Because I cannot help myself, I write a "General Prologue" for each Two Page Tuesday. I’d be lying if it were not in part a way for myself to read also, since I’m not going to do a two-page reading (I’m the organizer: I want to hear other people read), but I conceived of it mainly as a scene-setting device, as a way to establish a tone and a mood and a clean way to transition from the bullshitting into the reading (before we, of course, go back to the bullshitting). There have been three readings so far and therefore there have been three "prologues," and in this last I began by talking about how on this podcast the hosts were discussing where it’s best to get poems and stories and things published, if and how that should be a goal. For the purposes of the "prologue" I then took it over to communities and in-person things and why the reading was so great, etc., etc., but I’ve been thinking about it mostly in other ways, at least as far as myself is concerned.

I tend to dislike sending stories out. In fact, I really haven’t done very much of that at all since grad school. Partly it was the pandemic, partly it was working on a novel, but largely it was because I just don’t like the waiting. I’ve worked for/on enough journals to know that it’s a deeply weird and haphazard thing. Yes, good work does rise to the top eventually. But also a lot of stories get passed on because the reader, often a grad student, is hungover and needs a snack and has to power through 200 submissions by the end of the day and thinks that what they’re working on right now is better than anything they could possible read here, so why send anything along through?

(Am I bitter? Maybe. But also this is not an inaccurate picture. I have been this grad student. This is also part of the reason I no longer work on literary journals.)

There was a period at the beginning of this calendar year when I was sending stories lots of places. These were "short shorts," around or under 1,000 words. They’re kind of too long for the "flash fiction" people, and a little too short for the "fiction" people (and so I tell myself that that’s part of why it’s so hard for me to get them published). But I was sending them. I’d finished a good draft of a novel and needed something different to do. Eight months later I’ve collected a good number of form rejections, a couple personalized rejections, and six or seven still outstanding. I’m debating sending out again, but we’ll just have to see: I’m also querying agents about the novel, and I don’t know how much further waiting and rejection I want to carry. (I’ll probably send, maybe after looking over the stories again; I’m OK at compartmentalizing the waiting.)

But what I’ve been thinking about, mostly, is time. How long it takes to hear back, and how long it takes to get the thing published, and then how long it takes for the next one. I’ve had new friends ask to see work, or if I would mind if they went and read some of the published stories, but I always say that they’re so old, they’re not really representative, but then, even if I were to get one of the stories I’d sent earlier this year published, those would not be representative now, either.

This is partly because I’m still not really "settled," I guess, artistically. But also I don’t think anyone ever really is, and also I suppose I’m more settled now than I have ever been. Still.

I met a guy at a wedding who’s also a writer and with whom I was commiserating about how hard it is to get a novel published. He’s got an agent, but is in the no-man’s land that is what’s called being "on submission." It was good to talk to someone about it. But he later sent me a link to a recently published story, and again the caveat was something to the effect of it not really being "current." The journal in question had a little drama and he’d sent it in before any of the drama even began, how long ago. It’s all a lot of weird delay.

Of course, I completely understand why things are the way they are. There are too many fucking writers. Too many fucking submissions, too many fucking micro online "magazines" that nobody reads, too few fucking dollars to support any of this. I think the only people making money on literary concerns are the people who own Submittable.[1][2] And there has never been money in literary journals. That’s not the point. But they also used to be run by the generationally-wealthy. The circles were smaller. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. But it was different.

That’s largely the reason why, when I was running Response, the model was one of solicitation vs submission — I had (and still have) absolutely no interest in reading through a slush pile. It’s almost inhumane, the waiting. And journals are even now catching up to the literary agents in terms of there now being a "Closed No Response" option: "Unfortunately, due to the volume of materials we receive, we may not be able to respond to every submission or query." I mean: rude.[3]

All of which is to say that I feel good about running a reading series instead of a literary journal (even though I genuinely love producing literary journals), and I feel bad about the state of literary publishing. This is not, of course, a new or particularly unique take. But a long time ago, the writer who was then serving as the department head of my MFA program railed during workshop one day about how young writers — fiction writers especially — try to publish too soon (never mind that many of us were in or approaching our thirties or were even older than that). As with many of the things this writer said that infuriated me back then, I’m a little less enraged now. I can almost see his point. I mean, I still disagree. But this is a world in which you might get something published a year, two, three years after you finished your edits and rewrites and revisions and proofreads, and will it then still be something you’re proud of? Maybe, maybe not.

But also I guess you’ve still go to fucking try, don’t you? If you want to do the "writer" thing, I think, you really do.


1. The default submissions portal. It’s a nice app, but I remember when it was called "Submishmash" and it was free.
2. I should start a competitor and make my own money, shouldn’t I?
3. Especially given that it’s not exactly hard to automate a close/rejection email after X days. I mean, shit, I know these are books people and not computers people, but it’s really not that hard.