Removing blind submissions is a terrible idea, but so is keeping them

Let’s start by acknowledging that writing literary fiction is a bad deal financially for almost everyone right now. It’s bad for privileged cis, white, male writers like me, and it’s bad for nonbinary, poor writers of color. It's bad for writers and it's bad for journals. The economics of the literary journals we need to get to accept our work in order to progress as writers are, to be blunt, a scam. If that seems harsh, consider the similarities between how the average lit mag operates and those kiosks at the mall that grab passersby, telling them they have the face for modeling, and if only they’ll invest a mere $300 in a portfolio, they might be on their way to superstardom. The only thing that differentiates literary magazines is that they typically charge a lot less than $300. However, since you have to apply to many of them to have a hope of getting published, the total cost to the victim of the scam is about the same.

The modeling scam takes advantage of people’s natural tendency to overestimate their own value. Of course someone thinks I should be a model, the victims of the scam believe, so nothing seems out of place when someone suggests that the world sees a similar value in the victims.

For literary magazines, the exploitation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is even more invidious, because most of the people submitting actually do have some talent. The last few decades of MFA programs have generated tens of thousands of graduates, each of whom has, presumably, at least some ability. To go along with all of these, there are the hundreds of thousands more whose teachers or professors recognized they had some skill and encouraged them to make use of it. So the writers submitting their stories aren’t just fooled by their own vanity. They really can write at least passably. Do they write well enough to beat the 50-to-1, 100-to-1, or a million to one odds that some journals put in front of them? Likely not. But it’s three bucks to try, kind of the same as a lottery ticket, and you can’t win if don’t play, so in the three bucks goes. Maybe once in a while, you risk the big money and enter a $20 or $30 contest.

I assume my writing is as sexy as this woman's silhouette.

The people who run literary journals aren’t greedy like the scammers at the mall. In fact, most aren’t getting paid at all. There’s not much money in selling literary fiction these days, which is why they have to resort to squeezing writers to get even the few dollars needed to keep up a website or print a few copies. Stephen March, in a piece in Lithub in 2021 on Sally Rooney, compared literature as a business to the game musical chairs: “There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life.” There are far too many writers relative to readers, so the only money literary journals can get is from the supply side, rather than demand, giving it its scammy appearance.

It’s important to keep this in mind when discussing the idea of blind submissions, or, more accurately, ending the practice of blind submissions. If the literary ecosystem currently favors certain demographics, it doesn’t favor them that much, because the system is bad for nearly everybody. And if certain proposals might shift the balance of favor in ways that might harm the potential for success of some writers, well, it’s not like the people benefitting are going to find themselves in all that enviable a situation, either. Writers should be kind to one another and try to preserve what dignity they can, rather than let the fight for the remaining scraps get ugly. There isn't much hope for any of us, so let's die with class. 

 The argument against blind submissions

I first became aware of the trend to end blind submissions a few weeks ago when I entered a short story contest. The decision surprised me, as I suppose it has a lot of people, mostly because I thought the research on blind submissions had showed it to be effective. I thought of the success of blind auditions in orchestras, which has been proven to improve the representation of women in orchestras.  

In explaining its decision, the journal cited three articles. Since becoming aware of the practice and looking into it a little further, I've seen these same three articles quoted quite a bit by other journals moving to similar practices. They are:

• The Politics of Gatekeeping: On Reconsidering the Ethics of Blind Submissions, by Joyce Chen
• The Politics of "Blind Submissions" Policies, from the editors of Apogee Magazine
• "How Can Literary Magazines Counter Their Biases?" by Elisa Gabbert

Below, I'm going to try to summarize the main arguments they make. Just in case it's not already clear, what we're talking about is the idea that when a story or poem or essay is submitted, it should either have information identifying the author or it should not. The three essays above all argue that it should include identifying information. 

