it sometimes seems necessary. I guess the hope is that there will always be enough in the slush to wow editors, but reality is depressing. I’ve solicited authors for material and I’ve also been solicited as an author. I regret the soliciting I did though. It was for a start-up called Quintessence that I was asked to be a part of early on and that I very soon discovered was not going to live up to anything so I quit I think even before the first issue went live. But before I’d quit, I’d solicited from writers who I’d respected in the past and I think it affected their perception of me and my own fiction, that I was naive to even ask, or something. A few did send work that we took and then I felt that much more horrible when I began to see what Quintessence really was, and then I quit, and then Quintessence predictably folded, and so I felt responsible for essentially taking good work from authors I respected and then erasing it from existence. Since then I’ve had a bad taste in my mouth about soliciting others for work for something I happen to be involved in. I’d rather take a mediocre work from the slush and work with an author to edit and find its potential than take something because it has a name on it.

On the other side of it all, I enjoy getting solicitations myself. It’s vindicating because there’s always a part of me that feels like a hack since my literary education has been so autodidactical, so when people ask for my work, I’m like, so you’re saying I’m actually kind of like a writer then? The fact that anyone ever asks me to be an editor is still baffling to me.

Your question about having solicited work rejected, yeah, that’s happened to me, but it almost doesn’t matter. I’d say it’s much worse for the editor who solicited, and I don’t think that’s ever happened to me as an editor. For a writer, or at least for me as a writer, getting solicited by itself is almost as good as being published. I’m very aware of how uncontrollable the conditions are for any particular story to get picked for publication anywhere. Something I learned when I was at Pindeldyboz, dreadful work would come in from authors I’d probably solicited myself because of work I’d read in the past, but rarely is anyone so consistent (myself included). The best you can hope for is someone who delivers a consistent pile of shit that happens to have a few more diamonds embedded inside than anyone else.

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.

The Summerset Review does not solicit. We would much rather publish good stories by unknowns, than mediocre ones by authors who have rose petals thrown at their feet as they walk. We have, however very rarely, solicited a specific story, simply because we fell so much in love with it, seeing it elsewhere.

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.

Of the 236 stories published in the first 26 issues of Storyglossia only four were solicited. As a general policy I don’t solicit stories, but in those four cases I had been blown away by stories those authors published in other journals, had praised the stories in my blog, and then sent them a link to the blog entry and said I hoped they’d consider submitting to Storyglossia in the future. They were thrilled by the reviews I’d written of their work and were also flattered by the offer to submit, sent good submissions, which I in turn was thrilled to accept. Other writers have written to thank me for reviewing their stories or collections, and I took that occasion to encourage them to submit, but I don’t consider that a solicitation because I encourage everyone who writes me to submit. I want to see a broad spectrum of work so the more submissions the better as far as I’m concerned. Issues 27 and 28 have guest editors, who were given complete editorial autonomy, and I think they each solicited some submissions, but I don’t know how many. I’m fine with the guest editors doing some solicitation because it helps them shape the issue they envision. Otherwise, the quality of submissions has been so high recently, that I’m quite happy to fill entire issues with unsolicited submissions.

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.

One of my stories, “The Attraction of Asphalt,” was solicited by SmokeLong Quarterly after I’d posted it at the zoetrope.com workshop. I remember I was very surprised, and, of course, happy. I sent in a slightly revised version using the feedback I got from the reviewers. Apart from that, I’ve gone the slush route so far.

No, no editor ever solicited something from me only to reject it later (although Apex Digest invited me to revise and resubmit without a guarantee of publication; fortunately the revisions worked for them).

I guess my reaction to such a rejection would depend on the exact circumstances. If the editor made it clear that they can’t promise publication (instead, they’re simply interested in reading my work and don’t want to wait for it to rise through the slush – or not) — well, in that case I would be disappointed but not angry if the editor eventually decided to pass. However, if they claimed to want a particular story of mine for their mag and then end up not publishing it — without any external reasons, such as mag folding, etc. — I would be miffed for a moment or two.

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

As an editor, I do solicit stories that I see posted in the Flash Fiction or Short Stories wing(s) at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, or in private rooms there. Sometimes I happen upon these stories myself or sometimes a writer I know will say (for example), Hey, have you seen so-and-so’s groovy story posted in the Flash wing?! I also sometimes tell other editors about stories there that might be right for their magazines. So it’s like a whole big slush pile at Zoetrope Virtual Studios and lots of people are wading through it. (This doesn’t mean we see everything posted there, though, or even most of it. If we missed yours, forgive us: we were asleep at the wheel and this is not uncommon, us being asleep.)

Almost always I ask a writer if I can have a specific story that I have read in its entirety at Zoetrope. That way, I know exactly what I’m asking for. I am hesitant to ask a writer to just, you know, maybe someday, if they feel like it, go ahead and submit–just willy-nilly throw something over the transom because I like your style and maybe I’ll take it if you’re lucky and if I’m in a good mood and if it’s a Tuesday. I can see a whollllllle lot of pitfalls lying ahead there. I ain’t going down that road, m’dears—unless I know the writer’s work well and I am almost certain he or she will send something I like. Also, sometimes I see comments a writer makes in a room at Zoetrope and I’ll say to that writer, This would make a good story, or a good nonfiction piece. Would you like to try to write it? Then the writer either says, Hell, no, or else, OK, I’ll try. Then, if the writer needs or wants me to, I’ll work with the writer in developing the piece.

When I ask a writer if I can publish in FRiGG a story I see at Zoetrope, sometimes they say, Gosh, I’m flattered, but I want to try submitting the story to a print magazine. And I understand perfectly. In fact, I am positive the story will get placed in a print magazine because it’s such a good story. Plus, I figure after it appears in print, maybe the writer will let me run it in FRiGG! We do run stories and poems that have appeared in print because, you see, hardly anyone has seen these stories or poems yet. Maybe thirteen people read print literary magazines, and five of them are librarians and seven of them are college professors. Maybe one is an agent’s receptionist.

As a writer, I have been solicited and I loved it! I always said yes. I am very easy. Again, it was always a story that was posted somewhere at Zoetrope (in one of the fiction wings or in a private room), so the editor knew exactly what he or she was asking for. No one has ever just asked me to submit any old story because they’d seen me around and liked my style. I guess I should be insulted. Oh, actually, one guy did. I think this guy was using a fake name. He said he saw my story at Pindeldyboz and would I send him some stories and I eagerly sent him a bunch and he took them all and now I’m sorry because I don’t like his Web site. Why’d I send him those stories? I am so freakin’ easy. See, you shouldn’t always give stuff to people just because they ask you. Those people might have ugly Web sites.

J. M. Patrick lives in Connecticut with a small cactus and a squirrel named Todd. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Summerset Review, Night Train, and NOÖ Journal, among others. She can be found online at www.jmpatrick.org.

I’ve had work solicited twice, and it’s a great feeling to cut out all of the ‘waiting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat” of regular submissions . Both editors saw my work at Zoetrope, which is the great thing about the website; the networking. The first time I was able to contribute the piece they wanted, but the second time I had to politely decline as it had been accepted elsewhere. There didn’t seem to be hard feelings on anyone’s part. The editor was extremely understanding and asked me to submit again in the future, and accepted the second time around.

As nice as it is to have an editor request your work, I can see where it can put the writer in an awkward position if they had other plans for the piece. I’m still desperate enough that that hasn’t happened. It’s flattering.

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.

Carrie Berry the editor of the great but now gone Gator Springs Gazette solicited a piece because she was told by someone that I wrote a novel (unpublished) about murder on the NASCAR circuit. I did an essay on writing the book called, Making White Lightning, which she published. Carrie also solicited a few of my poems but she turned down many more.

I was happy for the solicitations and agreed with the rejections. Carrie’s editorial judgment has always been A-1 and my stuff runs the gamut from good to the purest of crap.

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

People will probably get mad at me for saying this, but here goes. What is this attitude about journals only soliciting and publishing their friends? I’ve heard this so many times, and it’s just ridiculous. I’ve especially heard it said in connection to SmokeLong. I cannot stress this enough—this is FALSE. I can’t say that for every journal, but I strongly suspect it’s false for them, too. I mean, who the hell starts a literary journal, which is a huge undertaking, a massive time commitment, and literally a labor of love, to only publish the writers they know? And as a writer why would you agree to that?? It’s illogical. If you see the same writers popping up in the same journals, it’s because they can WRITE, dammit. And they’ve established this, and the journals are a match for the authors’ styles. Now there’s a concept. And I bet you $500 bucks that these same authors have been rejected by these same journals before, and after, they’ve been published by them. I know it’s true of SmokeLong.

Yeah, SmokeLong solicits. And truth be told, I was opposed to this until I understood why. Mostly, the solicitations come from guest editors. I think if you’re going to guest edit somewhere, you should be given the opportunity to put together the best issue you can, that represents your style of fiction. Otherwise, why do it? Dave Clapper understands this, and gives guest editors a lot of room to make the issue uniquely theirs. Some guest editors choose to pull a lot from the submissions that come in, others choose to approach writers whose work they admire. Most do both. But I can assure you that every single submission that comes in is read by someone at SmokeLong. And every single issue (that I’ve been a part of) has included work that has come in through “the slush.”

Again, “writers whose work they admire” does not mean “friend.” Then again, I have no idea what people mean when they use the word friend in this context. Does it mean someone you talk on the phone with once a month? Share spit with? Or someone whose work you admire, and so maintain a friendly relationship. If people mean the latter, then fine. Journals publish their friends. Get over it. But do I think they only publish their friends, or that you need to be a friend to get published? Nope. I know we at SmokeLong love to find and publish writers new to us and the magazine. Other editors I know feel the same way. If you’re having trouble getting published, well, we’ve all been there. Go write. Get better. And if you ever get a chance to edit or guest edit for a magazine, do it. But remember, you can only publish your friends…

Have I been solicited? Yes. A couple times that I recall. One ended up in publication. Another I declined because I didn’t have anything to send. And once, the editor who’d asked to see work rejected the piece and called me Ryan. It was weird. And that’s all I really have to say about that.

Lesley C. Weston lives and writes in New York City. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Ars Medica, Per Contra, Gud Magazine, The Duck & Herring Field Guide, Night Train, and The Pisgah Review.
Have you been solicited?

Yes, happily, three times.

At different times, two editors from the same publication read stories I’d posted in a workshop and asked that I submit them for consideration. The first time, the story was rejected. I harbored no resentment. I was happy to be asked, and hoped to hit the mark in the future. As it turned out, the second story solicited was accepted.

The third time involved a story I’d worked on in a class. One of the other students was very taken with the piece. He later became an editor, got in touch with me, and asked that I submit two stories of my choice. The editor in chief liked both. A long debate followed over which they would take. In the end, they chose my favorite of the two.

Marilyn Marie Wilkins hails from San Antonio, Texas. Her most notable recent accomplishment was being named to Laura Hird’s Best of 2006.

I’ve only had Laura Hird ask me to contribute other work along with a rejection or two as an addition to the rejection notice. She ultimately did accept two pieces of non-fiction. Skive Magazine (anthology solicitation) asked and then never replied. A few hard feelings there as he has become more and more likely to reject something by simply ignoring it.

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.

Question: As an editor, what is your policy for paying writers? If you pay writers, where do the funds come from? What is your policy for charging reading fees? Do you charge contest-entry fees? If so, what do you do with the money you receive from writers?

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

I think that every work has to be rewarded. It’s best when it’s done in cash, but sometimes recognition is more important. What constitutes recognition is a touchy subject in itself.

Vestal Review pays all authors in cash, copies and recognition. This is the best combination, so all grounds are covered.

There is no funding for Vestal Review rather than my own pockets. I have been doing this for almost eight years now.

I ran only one contest so far, and all the monies were paid as prizes.

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

My policy is that I’d love to pay writers, but it doesn’t make much sense to me to pay unless it’s a meaningful amount. Realistically, I could probably afford a thousand dollars out of my own pocket every year. That’d be tight, but I could do it. Since the web hosting we use runs a bit over $200 a year, that leaves $800. We publish up to 80 flashes per year. Do the math and that’s $10 a story. If I’m a writer and I get a check for $10, I sort of feel like, “Save it.” Even if we applied for, and received grants, the same money goes the same distance (and I’ve not yet found grants that would raise the pay to a meaningful level).

Also, as a writer, when I see places that do pay $10-$25 per flash, I sort of feel like they’re only doing so in order to qualify as “professional markets” in the various listings, and then run around touting their status at every opportunity. Professional what? Is there a flash writer out there making a living from it? I know I’ll probably get some flak for saying that (especially since a couple very specific markets leap to mind), but… sorry, that’s the way I feel. Unless a story is worth the cost of at least a fairly nice dinner, the money is borderline insulting.

