Props to the Adirondack Review: The "encouraging rejection" is one of the best services a literary journal can provide

I've probably written about rejection more than any other subject on this writing blog. That's because it's the single most ubiquitous fact of writing life. That doesn't change after a few publications or a few dozen or a few hundred. Nearly every writer faces rejection, even the stars. True, if you're Cormac McCarthy, your form of rejection might be that you didn't win a Pulitzer this year, instead of that your story didn't get published by the Zimber Creek Review, but either way, you're going to face disappointment.

I've received a few rejections just this week, but one of them stood out. The Adirondack Review added a little note to the automatic notification. They wrote this: We really enjoyed your work, and it was a strong contender for publication in The Adirondack Review. However, we regret to write that it was not selected. We encourage you to submit again.

Literary journals, most of which make no money (in fact, they often have to exist off the largesse of a patron who endows the magazine), are providing a valuable service to American literature. They provide a training ground for the next important writers to emerge. Without small journals, there wouldn't be as much good work coming to the big journals, and there wouldn't be as many writers perfecting how they write enough to produce important novels. 

Choosing stories for publication is always subjective, by definition. A story later regarded nearly universally as great may spend years getting rejected before is gets published. Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," one of the choices for this year's Best American Short Stories collection, spent two years getting rejected before it finally found a home, which led to it eventually being picked for BASS.  

What that means is that there is nothing "right" about any choices a journal makes. A "good" story is more likely to get published than a "bad" one most of the time, but there are all kinds of reasons why a good story might be hard to recognize at first. It's also very hard for a panel of editors to pick the "best" of what they got. One editor might like it, another might hate it, and a third might be on the fence.

What I'm getting at is that even though small journals do a great literary service by giving developing writers a place to go to test how they are doing at developing as artists, the feedback writers get isn't always going to give the right messages. This is especially true if you are only getting a "yes" or "no" every time. I can tell you, as a former literary journal editor myself, that there are a hundred different kinds of "no," from "almost made it and probably should have made it, in retrospect," to "I quit reading after one sentence."

So when journals go the extra mile to let you know that you made it past the slush pile and got real consideration, that's incredibly useful feedback. It says you're on the right track, and there is probably something to the story you've got. It might need a tweak, or it might just need to be submitted more. But either way, it hit a nerve somewhere, which increases the likelihood it'll do the same somewhere else. It takes a minute to craft that extra language in the email, and I understand that every journal everywhere is overworked, but just writing a few of those kinds of rejection with every edition you put out makes a journal's impact to the writing community much stronger.

It was especially useful to hear this response on the story in question, which is really an oddball. I wasn't sure that editors would even be open to the premise at all. This is now the second rejection-with-feedback I've had on the story, though, so I guess I'll keep pushing forward with it. I'd never know, though, if it weren't for editors who care.