1. There is a difference between orchestra auditions and literature

Two of the three essays explicitly mention those orchestra studies, and they acknowledge them as a reason why it might seem like a good idea to do the same thing in publishing. However, they argue that there are important differences between playing music and a writing/submitting a piece of literature. One important difference is that musicians typically do not play their own, original pieces in auditions. They are playing someone else's music, and there is, perhaps, while not perfect objectivity, at least relatively more of an objective standard as to how they are to perform. Chen writes: "Blind submissions do not actually have the same effect as, say, blind auditions, which suppose that the strength of a voice or an instrumental skill is more important than the identity of the singer or musician (also, the performed piece is not always an original piece). When it comes to writing, however, acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself." 

Gabbert probably explains the argument a little more precisely with: "Two cellists, a man and a woman, might audition with the same Bach piece; they won’t be playing their own music. And there seem to be nearly universally agreed upon standards of what constitutes good playing of Bach, which don’t vary much by gender. If they were each playing music of their own composition, we might run into a problem of bias again: namely, that we have been trained to perceive music written by men as great music. You glimpse this thinking in the common question, “Why are there no great female composers?” (Who says there aren’t?)"

2. The illusion of objectivity within the blind submission allows editors to indulge their conscious and unconscious biases

If writing has historically favored white, cis-male, heteronormative writing, and editors either fit those categories themselves or have been heavily influenced by an academic system that emphasized them, then they will struggle to avoid bringing assumptions fed by that system into their editing about what constitutes good literature. As the editors of Apogee put it, "the problem is that white/male/cis is the assumed standard."  Chen's version of the same idea was: "...in many corners of the literary world, quality has long been judged through a largely white, male, cis, heteronormative lens, and the practice of reading submissions blind perpetuates that standard of excellence and allows it to go unchecked." 

These assumptions might mean that an editor will fail to recognize another mode of storytelling, one that doesn't follow the narrative arc brought down from Aristotle. Or editors might discount diction that doesn't meet their expectations. In short, taking names off manuscripts doesn't mean that editors don't still bring biases with that into reading that can prevent greater inclusivity. Two of the articles cite statistics that show how literary magazines are still not (or as of 2017 were still not) as diverse as they ought to be. They reason from these statistics that editors continue to hold on to biases 

Problems with their arguments

The three articles use somewhat different logic to arrive at these claims, and cite different examples in places, but those two main arguments hold. Furthermore, all three acknowledge that blind submissions are not total evils. They can serve to fight against nepotism and favoritism. The Apogee article wrote" "There are valid reasons for doing blind submissions. Our friends at The James Franco Revieware all about blind submissions in order to stop the cult of celebrity." However, they also feel that in general, the good that blind submissions can do is outweighed by the negatives. Above all, all three alike argue that whether a journal chooses blind or identity-revealing submissions, what is really important is the makeup of the editorial staff. 

Overall, I think their arguments hold a reasonable amount of weight and are hard to dismiss completely. In practical terms, I think most literary journals have never really been blind. Other than in contests, which cost more money to enter, most do want identifying information on the piece being submitted, and it's been that way for a long time. If journals are going to do this, they ought to be all-in about it. Doing it halfway--by, say, asking for the name of the author but not looking at the biography--then they're asking for trouble. They might, in the quest to be inclusive, rule out someone who actually is Chinese or Guatemalan because they were adopted or took a married name or have a white father and now don't "sound" Chinese or Guatemalan. Also, some white writers might be able to present a very convincing world set within a non-white setting. I speak three foreign languages well enough to professionally translate in them. Much of my life has been in the company of non-white people, so I end up writing stories about non-white characters. Because I've been pretty deep in their culture, down to being able to speak the language, I can write a story that will make an editor think it was written by someone sharing the identity of those characters. I might even win a blind contest this way. In fact, I know that I've done this, because one editor told me so. So if a journal wants to avoid mistakenly picking a story by a white author, they need to go all-in. I'd recommend doing what Gordon Square Review has done. Their submission practices, the last time I submitted to them, said this: "We request that no cover letter or author bio be included in your submission. Instead, please share with Gordon Square Review what the story is about, the writing process of the story, and any context you believe is important to know while reading story." That seems to split the difference between not allowing for nepotism by allowing a writer to state how successful they already are, but also allowing a writer to explain how their background contributed to the story. 