The threshold, for me, is about $50. I can actually use $50 to do something nice for myself I wouldn’t have otherwise done. It’s enough to pay for a small celebration, y’know? At SmokeLong, we used to give $50 each to our favorite three stories each issue until my finances got insanely tight. I could see us doing something like that again, although I’d really rather be able to pay across the board than single people out. $50 a flash is $1,000 an issue, though. It adds up fast.

About reading fees… I hate ‘em. When we very first started out, we had only one staff member who’d ever worked on a literary magazine before (it was published by an MFA program, I believe). She insisted that people wouldn’t take us seriously unless we charged reading fees. So we set a policy that we’d charge, but that to get submissions rolling, reading fees would be waived for the first issue. I think the reading fee was set to be ten bucks(!). She kind of drifted away before we’d even put the first issue to bed, and another writer/editor broke down the math and demonstrated that we’d essentially be charging submitters about $100/hour to read their work. And we saw other models of magazines sans reading fees that were very well-respected. So we went with our original instincts and never did charge reading fees.

Even for contests, we don’t charge fees. We’ve been very blessed to have an anonymous donor for the Fish Fellowship. Another potential donor stepped forward recently to offer a prize for another contest. So we may have something else in the future besides the Fellowship. But except in cases where we have funding in place, we probably won’t do contests.

I’m loath to fund contests via entry fees for a couple reasons. As a writer, I don’t pay fees to be read, and it’d be hypocritical of me to expect others to pay me for the “privilege.” And there’s no way of knowing how many entries there will be and what the ratio of fees to prize will be—not enough entries means we’re short for prize money, and too many entries means we have a surplus (and what do we do with that? do we somehow deserve it?). How transparent is the process? If we’re collecting money from writers, I think they have every right to see what’s happening with the money. What’s the best way for us to do that? Taking in fees just introduces way too many layers of administration to make it worthwhile (at least if we were to do it in a way I felt was “right”). And the fact is that when it comes to handling monetary transactions, I personally am a lazy-ass, and writers deserve better than dealing with a lazy-ass.

I don’t mean to sound holier than thou, I really don’t. What’s right for us isn’t going to be right for everyone. But when I see a contest with a $6 entry fee and a $50 prize (and again, saying this is going to piss off a specific publication), it makes my eyes bleed.

Matt DiGangi is editor of Thieves Jargon.

I wish I could pay writers. I hate the idea of charging reading fees. We don’t run contests, probably because we don’t have good prizes, probably because I couldn’t bring myself to charge contest-entry fees. I’d be too worried nobody would enter the contest, and then there would be no money to pay out. Boy, that would look cheesy.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer, editor and Creative Writing teacher.

I founded, own and edit a specialist ezine called Tom’s Voice. It is for writing from those trying to kick addiction in any form. And for anyone whose life has been touched by the addiction struggles of others.

I pay for the webspace. The name. A friend uploads the work I choose from open submissions, and charges me nothing. I am unable to pay.

I would like to, because many of my writers seriously need to know that they can do something to earn funds legitimately, as opposed to finding cash via breaking the law.

So, nope, I don’t/can’t pay.

I would not dream of charging a reading fee. These writers have trusted me with their feelings, their thoughts, their fears. Why on this earth would I make them pay to be listened to?

Feel strongly? You bet I do.

Steve Hansen has had limited success as a writer, having published stories over that last 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.

We pay $50 per published piece of fiction. The money comes from my bank account. I just think writers ought to be paid. I’m not ambitious our audacious enough (yet) to hold contests. As far as reading fees go, I don’t think we’d get any submissions if we tried going that route. Maybe years down the line when TQR is branded and gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, then we’ll think about monetizing the whole enterprise in some fashion or other. Fantasizing about that later time, I’d use the money to pay the folks who volunteer their time and creative energy to not only read the work sent in, but create their own particular narratives as the quarters go by. TQR is, after all, a total quality reading experience wherein the fiction published by its contributors is complemented by the staff’s own publicly accessed serial. And, when that glorious day comes, I’ll use the money to improve the site, pay the contributors more, and then what’s left over, use for my own personal gain. I am in fact a capitalist, just not a very successful one at this moment. But things could change with time, who knows?

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.

If Storyglossia had funding besides my checkbook I’d be happy to pay writers upon publication. Instead they get the permanent exposure that online publication provides. Reading fees are heinous. Contest entry fees are a bit more complicated. Part of me says that just as with paying for publication, if the journal had other funding I’d forego the entry fees and still pay a cash prize. But another part of me, the part that has competed in numerous sports and other events that all required an “at risk” entry fee, says that the entry fee is a necessary part of the competition. A hurdle. A threshold guardian. A test—a sacrifice–to prove you want it. I find it interesting that many writers balk at paying entry fees while still expecting a cash prize when that is not the norm for nearly all other types of competition.

So, yes, Storyglossia does charge an entry fee for it’s annual fiction prize contest. The entry fees are used to pay cash prizes to the finalists and to pay for the advertisements purchased to announce and promote the contest. I’d be happy if the contest broke-even—which it has yet to do—and would increase the prizes awarded if the entry fees were producing a surplus.

Stefani Nellen is a writer of literary fiction and science fiction. She co-edits the Steel City Review, an online quarterly that also publishes as annual print edition.

At Steel City Review, we can’t pay writers. Since we’re primarily an online magazine, we don’t have subscribers, we don’t run advertisements, and hence hardly have any income. The profit from selling the print edition is barely enough to cover the webhosting expenses!

Our payment is in exposure, and in loving preparation of the stories we publish. We’re small. I (Stefani) am okay with this, because I submit to non-paying places all the time. If I had to earn money, I wouldn’t write.

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.

I can’t afford to pay writers or artists or musicians, unfortunately. I pay our webmistress/designer. But our writers get custom-made music and art, if they so desire, which, in my opinion, is worth more than the usual token payment provided by most journals that list themselves as paying markets. Writers may also opt to record recitations. They are delighted by the attention and respect we give to their writings.

We only charge $6 for our regular contests and we charge no reading fees. The little money we receive from writers, plus donations we receive, go toward paying our webmistress. A new video contest co-sponsored by Web Del Sol, plus a big benefit we’re organizing (May 4th at The Bowery Poetry Club, NYC) will, I hope, make it possible for me to continue paying our webmistress. If not, I may ultimately take some courses in HTML and produce the magazine myself.

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

FRiGG doesn’t pay writers. I wish we could—but I wouldn’t do it unless it was a sufficient amount. I’m not sure token amounts—like $10 per story—are very meaningful or beneficial to writers. But how much is “sufficient”? I think $50 per story would be an OK sum; $100 per story would be even better. But would this sum apply regardless of the story’s word count? Like, a 400-word story would get $50—and so would a 4,000-word story? And we often run more than one story by a fiction writer. So, if we run three short-short stories by a writer (less than 1,000 words each), would that writer get $50 per story, for a total of $150? But the writer of the 7,000-word story would get only $50? This becomes even more complicated when we take into account the poetry we feature. Would we pay $50 per poem? We have, in the past, run as many as 10 poems in an issue by one writer. Would that writer get $500?

What if we go strictly by word count? A poem does tend to have fewer words than a story does. So is one poem not worth as much as a story? Of course not.

If we started paying, I can also foresee bad feelings among writers. A writer might think, Hey, why was Dennis allowed to have five poems in this issue and I was allowed only three? He gets paid for five but I get paid for only three. Or say we paid each writer a flat sum regardless of how much of his or her work we ran. A writer could go, Hey, Patricia got the same amount of money I did—but she’s got three stories in the issue whereas I had seven.

Thinking about it gives me a headache.

Say we paid $50 for each story and poem that appeared in FRiGG. In any given issue, we might run as many as 50 poems and stories. That would be $2,500. For the year, it would be $10,000. There’s no way we could do this. The money behind FRiGG comes from my pocket.

Like I said, thinking about it gives me a headache.

We don’t charge reading fees. We’ve never had a contest. If we ever had a contest, I wouldn’t charge an entry fee because I don’t want to take money from writers. Right now, no money gets exchanged—except from my credit card to Yahoo, the Web host.

Probably I should try to get a grant so we could pay writers. I would really like to pay writers. But, again, this brings me ‘round to my original question: How much should we pay? Per story? Per poem? Per writer?

I think we would have to change our format so we ran only one story or poem per writer per issue. (We would still have the question, though, of how much to pay for a poem vs. how much to pay for a story.) But then the number of stories and poems featured in FRiGG would be drastically cut. Who does this benefit? No one.

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.

I am one of six editors at flashquake. Authors published in flashquake receive payments ranging from $5 to $25, depending on the editors’ ranking of the works within the sections (fiction, nonfiction, poetry), and a contributor’s CD copy of the issue. Payments are privately funded.

flashquake does not charge reading fees – even for contests, which are also privately funded.

As a writer, do you submit only (or first) to magazines that pay–regardless of how much they pay? Or does a magazine have to pay a certain amount to attract your interest? If so, how much? Or is payment not a criterion when you’re submitting?

Do you approve of magazines charging reading fees, or fees to enter contests? Why or why not? If you approve, how much would you be willing to pay as a reading fee or an entry fee?

Mary Akers writes and obsesses in Western, NY. She is currently trying not to think about the pending offers for her non-fiction book.

1) No, I don’t only submit to paying magazines. If I did, I’d probably never get published; there just aren’t that many paying venues for literary fiction, particularly for an emerging writer’s work. So, no, it’s not a criterion I use when submitting, but it’s wonderful icing on a cakey acceptance. (Why am I saying that? I hate icing.)

2) In general, I don’t approve of reading fees. I don’t have a well-considered moral high-ground position, it’s just a gut thing for me. It doesn’t feel right. Having said that, I have paid the small $3 “processing fee” that Missouri Review charges for electronic submissions. It would cost me more than that to print a story out, enclose an SASE, and mail it in, so I don’t mind that as much. It’s even better, though, if I can submit for free, especially when it’s a non-paying mag.

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. She blogs at ZenofWriting.

Payment hasn’t been a criterion for me so far. I’m trying to place my stories where they are welcome, and I do less of that these days than I have been. Subbing anywhere is my least favorite part of writing.

I don’t enter contests, usually. It runs into too much money to do it consistently, so I don’t do it occasionally, either. I might have entered one or two contests, but after that thought, well, I don’t know enough about these magazines or my work isn’t a good enough fit to throw money at a contest. Same with reading fees—although they are usually smaller. I’d avoid magazines that required them. It would add up, even if more slowly.

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

I submit primarily to my favorite publications. Payment is not a criterion. I don’t bother with publications that charge a reading fee and I’ve entered a contest once and that was several years ago. I don’t write to win contests. The exception to this would be small press or chapbook contests where you have an opportunity to get a novel or collection of stories published.

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.

Payment is not a criterion. Not because I wouldn’t love to get paid, but because the reality is, some impressive publications don’t have the means to pay contributors. The money is not important enough to limit my submissions based on the payment.

Contributor’s copies are very nice, however. Again, not a criterion for submitting, but appreciated.

Do I approve of fees? Sure, I don’t see an ethical issue with the practice of charging writers. However, I seldom submit to publications that charge a reading fee, even a nominal one. Again, this is not about the money, but I don’t want to pay someone just to read my work. (I will wash cars, however.) I understand the necessity of the fee, and I do feel that these charges may have a legitimate place in the submission process, but it is not my general practice to pay reading fees. Contests are a bit different as they are a unique part of a publication’s realm and often include a cash prize which must be funded somehow. I would pay up to $15 to enter a contest. OK, I would pay $16…I don’t know what is realistic, but most writers can’t afford much than that!

The publications make their money (if not real money, their notoriety, readership, etc.) from the contributors’ stories. To me, it seems a bit cyclical to charge these folks money just to get a shot at the publication.

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.

Payment is a consideration. Though plenty of excellent publications don’t pay, so it’s not essential. I’d never pay a reading fee, although I might pay a small entry fee for a competition offering financial prizes.

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

As a writer, I really don’t give a shit if magazines pay me for my work. Because I write primarily flash fiction, I have to accept the fact that I’m not going to make a living from it. Twenty-five bucks here, fifty bucks there… y’know, I’ll take it, but it’s not enough to make a real difference in my life. My priorities are: how many people are going to read it? Is the work going to be well-presented? Do the editors treat me well? All of those are worth far more to me than a few bucks.

As far as reading fees go…do I approve of them? Sure. Money’s gotta come from somewhere (especially in cases where there’s significant prize money involved). It’s not really my place to look askance at how other magazines run their business. Unless the return is clearly uneven. Are they charging $25 for a $100 prize? Come on. But $10 for a $1000 prize? Totally within reason. But really, if a business model seems rational for both the editor and the writers, go for it.

That said, I don’t pay reading fees. Period. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of writers subsidizing other writers. Could the money not come from someplace else? I realize it’s an accepted norm a lot of places, and I know a lot of writers don’t mind the practice. They should have the freedom to enter those contests as they see fit. For me personally, though… I’ll pass. The idea that, on top of the work I’ve put in creating a piece, I also have to pay money for it to be read? It just feels devaluing and gives me the heebie-jeebies.

