Every Literary Warrior Must Handle Rejection
No whining or pouting allowed
As the poet Tom Wayman has said and written, All you can do is submit.
That’s how it works for freelance writers. We pitch story ideas if we’re non-fiction writers to the shrinking number of paying newspapers and magazines left in this world, including the ever-expanding digital operations. If we write fiction and poetry, we send, or submit via Submittable, our best and most polished pieces to those magazines, big, medium and tiny, many of which are inundated with hundreds of short stories and poems every month.
This Waka poem celebrates the beauty of a clear summer morning at Lennard Island Lightstation near Tofino, B.C. Poem by Caroline Woodward. Photo by Jeff George.
It occurs to me that we writers should emulate lighthouses and shine our lights without prejudice or favour, just keep putting our beams out there. If it guides some away from the treacherous shoals of life, all the better. If it helps other readers keep their own boats on course, comforted to know another kindred spirit is out there, has been through these same storms and survived, that’s all good too.
Most of us start with little magazines. Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood all published their poems first, these fine minds working with words, fledging their wings. It helps to have our work reach hundreds, thousands or even more readers if we make the Grande Dame of literary magazines, The New Yorker. This will help our chances of actually having a book published as well, when the poems or stories have passed muster with editors at six or more different magazines already.
But the chances of an unknown writer being published in a venerable magazine like TNY or Harper’s or the Atlantic Monthly or in Canada, The Walrus, are slim to none. Agents lobby those editors with their A and B+ stable of writers’ latest efforts in advance of a new book. Agents already have their influence-making feet in the publisher’s door, a known quantity, a no-nonsense curator of Good Writing. The busy work of screening hundreds of hopeless submissions can be circumvented by just dealing with agents, which is the case with the Big Five publishers already and is in play at some of the major magazines as well.
Why else have we read lame little poems at some of these magazines from the same few writers? Or wondered at the personal and professional conduits some writers of unremarkable fiction must have to some editors. But it does the likes of me no good to wonder. It is what it is and if one dares to point out these jejeune stories and limp strands of verse by a coterie of recurring individuals, one will certainly never have any work published there in future. As Wayman says, and his are wise words which take the long view, all we can do is submit.
At one university literary magazine where I was a volunteer student editor, the head editor, also a professor, contacted friends and semi-famous scribblers in the small world of writing at that time. I don’t remember any discussion about this. Suddenly the magazine had room for about two submissions over the transom, that quaint publishing phrase. The senior class of writers were all desperate to be published as well so those two spots were much sought-after in-house. I waited until after I’d graduated to submit anything because I, then as now, have an ethical aversion to leaning on friendships or trading favours in order to advance. I know, it happens all over, all the time, but who needs to live with that self-knowledge of sleezing possibly sub-standard work through some gilded back door, nudging and winking all the while? Not I. The writing should succeed on its own merits.
Enter the slush pile editor in charge of the transom. When I was a newly-minted slush pile editor, I was advised by the wise publisher to use a pseudonym in order to respond politely to writers with rejection letters for fear of being drawn and quartered by vengeful -and some seriously delusional - writers thereafter, as in the rest of my natural life. But I also enthusiastically hand-delivered promising and downright brilliant writing proposals right to the desks of the head editors. I’d been promoted from manuscript reader to slush pile editor after all and then as now, I had strong opinions about what was an authentic voice, with content I found deeply moving and always, always, beautifully written and thought-provoking. These were my subjective opinions and editors at all levels have to make them, informed by lots and lots and lots of reading.
Submitting any work (which is not already solicited by the head editor) means it may meet with the scrutiny of a group of unpaid editorial interns with their newly-minted M.A.s in Literature of Some Sort. Having been a literary magazine editorial volunteer myself (not yet a warrior, but observant and already designing my own lance and shield), I could tell when my story had not been read, or at least not beyond the first page. I’d sent it and a covering letter to Harper’s Magazine last year, along with my Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope complete with American stamps. Harper’s is old school and will have none of that emailing tomfoolery of fiction or poetry, thank you very much.
Now, I don’t mind paying for a few stamps as I’d bought a swack of them when I was last south of the border BTSD (Before Trump’s Second Derangement). I was initially heartened because it took ten days from my initial mailing of the story to the magazine headquarters in New York for my S.A.S.E. to return to my little village postbox in New Denver, British Columbia, Canada. Dare I hope? No, you’ll be unsurprised to know, I should never dare do that.
I’d asked for page 8 to be enclosed with their response in the event of a rejection. It’s a basic bit of intellectual copyright protection for the author to prevent a complete story being purloined by someone loitering nearby. As if nobody’s ever heard of a photocopier. Anyway, the messy state of the closed envelope revealed a frantic effort to unstick the seal as perhaps someone finally read my line about page 8 but alas, it was impossible to re-open and they were hooped, the messy crumpled evidence plain to see. The story must have sat on a Harper’s desk, after passing through the infamous transom, possibly for half a day. If it was read at all, much less closely, I’ll never know. I won’t be wasting precious stamps there again. Unless of course someone at Harper’s magazine asks me for “any new work” along with blandishments of all sorts. Then, why yes! They pay well and in American dollars. I am a pragmatic fiction writer after all.
For the Hallowe’en party during my first year, and only year at the fabulous David Thompson University School of Writing, I wore a witch costume. I always wear my basic black witch dress and black shawl and black lipstick and my feather ‘spectacles’. For that year, I decorated my dress with rejection letters safety-pinned onto the dress, at least eight of them. I saved the most snooty one to cover my ass of course, one which told me my story “didn’t read like fiction”. Well, it’s because it was a prose-poem, duh! It became the lead work in my first collection of short fiction seven years later, with two prose-poems bookending them because my savvy publisher was well-read and knew what a prose-poem form was when he saw it.
