15Dec

Crossing the Rubicon: Replying to a Rejection from a Literary Journal

• Saved in: Editors, Fiction Writing, Literary Journals, Personal Essay, Publishing & the Marketplace, Rejections, Short Stories, Submissions, THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND, Writing Experiences
• by Chris Orcutt
• with 19 Comments

Today I did the unthink­able.

In the lit­er­ary world, what I did is tan­ta­mount to cross­ing the Rubi­con. It’s some­thing that, in 20 years of sub­mit­ting my work to lit­er­ary jour­nals, I have nev­er done before:

I replied to a rejec­tion let­ter.

Actu­al­ly, I replied to a rejec­tion email (times have changed), but the sub­stance of the trans­ac­tion was the same: instead of shrug­ging off the rejec­tion as I’ve done hun­dreds and hun­dreds of times before, this time I decid­ed, “Hell, they’re reject­ing my work any­way, so I might as well point out their dis­re­spect­ful behav­ior.”

How is this cross­ing the Rubi­con, you ask? Well, every­thing I’ve read about the writer–publication rela­tion­ship has been explic­it: Nev­er send an angry or con­tentious reply to edi­tors, because it only makes you, the writer, look bad. The oth­er prob­lem is, I don’t know if the edi­tors of these lit­er­ary jour­nals talk with each oth­er, and whether I might be black­list­ed because of my action:

“Oh, here’s a sub­mis­sion from that Chris Orcutt. I’ve heard about him—he’s that trou­ble­mak­er, that writer who sends nasty replies to rejec­tions. We don’t need to read this. Send him a form slip.”

Let me give you some back­sto­ry here. The rejec­tion email went to an account that I set up sole­ly for sto­ry sub­mis­sions, and I had­n’t checked the account in a while. And the rea­son I had­n’t checked it is this: I had stopped sub­mit­ting stories—probably a year ago—because (I’ll admit it, I’m human) I got tired of being reject­ed.

Over the past three years, I wrote 39 sto­ries and made over 250 sub­mis­sions, all with­out a sin­gle accep­tance. Any­where.

Inter­est­ing­ly, these are some of the same sto­ries that read­ers of The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end are now call­ing “bril­liant,” “deli­cious­ly cheeky and iron­ic,” and “beau­ti­ful use of our lan­guage.”

But back to my sub­mis­sions over the past three years.

Dur­ing that time, because of the qual­i­ty of the sto­ries I was sub­mit­ting, I did man­age to estab­lish a cor­re­spon­dence with major mag­a­zine editors—including the accom­plished, ven­er­a­ble and gra­cious C. Michael Cur­tis at The Atlantic—and all of them, even though they were reject­ing my work, always treat­ed me with respect.

The Atlantic, The New York­er, Harper’s, The Mis­souri Review, Mid-Amer­i­can Review—they’re class acts, every one of them.

I can’t say the same of the lit­er­ary jour­nal I replied to this morn­ing. I won’t men­tion it by name, but I will say that it used to be con­sid­ered a pres­ti­gious fic­tion jour­nal, and it still pub­lish­es quite a few name authors.

So why did I reply to this par­tic­u­lar rejec­tion, when I’ve nev­er done it before? Read it for your­self, and I think my rea­sons will be obvi­ous:

 

 

Dear Con­trib­u­tor:

Thank you very much for sub­mit­ting your work. After care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, the edi­tors were not able to accept it for pub­li­ca­tion.

We would like to offer per­son­al­ized let­ters or feed­back but lim­i­ta­tions of time and staff have made that impos­si­ble at the present. We wish you the best of luck in find­ing a jour­nal to pub­lish your writ­ing. The edi­to­r­i­al staff, includ­ing the edi­tor-in-chief, ******* *******, wel­comes crit­i­cal response to past issues of the mag­a­zine if you wish to include any in future sub­mis­sions or let­ters. If you iden­ti­fy your­self as a writer who sub­mit­ted to ********, you may order back issues at a fifty per­cent dis­count.

With best regards,

The Edi­tors

 

I’ll admit that their insult­ing­ly gener­ic salu­ta­tion of “Dear Con­trib­u­tor” irked me. Not to men­tion their dubi­ous “care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion” of my work. They gave me no indi­ca­tion that my sto­ry had been read at all. In fact, every indi­ca­tion is that mine was one of dozens or hun­dreds of oth­ers sum­mar­i­ly reject­ed because the Edi­tors were buried in man­u­scripts.

And then they had the temer­i­ty to inti­mate that I might actu­al­ly want to buy some­thing from them? Please.