When working as a stage actor, I never had to pay to audition (and the potential pay there dwarfed these prizes, while the potential audience was smaller). Why should writing be different? Do painters pay galleries to have their work considered? Sculptors? Dancers? Singers? Maybe I’m wrong and some of these disciplines do require fees to be considered, but it seems like literature is the only artistic field where this is the accepted norm. Why?

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

I submit to top-tier magazines (using my own ranking method), and for the most part those magazines pay at professional rates, although payment is by no means my primary concern. I know writers who won’t submit to magazines that won’t pay them, but I don’t feel I’m sufficiently established to take that approach yet.

In terms of reading fees, I don’t pay them. There are lots of places to get published without paying a fee; it has an exploitative feel to it. Contest entry fees, on the other hand, are a different story, as long as the price of admission includes something other than just the lottery ticket like a subscription, or at least one issue of the magazine holding the contest. The amount I’m willing pay depends on the prize money, although I no longer consider contests that pay less than $500, and mostly focus on $1000-and-up contests. In that case I’ve paid as much as $15 to enter, keeping in mind that I’ll be getting at least one issue of the magazine in exchange for my fee.

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

No, I don’t submit only to paying magazines. Being involved in running both an e-zine and a paper magazine myself, I know it’s impossible for many places to pay contributors. And I know too that this does not stop them being good solid writing credits.

I also like supporting start-ups that look well thought out, whose editors come over as serious, and which have a “vision.” A couple of examples: Steel City Review (kudos, Stefani) and a London initiative, Litro, a distributor of single stories on London Underground. I was their inaugural author, and proud of it. Now it’s also distributed in libraries, bookshops, coffee bars. Fantastic places to be read. Pays not a bean. It’s good to support.

Having said that, I do like to get “something” back, now and again, and that’s why I enter competitions such a lot.

Competitions: I pay, happily. So long as a) they are reputable, b) they are being judged by discerning professionals, c) a “place” is a credit worth having and d) the ratio of fee to prize is attractive. The most I’ve paid for a single story entry is e20 at the Fish prize.

Reading fees are another matter. No. I would not consider sending work to place that requires a reading fee.

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.

I used to submit to any old e-zine, but then I figured I wanted to get paid. So I only sub to paying markets anymore that pay no less than $50.

As far as contests and reading fees, I’m of the mind that if you can get writers to pay you for either of them, you are living my dream. In other words, you’re the man!

Tania Hershman’s short stories have been published in various publications including Cafe Irreal, Front&Centre, Transmission, Riptide, and Brand magazines, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, will be published by Salt Publishing in June 2008. Her Web site is www.taniahershman.com.

Until now I haven’t submitted to magazines on the basis of payment, though I have been thrilled when they have offered anything! It is hard for me to get into the headspace of someone paying me for doing something I love, but now that I am a full-time writer, I realize that I must approach this is as a career and try and make some money from it. So now I do look to see if a magazine pays, but there seem to be so few that do that it is not feasible to restrict myself only to paying markets. I don’t believe that whether a magazine pays or not should be a measure of its quality or prestige. It’s the quality of its contents that matters.

I have never submitted to a magazine that charges a reading fee. I feel in my gut that there is something wrong with this. Part of a magazine editor’s role is to read all its submissions and if someone isn’t prepared to do this unless they are paid, then this strikes me as just a money-making scheme.

However, entry fees for competitions are a different matter. I spend a large amount on these, because I know that there is the prize money to be collected, judges to be paid. This strikes me as a fair bargain. I’ve paid up to $30 for a contest fee. I think for me it’s proportional to the prize money. Can’t give an objective sum that I would be prepared to pay.

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.

I don’t let the payment factor into my decision to submit to a magazine.

On non-contest reading fees, I do not approve, although I can see magazines who accept submissions online stipulating a small fee (three dollars max) to cover printing costs.

On contest reading fees, as long as the prize is at least several hundred dollars, a maximum reasonable fee for a single piece under 8000 words is $15, in my view. I’d go as high as $20 if it included a year’s subscription.

I have been known to live in UtopiaLand, but I think a magazine worth its weight is a labor of love, run by people who truly appreciate literature. At its core, literature is art, not a business. To these people, revenue and pay-out is a secondary concern. Most of the best stories I have read were submitted to places with no reading fee and little or no pay-out.

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’ve submitted and have been published by paying and non-paying print rags and e-zines. I, of course, like to be paid but sometimes psychic income is near as good as money. I think it depends on my personal assessment of the quality of the publication.

I once paid for a contest ($10 to Writer’s Digest in 1995) and won a certificate of honor for “Literary Short Story.” But, I actually don’t approve of reading or contest fees. Self-financed publication or contests strike me as counterproductive to the market test of literary worthiness. If there’s a market for the work I think that good. If a publisher gets something by publishing the work I think that good. But I’m not interested in subsidizing either pubs or writers. I’d rather save my gambling bucks for the “March Madness” pool or the Super Bowl.

A while back Carrie Berry (Gator Springs Gazette) had a contest that was open for no fee to writer/subscribers. I thought that unique and entered and was pubbed as a runner up of sorts (no figurative cigar in the form of $s though). I don’t remember if there was a fee for non-subscribers, but there may have been such.

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

Earning money for my writing is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. How do you do it? Is it even feasible? Especially writing fiction. (And short fiction at that.) Why do some genres (mystery, science fiction) regularly pay, but literary fiction doesn’t? How can a journal turn a profit? How does a journal, and literary fiction in general, attract readers? I have so many questions! So if anyone out there knows the answers, please share!!

In general, I would like to be compensated for my writing. Money would be nice. Contributor copies are always welcome. Recently, I’ve been trying to submit more to paying publications, but paying publications aren’t the only publications I will submit to.

I won’t pay reading fees. No way, no how. I don’t normally enter contests, but I will pay a contest fee if the ratio of fee to prize money is reasonable, and entrants receive a copy or subscription of the journal they are supporting. Otherwise, no thank you.

Beth Thomas lives in California with her husband and daughter. She writes a lot and occasionally has things published, most recently in SmokeLong Quarterl and elimae.

At this stage in my writing career (i.e., really, really early), pay is something I’m not actively pursuing. I’m more in the “actively pursuing respectable credits” stage. I think the $$ will come later.

I think contest fees are understandable IF the fee-to-prize ratio is right. A $10 fee for a $1,000 prize is good. A $20 fee for a $100 prize is bad. Of course, a $0 fee for a $1,000 prize is best. I don’t mind shelling out a few bucks to enter a good contest, but if I can save $10, even better. Of course, other things must be considered, like the publication itself, judges, how the winning story will be featured, etc. Sometimes these things can balance out a bad fee-to-prize ratio.

Regarding straight-up reading fees for regular submissions, as in “send us $10 and we’ll read your story,” I don’t understand that. Where does that money go? To the publication? Back to contributors? If my story is not selected, does my $10 go straight into the pocket of my competition? Weird. I don’t submit to those places, as a rule. (I don’t submit to vanity presses either, but at least they print your stuff FOR SURE for that $10. You know?)

Bonnie ZoBell has received an NEA and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such print magazines as American Fiction, The Bellingham Review, and The Greensboro Review, and online at FRiGG, juked, and Word Riot. She received an MFA from Columbia and teaches at San Diego Mesa College.

While I absolutely think writers should get paid for what they do and that their work is massively undervalued, ironically money has nothing to do with why I submit to the magazines I do. I care about the quality of the work in the magazines I submit to.

For the most part, I approve of reading fees and entry fees. I understand that literary magazines are basically nonprofit organizations where the editors get paid little or nothing. Every successful literary magazine I’ve ever known succeeds because it’s a labor of love for someone. Therefore, I’m under no misconception that anybody is getting rich off my entry fee.

Contests are lotteries, which writers don’t have to play if they don’t want to. The prize money is usually supplied by the writers themselves with their entry fees. However, some entry fees seem more worthwhile than others and would make paying the fee and paying a higher fee more worthwhile to me. If I get a subscription to a magazine I’d like to read more of anyway, I’ve definitely broken even. Contests at high-quality magazines often mean that the magazine is going to read a lot of unsolicited material at once and will often publish other work besides the winning story. This makes it more worthwhile. Especially if the magazine is going to publish more than just the first-place winning story.

I write entry fees off on my taxes and feel like if the added-up fees contribute to a magazine paying its phone bill, buying a new printer, or editors/readers actually getting paid for all the work they do, the money is well spent.

Some writers only submit to print publications. Others prefer to have their work appear online. What is your preference, and why?

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.

I like both online and print publications, but I prefer to submit to online pubs. I’m not ashamed to say the chances of acceptance are greater, but I’m also glad to be able to send URLs to friends who’d never get a chance to see printed literary magazines. They have a limited lifespan, and then they are gone, but online, you can potentially keep reaching readers. I actually got a hand-written fan letter–my first, I was thrilled, a couple of months back, for a story I had published online at Hobart a year and a half previously. You can’t beat that with print prestige, in my opinion, much as I like the feel of a real book.

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

I have no preference. Of course, every writer wants to get published in the top tier publications, which are predominantly print. At the end of the day, having my best work published and accessible for others to read is what matters most to me.

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.

It seems that a combination of both online and print publication credits comprise the best possible writer-resume.

Online stories are ready-to-read. The average reader can have immediate access to the work and can often click about for more information on the author and additional works. In today’s climate, being online is commonplace, not only in art but in business, news and lifestyle. In order to capture the greatest audience one needs to use the Internet. Many readers will never subscribe to journals; it just isn’t a priority for a lot of folks. Internet however is free, easy and relatable..

Ahh, the printed word. I think that all of the folks in this discussion will admit to loving words on the page, and what a beautiful bonus if those words include our name! Of course we want to be in print and on bookshelves. No question there.

It goes without saying that being associated with a reputable publication & editor are above all the most valuable mechanism to measure success. A shoddy print pub isn’t as satisfying as a connection with an esteemed online editor and a flowing website with high readership.

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.

What I look for in deciding whether to submit my stories to a particular publication is the quality of the work it contains, not if it’s online or in print.

Fleur Bradley is a crime fiction writer from Colorado. Check out her Website.

I used to prefer print publication, and I would submit to those first. But although it’s great to hold a magazine in your hands (especially if it looks good), it’s a lot harder to get everyone you know to read it. Because it costs them money.

Online, I can send the link to every group I belong to, every friend I have. It’s great for exposure, which is what I’m really after at this point.

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

My preference is the combination of both, of course. Good print magazines will eventually put your submission online anyway, in many cases. So my vote is print.

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

I strongly prefer to have my work published online. Why? Because, as a writer, I like people to actually read my work. I’ve been in a few print magazines, but I don’t think any of them had a distribution higher than a thousand. Certainly no more than ten thousand. I can’t speak to exactly how many page views online magazines are getting beyond SmokeLong, but I know we get upwards of 200,000 page views per issue. I’m sure that some of the more established online magazines like 3:AM or McSweeney’s dwarf that amount.

Actually, comparing apples to apples, think about McSweeney’s. I would argue that the likelihood of John Moe’s “A Midyear Update from Miss Othmar” (published online in January 2004) being read by someone today are hugely higher than someone reading John Updike’s piece in print issue 13 (published in May 2004) today. Why? The combination of archival capabilities and ease of Internet access. If someone wants to read John Moe’s piece, a quick look at the online archives will unearth it. If someone wants to read Updike’s piece (the title of which I don’t even know, as it’s not even close to being as easy to find online), an order with Amazon is probably the quickest way to get it. Further, if a reader really liked the Moe piece, it’s only a click or two away to find more of his work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A reader likes the Updike piece and wants to read more of his work in McSweeney’s print? Good luck finding whether any exists, much less tracking it down to read the same day.

Don’t get me wrong. I think print has its place. I’d rather take a magazine or book into the bathroom to read than my laptop. And I’ll admit that when I’ve done readings in the past, it’s been much easier to read a selection from a print mag in which I’ve appeared, rather than printing something off the Web to take with me. And there is a certain level of prestige to print, I suppose, but I think that’s rapidly changing. More and more editors and publishers are realizing that there are a great many online publications putting out work that rivals any of the print mags. And as dinosaurs fade out of the business and are replaced by younger blood, that balance is going to continue to shift.

I’m sure some folks will think that I preach in favor of online publications because I publish an online magazine. But the causation actually goes the other direction: I publish an online magazine because I believe in online publication.

Ramon Collins lives on the NE edge of the Mojave Desert and is often seen running with a pack of scruffy coyotes.

I’ve been fortunate to be published in both.

It’s my opinion that online writers write for writers–and their duty-bound friends and family–and “print” writers (ISBN and ISSN) write for readers. However, it’s the opinion of pollsters and other statistical doubledomes that US citizens under 24 do not read.

Once I had the opportunity to run an unscientific straw poll of online fiction readers. Typically, from younger readers I got, “That ain’t where the ‘Net is at’” and from older readers I got, “When I want to read, I buy a magazine.”