Nonetheless, I do think there are some problems with ending blind submissions, and also with the philosophy of putting the author's identity front and center when selecting stories. Because that's really what all three articles are calling for. 

1. The lack of perfect objectivity in literature doesn't mean there are no standards at all. 

All three articles demonstrated what I would consider to be a troubling casualness in dismissing the notion of objective standards in literature. Chen wrote that "there is no such thing as objective quality." Apogee put it less extremely: "However, artistic and literary aesthetics are not an algorithm, and “literary excellence” is not an infallible mathematics." Gabbert, though, echoed Chen's absolute rejection of objectivity: "There is no universal standard of goodness." 

Rejecting the notion of objective aesthetic standards has become so commonplace, it seems many critics don't feel any sense of sorrow pronouncing that there is no such thing as "good" literature. They accept that literature can be reduced to a dialectical struggle between competing political interests and don't seem to feel any sense of loss. I've never been able to understand how. "No objectivity" would seem to mean you could just randomly pick stories for a magazine and do no worse than having a team of supposedly expert editors. Ask a computer to account for identities, pick the mix you want, and ignore the stories altogether. 

I'm sure Chen and Gabbert would reject this idea, if for no other reason than because it would diminish the political power of editors, which presumably they would like to keep in order to allow their kind of editors to fight for political ends they agree with. But they'd also likely agree that just because literary standards are not based on perfect objectivity doesn't mean there is no objectivity at all. It doesn't mean that 50 Shades of Grey is as "good"--yes, I think we can use that word--as Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

In aesthetics and ethics both, we might never be able, absent the decree of the gods, to determine with perfect accuracy where "good" lies, but we can create something like a plot graph, and we will find, over time and across cultures, that most of the dots for "good" are near one another. It can be hard to describe the area they inhabit, but that's really the job of literary and cultural criticism--to try to adduce something close to objectivity in a realm where there will never be absolute standards. 

Kim Yong Ha, a Korean writer I much admire, has written much about his admiration for Aristotle's Poetics. In spite of Kim's different cultural assumptions and identity, he finds a universal applicability in many of Aristotle's principles: "Thanks to (a movie director he heard about who always carried a copy of the Poetics in his pocket), I also started reading it, and that reading had an influence on novels I wrote afterwards...of course, my novels can't be compared to (the great classics Kim had been discussing earlier) but many writers the world over have gone through a similar process and ended up writing "work that seems new, but in reality is old." (From "Reading Dangerous Books," appearing in the collection See, Read, Speak. Translation mine.) 

Speaking three foreign languages may not make me the most globally aware reader, but it does mean I can to a small degree balance Western writing against some other traditions. And those other traditions show a nearly universal preference for a standard of "good" that even a fusty white professor from the 1950s would at least somewhat recognize. Even within Western culture, there have been eras where very different assumptions went into the production of literary work, and therefore those times yielded quite different work from other times. "Western literature" of the last 3,000 years is far from homogenous, but that doesn't mean we can't find something we can call "good" in any of the surviving records. 

2. The level of diversity needed to ensure the goal is impossible 

In this year's Best American Short Stories collection, one of the entries was "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam. As I pointed out in my critique of the story, it included a lot of veiled references to the last sixty years of Ethiopian history that would have been lost of most readers. At least some critics of the story ignored it, figuring one African country is the same as another. But I recognized the references, because, as fate would have it, I spent about five years studying modern Ethiopia rather deeply. So the story read quite differently to me than it would have to other readers. 

