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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.
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