One drawback to being “published” in e-zines is you have to have a laptop on the coffee table and say, “Hey, gang–anyone wanna read my latest story?”

Of course, when the power goes off so does the story. With “print” you can buy some candles, a dozen magazines and scatter them around the living room.

Katrina Denza’s work can be found in recent issues of The Emerson Review; REAL; Storyglossia; elimae, among others, and forthcoming from Confrontation; Passages North and REAL. Her website is www.katdenza.blogspot.com.

I used to prefer print. Now, I decide where to submit by how much I like and respect the journal. I have favorites in both online and print, and the efforts of the editor(s) and the final product weigh heavier in my decision-making process than whether they’re paper or screen. The advantage of print: long life of collecting dust. Advantage of online: your piece may actually be read by more people than the subscribers of the journal.

Matt DiGangi is the editor of Thieves Jargon.

What’s better about online, as a publisher, is that it’s so much less expensive. You can’t even put a number on it. I think once you have a web site built, it’s also a lot easier to update and maintain a web site than any type of print publication.

However, I think if you’re going to publish online, and you actually want more than a handful of people to read what you publish, you’d be wise to keep the material you run as short as possible. Which is frustrating if you want to work with anything over three thousand (if you’re smart) and five thousand (if you’re stubborn) words in length.

Avital Gad-Cykman’s work has appeared in print in McSweeney’s, Glimmer Train, Other Voices, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prism International, other magazines and several anthologies. It has appeared online in Zoetrope All-Story Extra, Locus Novus, 3:AM, Vestal Review, SmokeLong Quarterly and elsewhere.

I usually submit to print publications because they have been the most solid, substantial part of the literary world so far. Now that technology is catching up with products like Kindle and that we are almost ready to take a book-like computer to bed, things may change.

I have noticed that readers contact me more regarding stories I’ve published online. I am not sure whether it’s the accessibility of the email or the impression that once the writer is online, he is available for an electronic exchange. Such an exchange is highly rewarding.

On the other hand, print magazines and anthologies raise more interest within the literary market than the online ones. The contact between the reader and the writer may not be direct, but readers comment on stories in print in different publications both electronic and not, and most literary acknowledgements are given in this venue.

Bottom line: why not both?

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

Although there are an increasing number of well-regarded, high-quality online magazines, the most prestigious publications–the ones that matter to agents and publishers–are still the ones that exist in print. For the most part, too, the stories that win prizes such as the Pushcart and the O. Henry have appeared in print journals, not online. This may be in the process of changing, but it’s true right now.

Because my goal in publishing stories is to attract enough attention that I will one day be able to publish a book, either a collection of stories or a novel, I aim my publishing efforts at magazines that I think will further that ambition: print magazine as high up the literary ladder as I can get. At this stage, it isn’t about seeking a wide audience for me. For the most part, then, I send new stories only to print publications. I have also taken the approach that online publication is my first choice for reprints, and I’ve published several stories online that first appeared in print.

However, because many online journals publish flash fiction or short-short stories, and many print magazines do not, I’ve begun submitting shorter stories to online magazines as a matter of course. Frequently the response time is faster and with a story that is under 1,000 words, it hardly seems worth it to wait the 2 or 3 months it might take a print journal to consider the piece.

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

I find this an antsy question, perhaps because I’m a Gemini and can see more than one facet of every possible answer.

I appreciate the Internet publications I have had enormously. Work is “out there” to be read in not just the relevant issue, but in the archive.

In the right place, it is a good platform, an opportunity. Of course, I am fond of all the places that publish me.but The Café Irreal has to be one of my favourites. Why, apart from their ethos, their style? Because it has led to my work being selected and translated into Vietnamese (stolen), Japanese (stolen), and Italian (requested). And I get a huge buzz to know I’m being read in those places too.

But that raises one issue that is not so much fun: the issue of plagiarism and theft which is so easy to do with Internet work. I know there are legal safeguards . but what writer at my level in the game wants to spend both time and cash bringing bring lawsuits on publications, unless there is something that seriously damages me personally? I know that at some point I will feel differently, but just now, read. But ask me first, OK?

However. Any Tom, Dick, or Harriet can start up an ezine. I know. I did. The plethora of outlets is overwhelming. And the quality? Variable. And one minute there, the next, shut, many of them.

And the most important question is this: how many non-writers do you know who read ezines for pleasure? I know none. Not one. Repeat. Not ONE.

Print still holds something special. A solidity both real and quasi-illusory. Real because you and readers can hold, feel, share, cry over, lose, write on, collect or throw actual artifacts. Real because many people still want print credits listed and not Internet. (Why? That’s another question, for agents, some publishers, or those to whom I apply for CW work.)

Print still holds a kudos that the Internet does not quite have. Because the “best” publications credits, top ranking in all possibles, are still this: first the print versions and second the Internet versions of those top print outlets.

But the lives of print credits without Internet backup are fleeting except for those who have them on their shelves.

Alicia Gifford is a writer in Southern California. She likes this line: “She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

I believe in a diversified portfolio for financial investments, and something similar for submissions. I love having an online presence; the work is accessible to anyone with a computer. And there’s something very satisfying about seeing your work in print. I tend to send shorter works to online venues, whereas I’ll submit flash or full length stories to print markets. The only thing that makes me balk some are very new markets, whether online or print. I prefer sending to places that have been around for a while, that seem to have some staying power.

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.

I prefer online because of the convenience. Who wants to put up with SASE and the US mail when they can simply copy, paste and click?

Tania Hershman’s short stories have been published in various publications including Cafe Irreal, Front&Centre, Transmission, Riptide, and Brand magazines, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, will be published by Salt Publishing in June 2008. Her Web site is www.taniahershman.com.

I have to say that while I spend a large portion of my day online, I don’t find it easy to read stories online. It is no substitute for holding a journal in your hands, turning the pages. This is probably why I get a greater thrill when my work is accepted by a print publication. There is something in me that feels that having stories in print will keep them around longer, I will leave a greater legacy than if they are on the Net.

This is not to say that I don’t submit to online publications–I do–and that I don’t also love many of these publications that employ wondrous creativity to illustrate stories, making the most of the fact that they are online. Some publications seem to fit more naturally with the Internet–such as Cafe Irreal, for example: I don’t know whether the irreality of the stories wouldn’t seem incongruous with the tangible reality of a printed page. I also appreciate the comment facility on many online publications, which is obviously not relevant for a print pub.

To sum up, though, it is a publication’s reputation that for me is the ultimate issue–are they highly thought of, do they have a large readership, etc.? And as I am writing more and more flash fiction I can see myself submitting to more and more online publications. That’s the way the world is going … and it is better for the trees, ain’t it?

Debbie Ice lives in Connecticut with her husband, two boys, and English bulldog.

It’s so sad because what we prefer does not matter. If you have a novel you want to sell, or at least want to try to sell, what matters is what “they” think. “They” being the agents who read query letters. “They” tend to be overworked, old schoolish, very dependent upon the academia for additional supply of product. Academia being prints.

I think the lit world, or the world of prints, now depends almost solely upon the wannabe writer and writer market, as opposed to the reader market. Of course the book publishers look at the reader market. Nevertheless, the strategy seems to be to grow this writer market–by waving carrots and offering more schools etc.–so much that the demand will go up because, well, the supply goes up. The demand being also the supply. (Basically it’s OK to sell to yourself if yourself keeps expanding. Kind of like those pyramid companies. I think Amway is still around.)

But I am not sure the pool of readers is shrinking at all. Our desire for a good story will never shrink as long as we remain social animals. What has changed and perhaps will continue to evolve is the reader’s need/desire for variety of delivery systems. The information age has spoiled readers. They now demand fast turnover, quick access to information, multiple delivery systems, all of which will require finger-on-the-pulse marketing. Readers will eventually shop novels online and download with Kindles (only when cost comes down.) Readers will demand books that not only can be downloaded but also spit out quickly-POD. Readers will want to listen to readings (audio files), maybe watch readers (movie files), maybe do it all at once–watch, listen and read. Internet is positioned to service this type of demand.

I wonder if prints may evolve into what services the writer market. Internet may be what will/or can service the reader market.

Michael Leone lives in New Jersey with his wife and baby. His short fiction has been published in Green Mountains Review, North Atlantic Review, The Ledge, and The Jabberwock Review. He also writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Plain Dealer, and the Kansas City Star.

Online magazines are probably going to replace print magazines eventually, but right now the quality of the writing is no match, except for a few that I can think of.

One of the reasons I think is that the competition is fiercer at print mags: you are battling writers who have two, three, sometimes four books out, whereas it seems to me anybody can save a Word doc and hit send. I also think about exposure to literary agents: most agents read print magazines and have no interest or knowledge of online venues.

At every writers conference I have been to the reaction of agents and editors to online magazines was a barely disguised sneer. I’m not saying I agree with their attitude–I don’t–but I do believe the consensus is that the quality in online mags isn’t high enough to merit being taken as seriously as print.

Dennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. His work appears widely, both on the Web, and in print.

My attitude toward print magazines was shaped, early on, by a couple of unfortunate incidents that, through the benefit of hindsight, I understand were neither “here, nor there.”

For example, there came a situation by which an acceptance I’d received, from a print magazine, was “reversed”–like one of those hideous NFL football replays, where the referee disappears “under the hood”–when the magazine ran into space constraints with the issue they were trying to put out; the other incident occurred when 10 months went by with no reply from a print magazine–vis a vis a poem I’d sent them–and so I sim-subbed the piece, assuming they were not interested in publishing it–which, as it turns out, in the long run, they were. DANG! Then, I was out of luck with that magazine, by virtue of contravening their rule about No Sim Subs. A bummer deal, all the way around.

Life goes on, however, and the passage of time creates the opportunity for new perspectives. What I’d previously perceived as editorial caprice and hubris can also be examined as nothing more than “attrition by exigency”–due to the paste-up/layout, time/labor, and production/deadline constraints comprising a Print Mag Reality. These are constraints which, for better or worse, are not faced to the same harrowing degree by online publications. And so it goes.

Longstanding print magazines–by virtue of their prosperity within a “harsh food chain”–deserve, IMO, every bit of the respect and cachet they command. As such, many of my recent submission campaigns have been geared toward connecting with some of them. My new motto reads thusly:

A Byline is a Byline,
and Bygones be–

Well… You know.

Onward, Scriveners!

Mary Miller’s stories can be found in print at The Oxford American, Black Clock, and Mississippi Review, and online at elimae, Storyglossia, FRiGG, and Smokelong Quarterly.

I prefer print, though I like publishing stories online as well. A lot of print magazines have such small circulations that I wonder if anyone ever sees them. I love books, though, and it’s always great to have something I can hold in my hands.

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.

I have a preference. It’s for good magazines. Sometimes those magazines are expressed through paper. Sometimes through electrons. I have a slight theoretical bias towards the Internet (it allows for economic models of magazines that are closer to zero-financial cost to the provider, it is the more democratically accessible medium because it doesn’t cost anything and it is available to all Internet users no matter where they live…) but it’s not enough to call a preference.

The only thing online publishing is lacking right now is brand-name recognition. There are only a couple of journals that have any mainstream noise on their record (maybe Jacket and nth position, speaking from a poetry perspective). The comparable number of print journals is much higher; in my tiny local library there are sixteen print journals regularly stocked. Still, the dirty little secret in the industry is that some of the most unknown online journals have a greater readership than some of the stalwarts of traditional publishing. So reach is never a problem; the problem is credibility. The Internet publishing scene laughs at the idea of credibility, but it shouldn’t. Every time a successful novelist publishes a story online, that journal’s numbers go sky high and the quality of their submissions increases. Credibility, like everything else online, is both easier to get and harder to keep. All it takes are online editors that are as dedicated and earnest in their approaches as anyone in the print world and mainstream credibility is a given.

Stefani Nellen is a writer of literary fiction and science fiction. She co-edits the Steel City Review, an online quarterly that also publishes as annual print edition.

Eventually, I hope my work will appear in both.

Here’s why I like to continue to publish online: It’s so easy to share work that appeared online. In fact, I think most of my friends would never have read my stories if it weren’t for online magazines. It’s not easy to get a hold of print issues, especially if you live abroad. It’s very easy to send around an email with a link.

So, “spreadability” attracts me to online magazines, and the potentially huge readership. I subscribe to & pick up issues of many print mags, but my shelf space and purse are limited. I can’t read as much print as I would like. This is where online mags come in: They are free, which is great, they don’t take up space, which is great, too. And we all know the power of Google. It’s just incredibly easy to jump from one story to another, from one writer to the next, and to explore the network of writers currently at work. I don’t think I would have made whatever progress I made in my first years of writing without the always available and fresh online lit mags.

And yet, in my experience print has more prestige. The same people who won’t bother to send in a single-issue order request to the Prestigious University Review will nevertheless be more impressed with a credit in said review than an online credit. That’s just my personal experience, the way I perceive my friends’ reaction. (Most of them aren’t writers.) “Oh, you mean your story is going to be in a REAL magazine? Your story is going to appear in print?”