But what real­ly both­ered me—the thing that made me have to reply to them—was the ridicu­lous length of time that had passed between my send­ing them the sto­ry in ques­tion and their reject­ing it. (NOTE: In the lit­er­ary world, a few months is con­sid­ered an accept­able length of time to wait for a reply.)

 

Dear “The Edi­tors”:

Accord­ing to my records, the last sto­ry I sub­mit­ted to you was “The Last Great White Hunter,” and that was on Octo­ber 1 of last year. Four­teen months ago.

After a YEAR and two months before you could respond to my sub­mis­sion, not only did I com­plete­ly for­get that I sub­mit­ted any­thing to you, but I stopped car­ing. I won’t be sub­mit­ting any­thing to you again.

Anoth­er point: In the future, if a writer takes the time to send you a well-writ­ten sto­ry, if that writer shows respect for you and your time by not send­ing you some­thing that is clear­ly ama­teur (e.g., mis­takes in gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion), if that writer is clear­ly a pro­fes­sion­al, then that writer at least deserves a per­son­al response. This is some­thing that the major mag­a­zines includ­ing The New York­er, The Atlantic, and Harper’s have done for me and oth­er good writ­ers, so why can’t you? Reserve your “Dear Con­trib­u­tor” salu­ta­tion for the so-called writ­ers who treat this endeav­or as anoth­er lot­tery.

Please do not both­er to reply to this email. I would­n’t want to wait anoth­er YEAR and two months before some­one respond­ed.

On a per­son­al note, I do wish the Edi­tors and all of the staff at ******** a hap­py hol­i­day sea­son and a New Year of health and pros­per­i­ty.

Thank you for your time.

Sin­cere­ly,

Chris Orcutt

 

Once I had writ­ten my reply, I sat in my chair with my fin­ger poised over the mouse, and the cur­sor over the Send but­ton. What I felt was a faint taste of what Cae­sar prob­a­bly felt when he stood on the bank of the Rubi­con, debat­ing whether to defy the Roman Sen­ate by cross­ing that insignif­i­cant lit­tle stream.

Cae­sar’s cross­ing com­mit­ted him to a future course of action, and my press­ing the Send but­ton would not only elim­i­nate this par­tic­u­lar lit­er­ary jour­nal as an option for future pub­li­ca­tion, but pos­si­bly many oth­ers. Over 20 years of sub­mis­sions, I had estab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion (albeit mod­est) as a writer of pro­fes­sion­al-qual­i­ty work, a writer who had tak­en rejec­tion in stride, and here I was, about to poten­tial­ly undo all of that with a sin­gle email.

I thought about this for sev­er­al min­utes, and then I grad­u­al­ly real­ized some­thing: I don’t need them any­more. They aren’t the only game in town now. Although pub­li­ca­tion in them would be nice, I don’t need them to reach read­ers the way I used to. If  lit­er­ary jour­nals won’t pub­lish my sto­ries in the future, it does­n’t mat­ter; I can pub­lish them myself in ebook for­mat, reach more read­ers, and make more mon­ey on them than I ever could by being pub­lished in an obscure, inces­tu­al† lit­er­ary jour­nal that the gen­er­al read­ing pub­lic does­n’t read any­way.

†See my com­ment below regard­ing my use of the non-word “inces­tu­al.”

 

 

Cae­sar is said to have quot­ed a line from a play as he crossed the Rubi­con, say­ing, “Alea iac­ta est! Let the die be cast!” Just before I hit the Send but­ton on my email, I said aloud one of my own favorite lines about commitment—spoken by King Claudius in my favorite Shake­speare play, Ham­let:

“Do it, Eng­land.”

And with a click and an audi­ble whoosh, my mes­sage went out.

Do I regret doing it? No. The lit­er­ary jour­nal in ques­tion is only one of many that engage in this kind of dis­re­spect­ful behav­ior towards good writ­ers. They for­get that they are utter­ly depen­dent on writ­ers for their con­tent.

No con­tent, no jour­nal. Peri­od.

I plan to con­tin­ue to send sto­ries to the above-men­tioned bet­ter mag­a­zines, and, pub­li­ca­tion or no, I’m hop­ing they’ll con­tin­ue to read and be respect­ful of my work.

And speak­ing of work, it’s time for me to get back to it.

 

Post­script: A few days after I made this post, my short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end was vot­ed one of the Best Indie Books of 2013. What makes this par­tic­u­lar­ly grat­i­fy­ing is that 9 of the 10 sto­ries in the col­lec­tion were among the 39 that lit­er­ary jour­nals had reject­ed over the past three years.

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