America is the most culturally diverse country on Earth. That means a journal can and will get submissions from writers who fully qualify as "American" but who are also writing from deep within other cultural contexts. Can any board of editors be diverse enough to recognize the political bent of a Nepalese-American, how that writer might be coming down on a variety of political issues well known to Nepalese diasporic readers but invisible to others? Can they do this for all the diasporas that might be represented within the submission pool? 

If we followed the recommendations of these three editorials, we might have picked a black, female editor over someone like me in order to achieve the needed diversity to judge a story like Maya's. But white, cis-male, middle-aged, balding, upper-middle-class me would have been a better judge of Maya's story.  (I say "Maya," rather than "Binyam," because Ethiopians use their given names to identify themselves. Did you know that? I do, but some critics of her story did not.) 

All three articles hoped that they could make up for weaknesses in identity-revealed submissions by first ensuring a properly diverse team of editors. But how on Earth is the average journal supposed to do this? How would they know if they are being blown away by something that seems novel to them, when in fact the writer is simply picking some very common item from another culture, one that wouldn't impress readers from that culture at all, the way Yoon Choi did in "The Art of Losing"? (For that matter, isn't it politically problematic that so much of the literary understanding of Americans about other countries comes from diasporic writers, rather than truly foreign writers in either the original language or in translation?) 

3. The statistics cited don't always support the arguments made

All three articles used similar statistics to prove that literary journals are still in thrall to white, cis-male, straight guys. They all seem to have ignored what is very clear from one of the very studies they cite: employees in the publishing industry are about 75% female. This has been an open secret in the literary community for as long as anyone can remember. Personally, as a writer who often creates what I've termed "bro lit," I feel that it's had an effect on what kinds of male stories get published. They are often either over-the-top tales of toxic masculinity, or they feature male characters I don't really recognize. 

One might also note other anomalies in the data. A whopping 19% identify as something other than straight, although the percentage of people in the general population identifying themselves as LGBT is around 7%. As in music and film, if anything, there is an over-representation of non-straight voices, at least in terms of raw numbers. This might be because there is something about literature that tends to attract LGBT people. Indeed, I've taken personality inventories that suggested I was gay, largely based on nothing more than my self-identified love of poetry. So there's likely nothing invidious in it, but it would be hard to claim that if there's an under-representation in publishing of non-straight voices, it's owing to a lack of representation among decision makers. 

That same study from Lee & Low Books identified a number of improvements within publishing that have taken place since the first survey they took. All in all, the assumed dire situation all three share seems overstated. We are in the middle of a shift, and if the slow and steady approach hasn't yielded all the results we'd like right away, that's no reason to suddenly switch to the nuclear option.

You keep on citing those statistics. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

4. Putting the author back in the center of literary study will undo a century of important critical work

In his essay "Authorship in Contemporary American Literature," Anis Shivani traces the history of the place of the author in critical theory over the last 100 years. Once, critics viewed the mind of the author, or the author's true intent, as the transcendental signified it was the critic's duty to discover. However, after first the New Critics and then Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s, not only did the author cease to be the central foucs of literary study, but actually, in the more extreme versions, the author disappeared entirely. The author was "dead," to use the title of Barthes' essay. 

However, Shivani observes that, counter to the critical preference for the decentralizing of the author, the publishing industry prefers to have the author at the center of literarture. "From technology to economics to culture, the tendency today ought to be for the supremacy of ecriture (writing), the reduction of the author to scriptor, whereas in fact the literary industry pushes hard for exactly the opposite, the transcendence of the author and the negation of the reader."

Criticism sees the death of the author as an important part of dismantling authoritarianism in general, because of the way it gives freedom to the reader, whereas authors "actively excluding creative readers from interpretation" is exactly what publishers want. The author's "own authenticity deriving in large part from the academic discourse of diversity, authors must blend into this discourse if they are to have any authority in the marketplace of texts. Authority is extracted ultimately from the community of novice writers, rather than freestanding critics, again evoking medieval conditions. Active readership, which may take interpretation in such stray directions, becomes a hindrance to the author's establishment of authenticity, which rests on constraining the possible range of interpretations."