I think print has more prestige because many people still think of literature in terms of books and paper, and the idea of an “online literary magazine” is even more alien to the mind of average people than the idea of a print literary magazine. (I had no idea literary magazines existed before I started writing, except for the New Yorker.)

Personally, I aim for print publications because of the perceived prestige, sure, but also because paper is a wonderful medium. You can take a book anywhere, pick it up again and again, watch the pages become yellow at the edges…yeah, it’s a cliché, but to me it feels that once a story appeared in print, the publication is permanent, even if the only existing copy is my contributor copy. (So, yeah, ironically it will probably be read by a lot fewer people, at least if we’re talking literary magazines.)

I also have the feeling that many University-based Reviews (such as Agni, The Southern Review, etc.) have a publication “system” in place, with a team of editors, a tradition of publishing, an existing business plan, financial support (hopefully)–the wheels might turn slowly, but they won’t stop. They’ve been around for a long time. Editors might change, the layout might improve, an online submission system might be installed, but the journal itself stays around. I’d like to have the feeling of entrusting my story to such a trustworthy publisher. With new online journals it’s sometimes hard to predict how long they are going to be around (same for print, but there at least you have your contributor copy, and paper never dies…).

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.

I’m an equal opportunity subber, meaning that I submit to what I consider quality journals, both online and in print. The benefits of online publishing include: (1) a global audience of potentially huge numbers; (2) easy access to links authors can use to display their writings to friends, relatives, putative publishers, putative agents and employers (etc.); (3) the opportunity to expand one’s conception of (on the static page) “literature,” by experimenting with and publishing multi-media presentations, including podcasts and “new media”/e-literary projects, which may well entail exciting collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers and composers..

The two benefits of print publishing are: (1) one can cuddle up with one’s journal and take it to readings to impress people; (2) print journals still (no matter how over-rated they are) have an imprimatur of prestige and validity that online journals don’t yet have, though the times are changing fast. Indeed, as print mags fold and produce online versions in their stead, the perceived validity of print over online will become a stuffy and archaic cliche.

Six of us online publishers/editors will touch upon these topics and others during our AWP panel presentation: Habitable Planets and Black Holes: Mapping the Expanding Cyber-Universe of the New Literary Media Friday, February 1st, 10:30 – 11:45 am, Nassau Suite Hilton, 2nd Floor).

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

Stories and poems that appear online generally get a much larger readership than those in print and they are readily accessible to anyone who Googles the writer’s name. This can be very good and, sometimes, pretty bad. It’s terrific to get a lot of readers–unless those readers include your Aunt Cecily (who’s always looking for proof that you’re a bit “off”), your boss and co-workers, your potential employers, your psychotherapy clients, your ten-year-old kid, your estranged spouse, your estranged spouse’s lawyer. These readers might not appreciate your story’s fearless “adult content,” the “colorful” language you used in dialogue, or the utter lies you were telling when you described with startling verisimilitude the married protagonist’s affair with an alluring stranger. In fact, you might get so much heat from some of these readers that you ask the e-zine editor to please just yank your story the hell off the Web site. Just make it go away!

Now, see, if that story had been published in a print journal, no one would ever have seen the fucker. Problem skirted.

I know a guy in a mid-Atlantic state who got arrested for the fictional material he’d written and posted on the Web. The local authorities saw it (like anyone could) and immediately confiscated his computer.

This writer claims that if this material had been published in a book it might have been a bestseller. He says none of it was any more salacious than the stuff you’d read in, say, American Psycho. There was just a lot more of it, hundreds of thousands of unlovely words, hyperlink upon hyperlink, and it was all posted on the Internet for every person on the planet to look at. This made the authorities nervous. They made him take down his site and they arrested him. Every week for a year the guy had to report to a probation officer. True story!

So . . . this makes me wonder how much longer little print magazines that nobody reads will continue to hold dominion within the literary publishing community in the United States. And the arrogance of some of the members of this community–some of the old-guard literary agents and editors–an arrogance based on their certitude that there is now and for more than 100 years has been only one game in town and they are players in that game (but you, an online writer and/or editor, are not) and this game will continue in the same fashion in perpetuity . . . this arrogance makes me want to get a front-row seat to watch the institutions crumble. Let’s all just park ourselves on some comfy stadium cushions . . . and wait.

We love our books, yes, and our print journals; they’re grand to caress beneath the covers and we love the whiff of their pages. There’s this other way, though, now–and, yep, it’s different. It’s big. It’s populist. It can bring one story, one poem, in an instant, for free, to the whole world. Do we like this? Hmmm, mixed. At the very least, though, we must try to stay humble–and savvy–in the presence of its gathering power.

In the four years she has been writing, Kay Sexton’s fiction has been chosen for over twenty anthologies ranging from Mexico, a Love Story to Tales of the Decongested and recent magazine publications include Ambit, Frogmore Papers, Lichen (Canada), and Mindprints(USA).

True story: I was in London for the day, meeting a friend, and a very senior political figure stepped out of Broadcasting House and stopped dead. “My dear Kay,” he said, “how lovely to see you … etc.” Took my mobile phone number, kissed me, got into his car. My friend was incredibly impressed, even more so when I explained I’d known him 20 years earlier when we’d been “close.”

The thing is, he never called. Many writers “move up” from online publication as though it’s a dirty habit they give up when they get a few credits. I hope never to be the kind of person who takes the number of an old friend but doesn’t call. There are online publications out there that I consider it an honour to appear in: FRiGG, for example, and online publications that will always have work from me if they want it, even if they don’t pay or have much profile, because they pulled me from the slush when I was starting out, the “old friends.” There are onlines that I love even though I would never have anything to suit them, like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and onlines that I strive for, as a grail, likeBlithe House Quarterly.

When the publishing world is limitless and talent is too, I see no reason to get precious about stories being on paper.

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’ve had stuff published (short stories, flash pieces, poetry) both in print and on line and I don’t really have a preference. I will say, however, that I particularly enjoyed being published in Gator Springs Gazette, Southern Hum, Dead Mule, and Quiction, all of which were or are cyber rags.

Now, my novel, yeah, I have a preference. I want print. I want a good house publishing. I don’t have either, but that’s what I want. Why? Because I believe the readership for long works is still with the print medium. Besides, I like the look and feel of the book.

I’m going to go and read a print novel now.

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

I look for the following when deciding what journals to submit to:

1. Style. Does the journal publish work that is “like” mine? Sometimes this is hard to discern. Other times, I’ll know immediately that my work isn’t a fit for the journal. If a journal publishes mostly experimental work, for example, or humor, I don’t waste my, or the editor’s, time. This is why it pays to read a magazine before submitting.

2. Consistency. Is the journal published regularly? Do I enjoy reading at least most of the work in every issue?

3. Design. If the journal is online, is it easy to read and navigate? If it’s print, do I like the cover, the font, are the typos minimal, etc.?

4. Response time. If a journal takes a year to respond, I won’t submit to them again. Sometimes the only way to find this out is to submit and wait. And wait and wait and wait and get pissed in the process. It’s understandable if a journal has a submission in the 3-6 month range, as long as they allow simultaneous submissions. If they don’t, they better respond within a month.

5. Reputation. Is the journal well-regarded among fellow writers and people in the publishing industry? Do they nominate for prizes? Great! Do they publish your work without sending out acceptance letters? Boo! Do they refuse to respond to your query regarding the status of your submission? Hiss!

If a journal meets all of the above criteria, I don’t much care whether it’s print or online, or both. There are a few instances when I prefer print over online, however. Long stories are a natural fit for print. I have a hard time reading long work on a computer screen, so when it comes to reading and submitting long stories, I’ll always opt for print. For me, anything over the 3,000 range is long. Another reason to opt for print is to catch the attention of agents, if that is your goal. I’ve heard of agents contacting people after reading their work in a print journal, but never online. I think this will change, eventually. I’d also be willing to bet that after an agent reads a story in print, they hit the Net to see what else they can find by that author. Which is a good reason to publish online, and a good reason to always publish your best work.

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.

Although there are some fine online journals available, I find that my work, due to its length, is best presented in print. Online is good for stories mazing out at 3500 words or so. I also prefer reading print journals. I don’t like browsing around Web sites looking for good stories to read. I want to sit down at night with Zoetrope (usually) or Tin House.

On the other hand, I know many fine writers have published online, and I commend their efforts. Some have even gone to book contracts without publishing in print at all. I really like dealing with online editors. They usually respond much more quickly and I have also received many more personal rejections from them. Steven McDermott even champions his writers in his blog.

Lesley C. Weston lives and writes in New York City. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Ars Medica, Per Contra, Gud Magazine, The Duck & Herring Field Guide, Night Train, and The Pisgah Review.

I submit to both, and I am proud when my work appears in either format.

What I enjoy about online:

Your work is more visible to a wider audience.
Many online journals publish more frequently than print. (I have to admit, I like seeing my work go live quickly after acceptance!)
This also means there is an increased opportunity to publish with a zine you admire. More issues = more stories to fill them.
Sometimes, they pay.
It’s great to be able to send a link of an online story to anyone interested in your work; it saves money and time.
I don’t have to stand in line at the post office.
If my apartment burns down, I won’t lose my contributor’s copy and have to buy or trade for a new one.

What I like about print:

It is lovely to hold a magazine in your hands, see your name on the page, line them up on the shelves.
There is a certain prestige to publishing in print.
The possibility of attracting an agent seems to be stronger if you make it into a top journal.
Sometimes, they pay.
Sometimes your story ends up next to a writer’s whose work you’ve admired for years.
If my computer crashes, I still have my copy.

Marilyn Marie Wilkins hails from San Antonio, Texas. Her most notable recent accomplishment was being named to Laura Hird’s Best of 2006.

I have no preference, really. In fact, I try very hard to be published in print, but I have succeeded only one time. Otherwise, I have had around 25 or so stories published online since 2004.Considering that I am a 67 year old writer who only plunged in at age 60, I am extremely proud of this accomplishment. In 2007, my goal was to be published only in print and get paid! The result was only two stories to show for my hard work the whole year. I am back to being excited and grateful for any recognition, online or print!

Bonnie ZoBell has received an NEA and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such print magazines as American Fiction, The Bellingham Review, and The Greensboro Review, and online at FRiGG, juked, and Word Riot. She received an MFA from Columbia and teaches at San Diego Mesa College.

I am just returning to publishing short stories because of life getting in the way and because of working on novels, and I have to confess, I’m still pretty thrilled to see my name and all the bright colors and pretty art work up there on the screen. And if my goal is to have my work read by as many people as possible, I can’t help but think that online publishing is the way to go. But I’m still figuring it out myself.

I can easily send my online fiction to family and friends to read, in addition to posting it where other writers can see and read it quickly, and citing it on cover letters. If I need to show proof of publications for various applications, I can’t print it and the often beautiful artwork that goes with it.

Many writers I admire and respect tell me you really need to publish in print. That’s where agents and editors are more likely to see you, they say, and it’s more prestigious. I myself do have print publications from the past, and now that I’m writing longer short stories again, I’ve started submitting to print again.

But I still get this feeling like: Who really reads those little print magazines? I’ve got a line up of them with old stories of mine on my bookshelf, now dusty and mildewing. (Yes, my housekeeping could be better, but I also live in sea air.)

More importantly, if I want specific people to read my print work, I either have to rely on them to look into how to purchase the journal and to actually send away and get it, buy it myself and send it to them, or send the story to them either as a Word doc. or a printed out copy.

Aren’t we going to get more readers online?

To those who say more editors/agents are likely to read print, I have to say I also hear stories of agents, especially, seeing stories they like online and contacting writers. And it seems like if you’re trying to get a collection published, the work has to stand on its own, regardless of where it was published.

I will say that if I’m going to read a longer piece of fiction–a collection or something the length of a printed literary magazine, I’d rather not read it on the screen. But if I’m reading a few stories here and there, the screen is fine with me.

Mainly, I think we’re in the process of changing to more and more work online. As we grow and learn about newer magazines, equally prestigious, both print and online, it seems like the better online mags are going to become increasingly familiar to agents and editors, too. I don’t think print magazines are ever going to go away, but online magazines are going to get bigger.

I guess the answer, from a writers’ perspective, at least for the moment, is to have some online publications and some print publications.

While talking with Ellen Parker, the editor of FRiGG, during a showcase piece about her literary journal, we found ourselves discussing terms such as “standards,” and editorial policies like solicitations. As time went on, the discussion moved further away from the work published in FRiGG, and more into a debate about publishing practices. Why do some people only publish in print? Do writers want critiques of rejected manuscripts? Is it the editor’s duty to provide those critiques? Just what is the role of an editor anyway? We were way off topic and running in circles. So we reigned in the FRiGG discussion, and decided that we’d set out asking these very questions. And thus, Get Real was born.

