CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

A Chronicle of Slush
By Thomas Washington

A friend has been firing anxious emails to me since mid-December. She’s looking for advice and a sympathetic ear on the plight of her manuscript. She says her fiction submission has been stuck in the slush pile queue for nearly six months. “What should I do? Do I write to the editor and inquire about its status?” She is plagued by the image of her SASE (literally) fallen through the cracks behind a clanking steam radiator with the stamp curling off the envelope like a dried autumn leaf.

She’s too obsessed to consider that her submission—unleashed from its cancerous adenoid SASE—might be making its way up the editorial ladder. If not, though, I try to reassure my friend that her SASE will make its flight back soon enough. And when she opens it, she will find a hastily scribbled note praising her (neglected) submission while apologizing for the delay. As for bothering the editor, I advise against it. This move, I tell her, comes off as something worse than the spurned one begging her lover to take her back. “Writers suffer enough indignities,” I say. “You don’t want to go fishing in that murky pond.”

My friend’s fixation might be odd, but the six-month lag time is not. What used to be a ninety-day turnaround time for a literary quarterly has now doubled, more or less. It is also common nowadays for an SASE never to make its way back to the writer’s mailbox. For anyone familiar with half-of-one-percent acceptance rates and the simultaneous rise of MFA programs, the reasons for these Bermuda Triangle hold-ups are simple enough: More writers are producing superior essays, fiction, and poetry than ever before, and despite the increase in quarterly periodicals, space is still precious.

The escape hatch from this dilemma is an online submission fee. Clearly, this manuscript-overload state is having numerous repercussions for writers and editors alike. But like the animal slaughterhouse of public sewer logistics, what goes on behind editorial headquarter’s doors (i.e., slush pile horror stories), is one of those unpleasant realities that neither side is facing head on. Granted, editors are awash in a sea of submissions month to month, but the only distress signals that writers know of are such editorial niceties (with perturbed undertones) as:

“The editors at _____________ have decided to close our reading period early. Already we are slotting submissions for the Summer 2009 issue. Though we are ecstatic to have an abundance of excellent writing, we fear we do our authors an unfortunate disservice by holding their accepted work for such a long period of time. Please understand the decision to close the reading period early as a testament to the quality of recent submissions. I speak for all of our readers when I thank you for considering such consistently strong work.”

Or this: “As of January 31, 2007, _______________ will no longer be accepting submissions via e-mail. Our goal in opening the magazine up to electronic submissions was to create greater ease-of-use for people interested in sending us work, but unfortunately, over the course of this experiment, we received an overwhelming number of submissions in this format, and we found there were just too many for us to handle expediently. So we regret to announce that we are now returning to a mail-only submissions policy.”

The logic in this second editor’s note assumes that the laborious snail mailing process will somehow deter writers from submitting work, or at least make us think twice before launching our carpet bombing campaign—launching simultaneous submissions to publications that the writer has probably never read. This assumption is probably wrong. Writers are notoriously starved for their work to see the light of day in a publication; most of us go to great lengths to find a way into print.

Of course, submission fees—three dollars a pop is the going rate for two quarterly publications that I know of—sounds Reaganesque in its callousness. After all, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) states that “in the independent publishing world, the goal is really to find emerging writers and literature that otherwise may not be published, and submission fees sort of go against the grain here.”

Consider, though, the advantages on both ends of the submission process. This past week, for example, I mailed seven manuscripts from Washington DC. They averaged sixteen pages each, or $1.31 for first class postage. Figuring in the cost of the SASE stamp, this amount increases to $1.72. Add to this the cost of printer paper, cartridge toner, envelopes, mailing labels, the logistical “costs” of addressing each envelope, making one’s way to the post office to stand in line, and the online submission fee looks like a decent trade-off for the headaches.

Put another way, why should writers allocate the brunt of their submission costs to the United States Postal Service when the publication itself (the very same, of course, that the eager writer solicits as an apparent devotee of the independent press community) would be far better served if the writer transferred these costs directly into the publication’s coffer?

In fact, a $3 fee favors the writer more than it does the publication itself. The Massachusetts Review, one of two quarterlies that charge a submission fee, states, “When we first considered going to an online submission process, our intention was to eliminate all paper and postage responsibilities for the writers. Our goal, when determining a fee amount, was to charge a cost equivalent to what the writer pays for in postage, return postage, paper, printer ribbon, etc, and, in addition, the costs of printing submissions out at our offices.” (Keep in mind, TMR still allows writers the option of submitting a hard copy.)

How many writers consider the logistical nightmare of the slush pile beyond their missing in action SASE? Imagine, for a moment, all that transporting of loaded bins to editorial headquarters—the monotonous physical labor of unpacking, sorting, inventorying, clipping and unclipping—until ninety-seven percent of what comes in goes right back out again. If a piece is eventually accepted for publication, the writer ends up submitting an electronic copy anyway. The system is archaic at best—absurd most likely.

Most important, submission fees would cut down the inventory surplus by forcing better work from writers. We are less inclined to charge our Visa account for a submission that we suspect isn’t quite ready for prime time publication. These carpet bombing campaigns would cease.

I like to think that after seven years of sending out manuscripts I’ve learned to exercise sound judgment regarding the quality of the work and its potential fit for a publication’s editorial mission. This is not always the case, though. I still send work out that is sure to find its way back to my mailbox with the dead certainty of a homing pigeon. Hope is the writer’s greatest contrivance.

Burgeoning slush piles are a metaphor for the age of bottlenecked hope, a clamoring for the top at any cost. I sympathized with my friend. At the time she seemed more concerned about the SASE’s return than she did the submission itself. And I understood why. The returned SASE spells closure. It symbolizes a pact between writer and editor, a trust that the reader on the other end will give the writer a fair shake by assigning the submission to the reject pile (and notifying the writer as such) or passing it up the ladder for another reading.

The fact is the SASE no longer provides adequate means to handle the thousands of submissions that pore over the editorial transom each month. Beyond the standard rule of knowing what kind of work a particular quarterly publishes (which is to read and subscribe to as many quarterlies as possible), writers and editors need to work under an additional honor code that recognizes the new topography behind the submission process.

Thomas Washington's essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, and the New England Review, among others. He is a 2008 Yaddo fellow.