Have we been reading your submission for, like, a year?

Dear readers and most especially writers,

We frequently receive letters from readers responding to our “Read More” email publications—”What a wonderful poem, it made me think of …” “This one, not so much…” “Thank you for sending this!” and “Go to hell with your newsletter. I don’t want to read your stories, I just wanted you to publish me.” (And some critiques too foul to repeat.)

We also often receive responses to the responses we send out to submissions. Usually it’s in the form of a resubmission: “Hello Editors, thank you for your kind words about my last submission, here is another story that I think you might like…. By the way, loved the Peter Shippy poem in the last issue.” And, less often (thank God) it’s a reprimand.

I received a reprimand this morning that reminded me how long I’ve been postponing writing something more detailed about our submissions reading process.

Dear members of the Literary Review

Shame on your journal for keeping my story 328 days and then sending me nothing more than a form letter. That’s slow and inconsiderate and lazy. The Paris Review just responded after 18 days with a written note telling me the same story was “beautiful.” I’ll not submit to your journal again.

Every few months I’ll appear on a panel at a creative writing program where I’ll explain how things work at TLR, the “life of an unsolicited submission” — but of course that’s a limited audience and it leaves our own readers and contributors a bit in the dark.

One of the things about TLR that I am most proud of is that the vast bulk of what we publish (about 90%) comes from unsolicited submissions: of those, about 30 to 40% comes from writers who have submitted previously and been encouraged to resubmit. About 10% comes in from previous contributors, and at least one or two of our contributors each issue are publishing for the first time ever with us. (That last category is our favorite—editors love to think they’ve “discovered” something.)

Agents don’t send us work (not because they don’t think we’re absolutely wonderful, but because there’s no money in it for anyone and that sort of defeats the whole business of being an agent or having an agent).

Every so often, we might approach a writer we admire and ask if they might possibly maybe have something for us. After hearing Percival Everett read a wondrous piece from a “kind of autobiographical” novel that he described as “permanently in progress,” I screwed up my courage to ask him if we could publish it. (Confluence). I begged Michael Morse, an old friend, to give me a poem, and he shook his head and hemmed and hawed and then finally after a couple of months released to me this long poem, that he was sure was too long and did I really want something from him anyway. (Void and Compensation)

My poetry editors are bolder in their passions than I am, and will ask favorite writers for work. I think that maybe one or two poets each issue (out of thirteen) come to us that way.

But the typical life of a submission to The Literary Review is this:

- a writer submits work to TLR (Thank you!) because (hopefully) he or she thinks there is some kind of affinity between their work and what we publish.

- The submissions come in through an on line system. We have an editor, Jessica Aufiery, who single-handedly manages all the submissions—quite a large job for a graduate assistant.

- Jessie assigns the submissions to a reader (first one, then a second one, and then often third) before ever taking an action on that submission. In other words, as a matter of policy, none of our submissions are ever rejected after having been read by one person.

- If, after two or three readers, Jessie receives consistently un-positive responses, she will read the submission. If it is patently obvious that the submission is totally completely wrong for TLR—because it’s like nothing we ever print, smut, historical fiction, completely unrefutably (sp?) derivative, riddled with dreadful grammar—Jessie will send a standard rejection.

- If, on the other hand, she herself doesn’t like it but finds something worthy in it (good smut, radically innovative historical fiction, new languages, etc), she will send it to me (or one of our poetry editors, if it’s poetry) and comment, “I don’t care for this, even though—. May I reject?” And I will look at it and either agree and the rejection will go forth. Or, I’ll disagree and the piece will go on for another reading.

- Because I have such strange tastes, and my poetry editors have such refined tastes, we will often see a submission that three readers have hated, but we love.

- Often, the submission that is going to be accepted gets processed through another reader or two after a top editor has commented on it.

- Everything that hasn’t been selected out earlier in the cycle because it’s totally wrong, gets seen by me or or Renee Ashley, or Craig Morgan Teicher.

- Every “nice reject” (to adopt the industry terminology for “thank you, we like your work, not this piece, but please send again”) has been sent directly by one of the three of us.

- Which means, sadly, that we don’t move terribly quickly through our submissions.

I like our system—even though I’m sorry it takes us so long, sometimes a year, sometimes in very embarrassing situations a little longer to reply. It’s the only system that I feel comfortable with. And it’s taken a little bit of experimenting and pig-headedness to arrive at it. Because obviously, writers do complain, and also we lose out on stories we wish we’d gotten to sooner because they go to other venues while we are still reading. But I’d much rather miss out on an extraordinary piece of writing because some other amazing magazine is going to publish it than because one reader with an entirely unique set of criteria just didn’t go for it.

Here’s why: the very first story that I accepted when I took over the editorship of TLR had been rejected nine months earlier. I was still learning the online system and was mistakenly reading submissions from the “rejected” pile. What I discovered, after un-rejecting that story by R.A. Allen, was that only one person had even seen the story. I do know that had that story made its way up the ranks to my esteemed colleague and former editor of TLR, Walter Cummins, it would have been rejected. Because, as Walter says, “there’s no accounting for taste.” Putting a finer spin on it, Walter often explains my taste as opposed to his taste in this fashion: “Well, you like that noise. What’s it called? The Clash?”

Over the last few years, I’ve found other stories that Walter may or may not have like that fell into the rejection pile after a single reading. We’ve had phases when we’ve been overeager to move through the backlog and passed blithely on things that at very least should have gotten a closer look. I’ve found contact information for writers that I’ve wanted to write fan letters from in our old reject piles. And, yes, we’ve repeatedly taken too long to respond to writers, which I regret, because I’m grateful to have all these writers submitting to us.

And yet, we have to pick our battles. Our standards for ourselves are what they are. Our resources are what they are (obviously if we had any full time staff at all, or relied less heavily on volunteers, we’d be a veritable machinery of careful reading). I take exception though, to the idea that we should be ashamed.

In gratitude for your attention,

Minna