After compiling a list of topics, we sent out and posted notices about our new project. The WRITERS’ responses to the first topic went live on Saturday. The EDITORS’ responses are below. The responses are in alphabetical order according to the respondent’s last name. If you have comments, questions, or a response, please leave them in the comments section, addressed to the appropriate person.

The Rejection Letter: Feedback or Form?

Some literary magazine editors often critique stories they reject. Other literary magazine editors seldom or never critique stories they reject. Editors, what is your practice (or policy) here?

EDITORS SPEAK:

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

At SmokeLong, we rarely critique stories we reject. We may offer a little extra encouragement if the writer was close to an acceptance or if we have a pre-existing relationship with the writer, but I’m hard-pressed to think of the last time we actually critiqued a piece we were rejecting.

Occasionally, I receive follow-ups from writers asking what didn’t work in the piece, and in that case, I may offer a little more insight, but it seems that those follow-ups most often come for pieces that weren’t even close, so it’s tough to engage positively.

In any case, I can’t think of the last time that I gave a full-blown critique of a piece we rejected. I strongly prefer to do that in a workshop setting. I just don’t know how appropriate it is to engage in it outside of that. What are we hoping to achieve?

The only time we give more in-depth feedback is if we’d like to accept a piece, but think it needs some edits. In that case, we actually will offer line edits, etc., but otherwise? No.

Matt DiGangi is editor of Thieves Jargon.

Unless you can read minds, it’s useless to try and write rejection letters that every writer is going to be pleased with. As such, I think an editor should be more concerned with getting responses out to their writers as soon as possible.

If writers are looking for in-depth critiques of their rejected work, they should find a writing group or take classes.

I prefer form letters that can be easily modified:

“Thanks for sending your work. Unfortunately, our submissions are really jammed up, and just last week we accepted a different piece about one-armed drag racers. In the interest of keeping it fresh, we’re going to have to pass on this one, but I do hope you think of hitting us up again.”

Thieves Jargon has one guy on staff (Andy Riverbed) who writes a few creative rejection letters each week for the other editors. I consider it something of an ambassador position. The interesting thing is, some rejected writers really appreciate getting this type of rejection, and the rest really hate it. There seems to be little middle ground. Either way is fine with me. Both the pleased and the displeased are going to tell their friends, and that’s good for business.

Like, yeah, we’re clowning around, but we’re not trying to do it at your expense, so chill out some.

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

How possible is it to comment on all submissions? My guess is that it is not. And the more of a “cult” magazine you are, the less possible it is. And therefore, only the chosen few writers can expect to have anything other than form rejects. The ones that come close but for some reason just miss, I hope fervently get a few words of encouragement… and those are the ones I would comment on myself.

Steve Hansen has had limited success as a writer, having published stories over that last 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.

Allow me to put my editor’s hat on. One sec. OK, now I am all-knowing and omnipresent! I started tqrstories.com because (having critiqued so many stories on zoetrope.com) I thought it would be valuable and entertaining to have an e-zine where the public could have access to the process of elimination in the form of public critiquing as the stories make their way up the editorial ladder. Granted, a lot of writers probably have not submitted to TQR because they don’t want to endure a public critiquing, but I figured such transparency would keep out the pretenders, the riff raff if you will. For the most part, this has been true. The number of submissions has always been low, but we’ve almost always been able to glean three top-notch pieces of fiction each quarter. And most of the contributors have come away from the process (whether they’ve been published by us or not) with an appreciation of our iconoclastic ways. I’ve been terribly lucky to headhunt a core staff (working gratis of course) who are editorially savvy and skillful enough to allow me, so far, to pull it off.

Tania Hershman’s short stories have been published in various publications including Cafe Irreal, Front&Centre, Transmission, Riptide and Brand magazines, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, will be published by Salt Publishing in June 2008. Visit her website.

As a reader, I send out both form rejections and more personalized ones, if I feel there is something constructive I can say regarding their story. Very often, the piece submitted is so far from being a flash story that there is nothing I can say briefly that might help. But in perhaps twenty percent of what I read, I like it but it just isn’t quite “there” so I make a very gentle (I hope!) suggestion, perhaps something about the point of view, the tense, maybe suggesting cutting some of what I feel are extraneous descriptions in a 500-word story. I have had a few replies to these rejections which indicate that people are delighted that someone has taken the time to read their story and think about what might make it better. That’s my aim, and I would appreciate the same treatment from the editors I send to!

Leigh Hughes is the editor-in-chief of the online literary journal edificeWRECKED.

When we first started edificeWRECKED we sent every rejection with a brief explanation of why the story didn’t work for us. It was not an in-depth critique and usually wasn’t about the writing of the story at all—just why it wouldn’t work FOR US. However, after a few months I was completely worn down by writers’ complaints, either receiving comments like “I didn’t ask for your opinion. A simple ‘no’ would have been better,” to rude comments (”go f*ck yourself”), but mostly just arguments about how wrong I was in my assessment of their genius story and why I should change my mind. It was disappointing at first, as I’d only wanted to provide the writers with what it was I thought they wanted, what I thought I would want. Then it got down-right maddening. The truth is that you can never tell a writer what they want to hear unless it’s a “yes” and we soon stopped giving any personalized rejections whatsoever. All form, all the time. No more complaints (at least to our faces.)

This subject comes up a lot on the writers workshop website Zoetrope.com and the attitude I often see is that the editors “owe” the writers not only an explanation of why they didn’t want it but also some brief critique of the story, so that they can make it better for future publishers. This seems to be the big complaint about form rejections–that they don’t know WHY it wasn’t accepted and therefore can’t possibly improve their work. This attitude pisses me off, frankly. As a writer, I completely understand. But guess what, a story shouldn’t be submitted if it isn’t ready to be published. Period. If you are distrustful of your own editing eye—then you workshop it, as often and as earnestly as you can. I think, with the Internet and the relatively fast responses of e-zines, that many people submit their work to editors not necessarily for publication but for the “review” from the editors. Rude, rude, rude and RUDE. It is not the responsibility of an editor reviewing a piece for publication to tell the writer how to make their story better. It just isn’t. It’s NICE if they do, and should be appreciated accordingly. (Gifts are great.)

Besides, what does ONE editor know anyway? The submissions are reviewed against the other submissions received and the style of the publication. THIS is the main criteria for publication. It all boils down to opinion. And one opinion formed from a very small group of people (many times just ONE person). Not to say that the editors are unqualified to make these judgments (they read shockingly large amounts of fiction/poetry and even if they have no formal education or literary experience they quickly become accustomed to what’s “good” and what isn’t) but it is still just opinion. The next publication may love it. Writers should simply acknowledge the rejection, mark that pub off the list of possibilities and send it out to the next one.

The bottom line for me is that it’s presumptuous to assume the submission readers at any level OWE anyone anything, except, of course, maintaining their personal, subjective view of the quality of their own publication. They certainly don’t owe any writer an explanation or critical review of a rejection. Ultimately, a no is a no is a no, anyway, regardless of its overblown or minimal wardrobe.

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

I tried to give feedback in the early years, but then as I hired more and more editors, it became a time consideration and form emails were developed. It was hard to insist on feedback when editors were so overworked. However when the work merited a remark, very often my editors would also add a note of encouragement or constructive criticism. But it wasn’t a policy.

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.

My policy with Storyglossia is to always provide a reason why I reject a story. Sometimes the reason is simply a matter of taste and if that’s the only reason I’ll say so. Just because a story is well-written it isn’t a given that I’ll like it. Lots of journals out there and that means there’s plenty of editorial taste to go around. On the other hand, if the beginning is slow, the ending weak, or the writer has a fondness for “it” instead of precise nouns, or if any of the other possible ways that a story can lose my interest is present, I’ll say that, too. If something really impressed me even as I reject the story, I’ll pass that along also. Usually I’ll only respond with a couple of lines of feedback, but occasionally I’ll provide more extensive feedback, or even offer to work with a writer on a revision. Editors who claim that time constraints prohibit such a response are slinging BS. If an editor has time to read a story they have time to provide at least a one-sentence reason for rejecting. I can understand not wanting to write such responses, but saying you don’t have time? Not buying that excuse.

Stefani Nellen is a writer of literary fiction and science fiction. She co-edits the Steel City Review, an online quarterly that also publishes as annual print edition.

I have to say that the decision to send out a personal or a form rejection is mainly a function of time. Our main goal at Steel City is to get back to writers as quickly as possible. Sometimes, we have the time to append personalized comments to rejections, sometimes we don’t. If you catch us at a busy time, you might get a form rejection even though we would have had much to say about your story—such is life!

However, we never “critique” submissions. That’s not our job. What we sometimes do is point out, in one sentence, what worked for us and what kept us from taking the submission—always with the caveat that this is only our subjective opinion and not a verdict.

Finally, if a submission is totally wacky (glaring spelling/grammar/formatting issues, weird content, etc.—editors, you know what I mean) they’ll get a form rejection. Why waste time on ‘writers’ who apparently can’t be bothered preparing an adequate submission?

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.

We (at Mad Hatters’ Review) don’t. The writer hasn’t asked us for a critique, only for publication. It’s presumptuous to offer submitting authors critiques when they haven’t asked for them. Of course, if an author who has submitted to us asks for a critique after rejection, and I have time, I’ll tell the author why we decided not to publish her/his submission/s.

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

I do not critique stories that are submitted to FRiGG unless that story is close to being ready for publication in FRiGG. (Notice I didn’t say close to being ready for publication. I can only say that a story is close to being ready for FRiGG—meaning it is close to being compatible with my sensibility, tastes, and standards. This has nothing to do with whether the story is ready for publication in another journal. Perhaps it is. In fact, in many instances, I’m sure it is.) If a story is close, I will either tell the writer that the story was a “near miss” and he or she should please submit again—or else I’ll tell the writer the story is very close and I’ll ask the writer if I can ask some questions about the story and make some comments. The writer can say yes or no to this. If the writer says yes, we begin the “critiquing” process. Often, this process leads to the story being accepted.

What also occasionally happens is I say, Ohmigod, this story throws me into conniptions. Can FRiGG publish it? Please? And we publish it verbatim because it is so sublime.

Now, if I know a writer even very casually, I will not send a form letter. I will give a personal response. This response is usually no, thanks—and then I’ll either open the door for future submittals or else I won’t encourage them.

If a story is not close to being ready for publication in FRiGG and I do not know the writer personally, I will send a form rejection letter. This circumstance covers probably 95 percent of the submittals we receive. I do not believe an editor owes any comments to a writer (who is unknown to that editor) who submits a story. Quite often there is no way I can soft-pedal my reason(s) for not accepting a story. Here are some common reasons: The story is badly done. The story is ham-handed. The misuse of just one word signals to me that the writer does not have control of his or her craft. How can I say any of these things to a writer? Should I spend hours of my time thinking of ways to soft-pedal reactions like: I dislike this story; this story is sophomoric; this story is not interesting; this story has nothing to recommend itself to me.

I am a professional copy editor and it’s part of my job to kindly and gently and deferentially tell writers that their writing needs improvement—and then I tell the writer, as kindly as possible, exactly how the writing can be improved. This process takes hours and hours and it calls on all of my powers and experience as an editor and I charge a lot of money for it. I do not want to engage in this process, even to a small extent, with every writer (or even most writers) who submit work to FRiGG. I absolutely will engage in the process if I can see that a story is close and I have asked the writer if he or she will entertain questions and comments about the story and the writer says yes. Otherwise, I will offer no comments or “critiques” or words of any nature.

So to those writers who are fervently hoping for even a few small comments from an editor, all I can say is your chances of getting any words from an editor if you submit to FRiGG are not great. The editors at FRiGG are not kind-hearted. However, if you submit a story that is close to being ready for publication in FRiGG and if you agree to enter into the critiquing process, you may indeed get many, many comments from us.

In the four years she has been writing, Kay Sexton’s fiction has been chosen for over twenty anthologies ranging from ‘Mexico, a Love Story’ to ‘Tales of the Decongested’ and recent magazine publications includeAmbit, Frogmore Papers, Lichen (Canada), and Mindprints (USA).

I’ve read for places that do both. I do prefer to able to say something, however fleeting—and I do have a bit of a problem, ethically, when I’m reading as an associate editor or just a slush reader and I’m not able to respond directly to the writer. My least favourite system was one zine where there were detailed discussions of stories and poems by up to four editors but none of that was fed back to the writers by the Senior Editor, which seemed to me to be a tragedy for the writer: who didn’t get constructive feedback, and the editors: who’d put in time on thinking critically about the story only to have their debates go entirely to waste. My favourite system to date has been the Night Train system of finding at least one good thing to say about the story, before going on to explain why you’re rejecting it. While it may sound mawkish to “always say something nice,” most people who’ve had to work with me as an editor say I’m very tough so I’m not exactly known for my tenderness to writers! Even so, my feeling is that there is always something you can say that will make the writer feel you actually read the story. That’s what most writers want to know, even if you only thank them for submitting according to your guidelines, it can be enough to show that you really did read their work. I liked the NT system also because you put your name to your rejection email and every writer knows who read their work—transparency is always a good thing.

