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Here are more we missed

Posted By Christopher Guerin On In books & writing | 6 Comments

Michael Antman’s excellent piece earlier this week, Poetry, Patience, and Rage [1], hit very close to home. Some of his experiences were mine; in fact, some were shared experiences between us. Michael refers to haiku he published in the late 70’s. They were part of a collaboration between us when he was working at the Chicago Board of Trade and I was working as a PR assistant for a machine tool company. Together we wrote more than 100 haiku and, ultimately, compiled 50 each, along with an introduction, under the title Here Are More We Missed. [2]

The theme of Michael’s piece is, in part, the frustrations a young writer experiences trying to get published. Mine were equally disappointing. He published 20 poems out of a 100 submissions, an awesome ratio. Mine is more like 2%.

You do this long enough and the little rationalizations one makes — such as feeling great because the editor wrote a few lukewarm words at the bottom of the standard rejection slip — can become quite pathetic. But, it’s not a game for the thin-skinned. A college professor of mine used to go on a bender every time he received a rejection, which, since he was prolific as a writer, made for a lot of hangovers.

The only rejection I ever got angry about was the editor who put you through three revisions and still rejected the poem or story, or, even worse, the editor who took it upon himself to pen-edit the poem or story and sent it back without even a rejection note. Rude and arrogant.

Admittedly, even the smallest literary magazine can receive thousands of submissions annually, and they have to have some kind of streamlined process for dealing with such volume, but a delay of 6 to 9 months (which is standard), resulting in a photocopied rejection slip, is simply barbarous. Compound that with the fact that it’s an enormous no-no to submit the same piece to more than one magazine at a time, even with Michael’s success ratio of 20%, it can take a single poem three to four and a half years to get published.

The only bright note in all of this is the growing popularity of online submission. Magazines like Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, even the New Yorker, have all embraced email submission, bless ’em, so at least I don’t have to pay for postage (both there and back, of course). Now, if only they could TNT me in 30 days.

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Christopher Guerin [6]

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.
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