How I wish I had a photograph of that costume. It was “well-read” by commiserating, snickering writer friends that evening.
So don’t take rejection to heart. Clark Blaise, whom we were fortunate to have as the writer-in-residence that term at DTUC, said that he gave himself five years to get work published. If it had taken longer he might have become a bus driver. Or a house painter, who knows? Happily for readers, he published a brilliant short story or two before his self-imposed deadline.
Moving on from literary magazines, publishers have to decide if they can wisely invest thousands of their dollars into your book. They may have two dozen great manuscripts to choose one or two to publish. They have to be prescient about what else might be flooding the market in two or three years’ time which is how long the editorial and design and production process of a book usually takes. They take a hard look at previous sales by some of the more-established authors as well. Literary magazine publishers need to decide whether to go fully digital or aim to publish four, rarely more, beautifully designed and illustrated journals annually. If they are lucky, a university is proud of them and continues to fund them, along with some tiny provincial arts council grant. Otherwise they run endless contests or which they ask hopeful writers to enter, for a substantial fee. This nets them a year-long subscription and beefs up the magazine’s subscription numbers just enough to qualify for modest, and I mean seriously underwhelming, grants from provincial and federal funding agencies. But there are conditions attached to public money, as there always should be, and first and foremost is that the writers, those people whose talent makes it all possible, must be paid. It might not be a lot but it’s an honorarium, a professional gesture of thanks.
Literary magazines nurture new writers (and some of us older ones too, for ballast and wisdom, I’d like to think) and editors of all kinds, like slush pile editors, read them and recognize talent when they read it. Small publishers nurture and grow the careers of writers who sometimes get poached by the big publishers and so it goes. It’s a literary ecosytem and we all toil away in it. Just keep writing and drawing and thinking and contributing because it makes you feel whole, like someone with a soul. Rejection will eventually be replaced with formal acceptance and onward we will go. Meanwhile, Substack offers a place to experiment, to share, to keep on creating. Thank you all for reading!
Paid subscribers, bless all your fair heads, will get Chapter Two of Tsunami Warning on Sunday. Here’s the first couple of pages of Chapter One to entice some of you to sign up! And furthermore, when, not if, I find a publisher for this possible trilogy of young adult fiction set in 2059 on the west coast of North America and then through the Northwest Passage to northern Europe, all paying subscribers will receive two autographed copies. Yes, I pledge that to you, and I will keep pitching this series to agents and publishers in the meantime to make it happen.
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Tsunami Warning: First Voyage of the Seafaring Lady
By Caroline Woodward
Confucius said, Good ones love mountains. Wise ones love water.
From a poem by Mark Mealing, Anthropologist and Poet
Chapter One
Sorrow Bay Grief Point
Sad Rocks Desolation Sound
Old Fears Blind Alley
Morbid Channel Grim Look-Out
Good Hearts Cove Safe Harbour
By unknown Canadian lighthouse keeper from ‘Flotsam & Jetsam: Collected Poems from the Lighthouse’ (name redacted, early 2020’s? in a little frame with a hand-painted lighthouse labelled Lennard Island Lightstation on the wall beside Grandpa’s kitchen dinette table)
Kerry Walsh, Captain for the time being, onboard The Seafaring Lady
I played hooky halfway through that morning, October 27, 2059, on the first day of the tsunami warning, but at the time it was just another dreary day at school for me. We all heard the Principal’s announcement for us to attend a General Assembly. I joined the crowd of students clomping and jostling our way to the gym when I saw the open door at the teacher’s entrance and seized the moment. Carpe Don’t Blow This Diem! Someone, a male teacher most likely, yelled Hey! once but I didn’t stop to see if he meant me and I kept going through three sets of doors.
Outside. Freedom! Even dull late October with its pearly grey skies and chilly northwest winds blasting across the streets outside that school meant fresh air and freedom to me. I took the alleys and trotted the five long blocks downhill to the harbour, glad I’d worn my running shoes. I ran past the loading ramps behind the big tech stores and the old warehouses filled with boutiques and restaurants. Some of them had their kitchen doors open and the warm inviting aromas of their specialties, their raisin breads and fish and chips and lemongrass soups, mixed and mingled in the alley air.
My school bag held my windbreaker and my thermos flask of mint tea and a sketch of my Old World Literature assignment proposal, a 3-D replica of the 15th century Globe Theatre in London where Shakespeare’s plays were performed. It was turned down. Millicent the Magnificent does not want “handwork” of any kind. Architectural drawings or even an ancient auto-cad 3-D print-out would have been acceptable but I wanted to make a real thatched roof with dried river reeds and use real wood for the walls and the stage of course. I did not bother to mount my usual defence of handwork which is: ‘The world is made by many hands.’ Dr. Millicent Grimsby was the Head of the English Department. She believed technical adeptness was my weakness and so I should focus on improving my weaknesses and not my strengths, “such as they are”, she’d sneered, in a personal and professional lapse of courtesy, imo.
I ducked into the Whole World Grocery Store at the foot of the hill just before the docks began, grabbing two kinds of ready-made vegan sandwiches, two fresh apples and some cranberry and pomegranate juice boxes. I used Grandpa’s Seafaring Lady supplies card, amazed it still worked as I stuffed the food into my pack. They haven’t cancelled his card yet. Interesting.
I was numb, but then, I had been numb for the past three days since getting called down to the lair of the Dormitory Matron who, with the School Principal beside her, told me Grandpa Walsh had died in his hotel room after speaking at an oceanography conference in the Southern Territory. They both stared at me with avid corvid eyes, as my Mom would have described them. Beady, alert, suspicious.