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

I’m still trying to figure out how to write rejection letters. They are freaking HARD, I tell you. Seriously, I have spent a good deal of time trying to word the little bastards. Especially when the piece has come close to acceptance. Why aren’t we accepting it then, I’m sure the writer wants to know. And the truth is, it could be any number of things. A tone that really bugs the shit out of someone, and would be difficult to edit out. Strong writing, but the story doesn’t grab us the way we want it to. Good story, good writing, but no one feels strongly about it. Too much. Not enough. The list goes on and on and on… So, am I supposed to tell the writer why we’re not taking the piece? Do they want specifics? I never know. All I can say for sure is why it didn’t work for the editors at SmokeLong, and often times, the opinions will vary so much among individual editors that it would be contradictory, and um, irresponsible (?) to send the writer our responses. So, as a general rule, I don’t. More than likely, you will get the: This Came Close For Us, Please Consider Submitting to SmokeLong Again version of the rejection letter. If we say this, we mean it. Otherwise, I use the form rejection letter and don’t personalize it.

Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal and blogs here.

At NOÖ, we receive enough submissions that I often have no time to send a detailed critique, and therefore I resort to “form” letters. However, I always individually type each letter and spend a lot of time with the nuance of the wording. If I sound enthusiastic in a rejection letter, I was enthusiastic. If I’m curt and don’t mention anything about wanting to see future work, your style probably eludes me. Plenty of people in the ’90s wore potato sacks for jeans. Some people bathe in patchouli oil. These people aren’t evil. I just don’t feel like a human being when I hang around them. When I send brisk rejection letters that seem to exhibit no sense of humanity, it’s because what I read didn’t really make me feel like a human. Thankfully, that occurs rarely, usually only in the face of mass mailing, utter delusion, jaw-wrenching obnoxiousness, or all of the above: “Dear magazine x, here is a link to fifty poems I wrote this morning. They are all (c) 2007 Starfish Popcorn, so please don’t steal my work.”

If you’re reading this, you’re not one of those people. You have what science calls a heart.

Returning to the main question of extended critiques, I usually will dive into critique if I feel like I really understand a story’s motivation and style and see it meshing with the magazine’s aesthetic (which isn’t the same as “my” aesthetic)–except for a few little things. Then I’ll try to talk through those little things honestly and clearly, casting them not as the story’s failures (I’m a writer too, yo) but in terms of something Mike-the-reader misunderstood or yearned for.

Stories like these don’t annoy me, they just make me feel a little stalled or off, so I say as such and save the snark for Starfish Popcorn. Some of the horror rejections I’ve heard about—usually from big lit rag “slush pile” interns—disgust me. A friend of mine had her story returned from the Georgia Review with “STUPID!” written on it. That’s not critique. That’s callous disrespect. No need. Grow up, interns. Etc.

So, yeah, the stories NOÖ receives that are written by earnest, hardworking adults I feel should be treated by the best earnest hardworking adulthood I can summon up. And the PDFs we receive of 700 poems about blue horns of sour rainbow love—um. Um. That’s why God invented whiskey.

While talking with Ellen Parker, the editor of FRiGG, during a showcase piece about her literary journal, we found ourselves discussing terms such as “standards,” and editorial policies like solicitations. As time went on, the discussion moved further away from the work published in FRiGG, and more into a debate about publishing practices. Why do some people only publish in print? Do writers want critiques of rejected manuscripts? Is it the editor’s duty to provide those critiques? Just what is the role of an editor anyway? We were way off topic and running in circles. So we reigned in the FRiGG discussion, and decided that we’d set out asking these very questions. And thus, Get Real was born.

After compiling a list of topics, we sent out and posted notices about our new project. The WRITERS’ responses to the first topic, along with the topic lead-in question, appear below. The EDITORS’ responses will follow. The responses are in alphabetical order according to the respondent’s last name. If you have comments, questions, or a response, please leave them in the comments section, addressed to the appropriate person.

The Rejection Letter: Feedback or Form?

Some literary magazine editors often critique stories they reject. Other literary magazine editors seldom or never critique stories they reject. Editors, what is your practice (or policy) here?

Some writers like to get critiques of stories that editors are rejecting. Others writers dislike getting critiques; they just want a straight rejection, with no unsolicited comments. Writers, how do you feel about having your story critiqued by an editor who is rejecting that story?

WRITERS:

A.M. 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.

I enjoy getting a critique that arises from the story, rather than from the magazine’s guidelines, say. For that, a simple “not for us” will do. But what I like about those spontaneous critiques is that they are spontaneous and optional. It wouldn’t be as meaningful if editors felt they had to say something.

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

I’ve received a variety of editor remarks from the encouraging to the bizarre and even illegible. I’ve been fortunate to have editors who have been gracious in offering constructive feedback and support. When the comments are specific and sincere, then it is welcomed. However, generalized remarks about a story needing to be “tightened” or “revised” or “edited” are a waste of time.

To answer the question, I don’t feel strongly one way or another. If the reader didn’t like my story, then slip a form in my SASE and move on to the next story. I’ve read slush and know the routine and understand how subjective the whole process is. Yet, if the reader felt moved or inspired by something and is compelled to write a note, then that is fine, also.

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.

A bit of general feedback is helpful, but I don’t expect editorial ‘services’ from an editor who has not engaged my work. For example, a comment such as, “Thanks for submitting, we respect the concept of this piece, but… Please continue to send your work” is better than a simple rejection.

If an editor is rejecting for a definable reason, it is helpful and reassuring to know why. For example, “We are looking for stories based on actual experiences for our war-themed issue. Your piece is clearly based on a fictional battle” is helpful to realize that perhaps it is not the quality of the work, but the fit that necessitated the rejection.

If an editor were truly interested in the piece, and their editorial advice would help shape the work to fit in the publication, I would love to be asked by the editor if I was interested in accepting advice and making revisions. For example, if an editor were to tell me that she would like to see more dialogue added, I would likely take that advice and make the additions in hopes of a publication. Not all editors want to enter into this process, so understandably this might not be practical.

Overall, I do think writers want to feel that they are worth more than the average form rejection. Editors might benefit from a bit of courting and polite comments to make their rejection letters feel a bit cozier. Writers will likely feel respected and continue to submit to such editors.

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.

Some editors’ critiques are useful while others are not. Even so, I’d always rather have the critique than a form rejection. At best, a critique can provide a writer with encouragement and direction.

Fleur Bradley is a crime fiction writer from Colorado. Check out her Web site.

I don’t like critiques on rejections. By the time I send out a story, I’m usually happy with it the way it is. Feedback is so subjective.

Now, if a story is accepted but the editor wants a few rewrites, I have no issues. But why edit to suit an editor who has already passed on your story?

Robert Bradley is writing a novel, a collection of short stories, and a play. He teaches an obscure method of mind/body awareness.

Feedback tells me who I’m talking to. I get a sense of the personality and sensibility of the reader by what and how THEY write, which informs my next submission.

I was getting some positive rejections from a new zine, but realized after three rejections that I don’t and won’t write the type of story they’re looking for.

Getting a detailed rejection from A Public Space is encouraging … feels like I’m one fluke story away.

Getting no feedback is fine and quickly forgotten.

Martin Cloutier has published stories in The Portland Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, and Bombay Gin. He holds an MFA from Brandeis University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

I always appreciate when an editor gives feedback. Especially if it’s feedback on ways to improve the story, and not just a comment on how much they liked it but unfortunately couldn’t find a place.

Editors read hundreds of stories from all levels of writers. The opinion of anyone with that kind of experience is valuable and illuminating. That doesn’t mean you have to take their advice, or that editors are always right; but it’s important to know how industry professionals interpret your work.

As a side note: I revised a story based on an editor’s comments and resubmitted that story to the same journal. The editor didn’t ask for a revision; I took it upon myself. And the journal ended up publishing the story. But whether they publish your resubmission or not, I always find an editor’s comments helpful.

Myfanwy Collins lives and writes in New England. Please visit her website.

I prefer simple rejections, though I don’t mind hearing “this came close” with a few simply stated reasons why it didn’t make the cut, but I don’t need a long explanation for why not unless the editor is requesting a rewrite.

Other than that, I try not to read too much into any one rejection—rather I look at the clump of rejections a piece receives and try to decide how to move forward.

Ultimately, rejection is opportunity.

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 sometime in 2008.

I only want critique if the story was truly very close to acceptance. Otherwise, I would prefer a straight form rejection. If my story was not even close, I feel it’s because the editors or readers just didn’t like it, period. They maybe only have gotten past the first paragraph. It seems an awful lot to ask of overworked editors to have them give specific critique on every submission, too. So, yes, critique only on the “almosts.”

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

I am ecstatic when I get a critique from an editor (or, more often, the second deputy associate junior editor’s assistant). I can’t imagine disliking feedback. I sit at my desk all day and I write these stories and sometimes have a friend read them; then I polish them up and send them off to magazines thirty, forty, a hundred, or several thousands of miles away. I’m not exactly twiddling my thumbs waiting for my SASE to come back—there are always more stories to write, an infinite number of stories—but I do have a solid database of where I’ve sent my work. I know they’re out there somewhere, but what I don’t know is whether anyone is reading them.

When I get a form response back (often a badly photocopied, badly cut out, tiny slip of paper), I still don’t know if the story has been read. It doesn’t matter what the slip of paper says; no printed form can convince me that my story was read by an editor or even an intern. They are all completely without credibility. A form rejection with minimal ink—“Thanks” scrawled at the bottom, or initials, or an actual name—is an improvement over the naked form rejection because it is solid evidence that someone other than a monkey or a robot opened the envelope containing my submission. My impression that my story might have been read, or partly read, by a human being, is strengthened. And thus I begin to feel a real connection with the world, a connection I don’t much feel when I get a plain, no-ink rejection.

Because, after all, it’s that connection that I crave. Sure, I want to write the very best stories I can, and readership is secondary (really? Yes, I think so), but absolutely, of course I do want to know that someone, anyone is reading my stuff. Call it validation if you want. Call it proof of life on other planets.

Critiques from editors do two other things for me in addition to proving that I have at least one reader. First, the critique may actually teach me something about my writing. Usually not, but sometimes. I recently had a note from an editor that complimented me on my story but pointed out one stylistic tic he’d noticed. He may have seen a hundred tics for all I know but he pointed out this one. I looked at the story I’d sent him and I saw that he was right. It wasn’t a huge problem, and other editors might overlook it, but it was noticeable and I’ve since revised that story. I try to keep that editor’s advice in mind when looking at my other work. Second, the critique may teach me something about the preferences of the magazine. I had a note from a prominent journal a couple of years ago that suggested a story of mine was too “plotty,” which I took to mean that there didn’t appear to be enough emphasis on character. This was an important discovery, I thought, and it will influence what I send that magazine in the future. I had a note from a different journal that liked a story of mine but the editor thought that the ending of the story felt like the beginning of something rather than the end. I was quite pleased with that comment because (a) that’s what I’d been aiming for, and (b) I now know that this editor prefers more resolved story endings rather than endings that open the story to new possibilities. I think about that when I send new work to that journal now.

The final reason why I am happy to have a critique from an editor is that it is the beginning of a relationship (which is one reason why I suspect editors rarely offer critiques—relationships with writers are probably more trouble than they’re worth). If I get a comment or a critique from an editor, at least one that offers something positive about the work, I view that as an invitation to try again. And if there then is a dialogue with that editor, that’s all the proof I need that I’m not in this world all by myself.

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

Oh how I would LOVE a non-form reject!!!

I know I “can write” to a good standard. And yet I receive multiple form rejects from the Zoetrope “most popular” zines and magazines. Apart from one (Night Train) I have not had a single comment on my submissions rejects for three years. I submit regularly to all the usual suspects, picking pieces I know are strong, that I know have strong voices, themes, originality, and so on. I read the zines and wonder why in all those submissions (250 plus) I have not had ONE hit.

Now, I know they are inundated with submissions, because it is trumpeted, and not just by the zines themselves. Duotrope gives the statistics. And this serves to up the cult status of the zines. They become a “get in here and you must be good” challenge.

BUT. The same contributors names crop up again and again. And my suspicion has to be that these are solicited, and the majority of the thousands of other unsolicited subs are glanced at, if that …

Without any feedback at all, not even once in all that time, I am in the air, as are all the other writers who submit. We have no idea at all what is wrong, as it could be one of many, many things.

The piece might have been OK, but not right for this issue. It might have been great, but there was already another piece accepted which dealt with a similar subject, or which had a similar voice. It might have been absolutely dreadful, and considered rubbish by the editor who de-selected it.

Or, it was not read in the first place.

Without any feedback at all, over the timescales referred to above, I assume the worst.

So please, eds, if you are reading this … just a one-liner reject now and again to writers who support you, read you, enjoy you, and encourage others to send you work. It would tell this writer an awful lot!

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.

I don’t submit a lot anymore, concentrating my spare time and energy on my editor’s hat these day, but when I did submit I was thrilled to get a scrawled word or two on a rejection form from one of the publication’s editors encouraging me to keep submitting. I never ever received a real critique or anything. So I guess I am saying a terse rejection form is just fine by me, with the caveat that a simple handwritten word of encouragement could really lessen the sting of the rejection. Which leads to another interesting fact, which is that over time that “sting of rejection” almost completely went away. I don’t know if this was because I had super thick skin by that time or if I just didn’t care anymore.

Tania Hershman’s short stories have been published in various publications including Cafe Irreal, Front&Centre, Transmission, Riptide, and Brand magazines, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, will be published by Salt Publishing in June 2008. Visit her Web site.

I appreciate personal rejections but have never actually received any with any proper critique. I would welcome some; I would welcome knowing why it wasn’t deemed a proper fit for the magazine at that point, or if the editor thought it had serious flaws. I can, as with all critique, take it or leave it, but it does show that someone has engaged with my story.

Debbie Ice lives in Connecticut with her husband, two boys, and English bulldog.

If the editor sees potential in the writer and wants to see more work, then a longer rejection would be nice. It can be a quick summary of why the story didn’t work—“Ending fell flat.” “I didn’t relate to this character…blah blah.” or “It just wasn’t the kind of story that appealed to me.”

Time is limited and I think all writers understand the editors do the best they can. But comments, any, are very helpful.

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

I really like getting a note from a reader or editor IF it’s genuine. If they have nothing constructive or truthful to say, then a form letter would be preferable. I really don’t like seeing all the negative (but unconstructive) remarks made by editors (as one e-zine provides). I find that crass and hurtful. Writers need encouragement whenever possible.

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.

I’m always interested to see feedback on a rejection. For one thing form rejections are the norm, so it’s nice to know someone actually read the story closely enough to be able to make a comment. Whether I pay much attention to whatever comments I receive depends a lot on who it’s coming from. If the comment comes from an editor whose taste and opinion I respect, then I’ll pay close attention. If it’s coming from an unknown “reader” then I’ll consider the comments only if they resonate. Taste is always a factor and comments on a rejection are only one opinion and thus subject to the two cents worth rule of criticism. I’d still rather get them than a form letter, though.

Mitzi McMahon lives in Wisconsin, near Lake Michigan. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rockford Review, Right Hand Pointing, Temenos, and elsewhere.

As a writer, I love to get feedback on why my story was rejected. Form rejections feel cold and impersonal. Plus they always make me wonder if my story was even read. I know editors are very busy, but even a first impression jotted down while reading the story and then communicated to me via the rejection would be helpful.

Stefani Nellen is a writer of literary fiction and science fiction. She co-edits the Steel City Review, an online quarterly that also publishes as annual print edition.

I don’t like critiques, especially of they’re definitely not going to take the story anyway. I think it would freak me out to receive a longwinded rambling rejection. The editors should spend that time on work they publish. A personal comment à la, “I liked A, but ‘I’m passing on the story because of B” is welcome. I got some good suggestions that way that helped me improve my stories.

Overall, I value a timely response before all else. Hit me with a form reject, as long as you stay within a three-month feedback window. If I go on Duotrope and see “181 day form rejection from Lazy-Ass Review” I roll my eyes.

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.

As a writer, I certainly don’t want to hear critiques when I haven’t asked for them, for I’ve honed the pieces before submitting. If the submission isn’t grabbing one particular publisher/editor, it will ultimately grab another; if it isn’t sufficiently attractive to one particular journal, it will be so to another. As a writer, I have colleagues I respect, with aesthetic sensibilities attuned to mine, colleagues who respect and understand what I’m doing, and I rely on them for vigorous and constructive critiques.

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

I do not like to receive any comments on a story that I have submitted to a magazine. If the editor does not want the story, I would like a form rejection letter. If the editor liked the story but not enough, it would be OK to have an editor tell me, simply, that the story was close and to submit again. However, I want an editor to tell me to submit again ONLY if the editor means it. I don’t want an editor telling me to submit again just to be “nice.”

I also do not want any comments on a story the editor is rejecting out of hand, a story that isn’t even close, a story that the editor perhaps despised. I have gotten hostile comments from editors. Once an editor at a well-known online magazine told me that a story I submitted was disgusting to her; she called it “fence porn.” Comments like these are unmerited, and unhelpful. Perhaps they make the editor feel cleverer, but they do not help the writer at all. In fact, that blade the writer is holding over her wrist? It gets lowered a little nearer to the vein.

Even if editors give comments they imagine are being helpful, well, I’m like, Save it. Years ago, the lead editor at the Missouri Review told me he liked my story (yeah, whatever) but he thought it sounded “like a case study.” What the fuck? Years later, I still do not know what he meant. I look at well-known short stories and I ask myself, Is this “like a case study”? Why, yes, it is! I could make a case for this story being “like a case study”! The question is: How have I learned anything from this comment? How has my fiction improved?

But at least I got a comment from the lead editor. Writers tell me they get comments from some editor at some prestigious little pissant print magazine put out by some little nowheresville college and I’m like, Ooo, celebrate! Some little nineteen-year-old creative writing student (that’s who reads the slush for these little university print mags, don’tcha know) deigned to scrawl you a comment about your pathetic story on some little slip of torn-up paper! Woohoo. Come on. Are we not past getting our panties all wet because some little nineteen-year-old writing student throws us a fucking bone?

In the four years she has been writing, Kay Sexton’s fiction has been chosen for over twenty anthologies ranging from Mexico, a Love Story to Tales of the Decongested and recent magazine publications include Ambit, Frogmore Papers, Lichen (Canada), and Mindprints (USA).

At this point in my career I don’t much care one way or the other. Not because I don’t want feedback, but because I’ve already had it, by workshopping my stories with a couple of writers whom I admire and trust and who are brutally honest with me; by putting stories on Zoetrope to get a “general audience” reaction; and/or by a process of constant revision of work which can mean a story might be a year old before I start sending it out to editors. When I started writing, things were different. Even the vaguest hint of something that was wrong or right about my work would have me scrambling to change that piece, and every other piece, to fall in line.

These days I’m more relaxed. I recently sent something to a genre magazine and got comments back in pencil from a very young person who didn’t recognise that the phrase “British spelling” in my cover letter meant my story wasn’t “riddled with amazing spelling mistakes.” At that point a writer has to shrug, smile, and move on. Sometimes you know more than the editor, but so what? They hold the power and you can only hold the grudge, which will make you old before your time. There are editors I listen to, of course: Sven Birkerts’ ink is like heart’s blood to me and getting a personal note from Granta’s editor a couple of months ago made me almost as pleased as if he’d said, Yes! But most of the time I can live with laconic rejections, and anyway, the longer you spend writing, the more you get rejected by people who know you, so you learn to cope with personal rejection, which is another story and a very different psychological process.

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 don’t really care one way or another. Editors are busy folks and should not be expected to critique or comment. But, an editor’s critique of a rejected story is, IMO, a compliment to the writer. It says the story/poem/novel, or whatever, is worthy of comment. So, if an editor makes the effort it should please the writer.

I’m going to include agents because they accept/reject and thusly act as initial editors. A polite “no, thank you” is enough for me, though I have had agents who wrote saying they liked my novels but couldn’t take them on for one or another reason. The agent’s comments were good to receive in that they held out hope that the books might be taken on by someone else, which to date has not happened.

In sum there is good to editors’ critiques but they are not something that a writer should expect.

Kelly Spitzer is a writer and an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

Unless they are generic (“Didn’t work for me” or “Almost but not quite,” etc.) I don’t want comments on rejections. I don’t want comments on acceptances, either. Here are a few reasons why:

1. I submit a story to a well-respected international publication. It’s rejected with a note citing specific reasons why. The reasons have to do with two or three sentences that the editor found gravely erroneous. She puts said sentences in quotes. I read them and freak out. I wrote those! Holy crap! I suck ass! I go back to the story and read it. I find the sentences. They are NOT written the way the editor quoted them. Not even very close, really. But she’s the editor of a well-respected international literary publication. She must be right. So I read the story again, stopping at the sentences she pointed out. Still, they are not written the way she says they were. I run a search for specific words within those sentences. I still don’t find what she pointed out. I look at previous drafts. Nothing. Months go by. I worry about this story and wonder if I should withdraw it from other publications until I can figure out what went so terribly wrong. I wonder if the sentences she quoted are not the way I wrote them, but the way they should be written. But no. That can’t be it. The sentences she wrote are gravely erroneous. Aren’t they?? And then something strange happens. The story gets accepted by another print mag, and they have no issue with it. Lesson? I don’t need that kind of stress.

2. I receive an acceptance. It’s accompanied by the editors’ comments. Some of the comments are less than kind. They make me feel like shit, actually. Why did you take this piece? I want to ask. Are you sure you want it? But an acceptance is an acceptance, right? I used to think so. Now I’m not convinced.

3. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone’s opinion is different. Say I submit a story to three journals and all three come back with rejections. The first one comes back three weeks before the second. It says the ending is off and makes a suggestion. So I change the ending and send the revised version out to a few more places. The second rejection comes back and says the characters aren’t believable for reasons X and Y. So I go about changing X and Y to make the characters believable. I then send this version out to a few more places. Rejection three comes in. The editor says the ending is great, but the opening was too slow. Maybe the story should start with paragraph four instead? I think this editor is right, actually, but now what? I’ve already changed the damn ending and mucked up the damn characters and the story looks nothing like it did originally and I’ve got five submissions out of this fucked up story that I no longer like. Now I can only hope that 1. I saved the original version. 2. The mucked up story doesn’t get accepted. 3. I’ve learned my lesson, which is: Don’t make every change suggested to you unless it truly makes sense, and don’t be so damn hasty with submissions.

Want to know something else? There are exceptions to this rule. Comments on rejections from Mike Young, the editor of NOÖ Journal, for example, are always welcome.

Lesley C. Weston lives and writes in New York City. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Ars Medica, Per Contra, Gud Magazine, The Duck & Herring Field Guide, Night Train, and The Pisgah Review.

I don’t really want a response or critique for a submission that held no interest at all for an editor. In fairness, a personal response in that case is a misuse of an editor’s time. In that situation, I think the form response tells it all. Not our kind of stuff, just didn’t grab us at all, is what I always imagine when reading a form response.

However, if my submission got a second or third glance, then didn’t make the cut, I’d be interested in knowing it was close, and if the editor could put a finger on the reason, the where or how the story let them down. I’d be grateful for the input.

Marilynn Wilkins hails from San Antonio, Texas. Her most notable recent accomplishment was being named to Laura Hird’s Best of 2006.

In regard to feedback, I seldom have had any editor be too specific about the problems with my piece when rejecting it. The most typical is: “It didn’t come together for me” or “The ending was not satisfying.” I am open to more lengthy comments but I feel editors don’t have the time. Keep in mind that I am primarily published online in non-paying markets. A real plus would be some specific comments by the editor with an invitation to resubmit at a later time.

Bonnie ZoBell has received an NEA and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such print magazines as American Fiction, The Bellingham Review, and The Greensboro Review, and online at FRiGG, juked, and Word Riot. She received an MFA from Columbia and teaches at San Diego Mesa College.

I would prefer to get the critique and know why the story wasn’t taken. But “critique” isn’t quite the right word in my mind because what editor has time for that? Just knowing the “reason” the editor doesn’t take a story can be tremendously helpful. Even a sentence is good. This isn’t just to assuage my ego that the editor is all wrong and doesn’t understand me or my work (though there’s that, too!), but it helps me continue to think about the story. Especially if the reason given confirms something I was already worried about or if I’ve gotten several similar reactions from other editors or readers, I know this is probably something I’m going to need to work out in the story.

From a writer’s viewpoint, I can guess at the reasons more editors don’t do this. It takes time. It might encourage some writers to try to argue with the editor. Some writers might feel like this is an opening for some long conversation. I’m aware of the fact that many of the editors at the magazines I most admire aren’t even paid. And some editors might point out that their reason for not taking the story is only one reaction and someone else might feel differently. Still, even if I don’t agree with the editor, I find it helpful to know the reason, and appreciate it.

There have been very rare occasions during my twenty or so years of writing and submitting that I have been offended by critical comments from an editor. But really, it’s never been about the comments themselves, but about the disrespectful tone of the editor. The kind of did-you-learn-to-write-from-some-damn-manual-found-in–a-Cracker-Jacks-box? tone one editor of a contest took in her notes to me made me feel like crawling into a hole and taking up accounting instead. Especially if you’re feeling somewhat fragile about your writing at the time, this can actually be damaging. Fortunately, in my case I talked to other writers who’d received this same type of tone in the responses they got. People can’t “hear” criticism given in that tone anyway, so the editor who does this isn’t trying to help but has some other kind of power trip going on.

But that’s the very rare exception. Mostly I’m always grateful for any kind of feedback an editor wants to give.