Criticism of all sorts viewed author-centered readings with suspicion. To use one example from feminist theory, Toril Moi's criticism of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic undermines the way the book assumed a unitary and whole female author throughout its history of literature, a move that ironically reified the entire patriarchal structure it was meant to attack: "For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin, and meaning of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death of the author." 

Chen claimed that "When it comes to writing... acknowledging the totality of the person behind the piece is arguably just as important as the piece itself."  What is this if not putting the author's identity at the forefront in a way even the pre-New Critical world would not have? 

My own biases and interests 

I conclude by acknowledging that I, like everyone trying to publish fiction, have my own interests that are affected by the philosophies or editing staffs. If they are to actively, rather than wistfully, push for greater diversity of story tellers--and they should--then this likely makes the odds longer for me. I don't want to write this, because it sounds like "reverse racism" nonsense, but I don't see how the math works out any other way. The majority of writers submitting to any mainstream journal are probably white. Let's say a staff makes a decision to actively pursue diversity by considering the identity of the writer, and says that of the four stories it will chose to publish in its next edition, at least two must be by writers of color. If 80% of the 500 submissions are from white writers, my odds of getting published are now 200 to 1. The odds of a writer of color are 50 to 1. Those odds are still terrible for both of us. The point is not to claim some kind of reverse racism, but I think it's dishonest gasligthing not to admit that at least in the short term, the odds for a non-established white, cis-male, straight author of breaking in through a journal are going to be longer than those of a lesbian Chinese-American woman. 

Of course, the writers of these essays would argue that the practice isn't unfair, because the writer of color had to overcome more obstacles just to get to a place where she could submit a story to a journal at all. There's certainly merit to that argument, and in the big picture of what's good for society, the practice is likely beneficial. But when I get rejections and feel like I'm worthless for a day, I may not care about what's good for society as a whole. I'm not going to argue that my feelings are a reason to keep the old policies, but editors should at least be aware that those feelings will exist. 

The big difference between what I'm saying and what a "reverse racism" proponent would say is that I'm not really arguing that it should be different. Harold Bloom complained about literary awards given out based more on the identity of the writer than on the quality, but I've found, as a close reader of short fiction award winners for the past decade, that the quality of writing of stories hasn't gone down. I would guess that what's more likely happening is that editors are getting an abundance of stories good enough--and here, I'll use "good" unproblematically--to be published. With more good stories than they can publish, they look to authorial identity as a sort of tie-breaker. It's much the way affirmative action college decisions were supposed to be made. This is a fine way to pick stories, and probably as good a way to decide between stories of relatively equal merit as there could be. 

The biggest award I've received as a writer was winning New Letters' Robert Day Award for fiction. I won a contest that was read blind. The judge was a female writer of color. I wonder if she read my story, about a North Korean defector working at a hotel in Seoul, and found it "felt" authentic enough that it likely came from an ethnically Korean writer. I wonder if that helped me win. Nobody ever said anything to me about it, and the magazine still runs this contest without identifying information on entries. That story had been a near-miss at many journals before winning the contest, and I do wonder if it would have ever been published in such a high-quality journal if it hadn't been for a blind contest. If there are no blind contests again, I might never get into such a high quality magazine again. 

If that's true, it's okay. Proponents argue that in the long run, this activist approach might actually help writers like me, because it will grow the community of readers. Ideally, it would make journals less financially strapped in the future as the literary world becomes less moribund. I'm skeptical this will happen, but I do think that of all the attempts to actively improve our society's assumptions about race, the most effective one has been the proliferation of narrative platforms to new and diverse voices. If I have to be a part of the generation of white writers whose prospects shrank for the first time in history in order to get there, then I accept that, based on utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" reasoning. I'd only ask that in return, I not be given assurances that things are still easier for white, male writers than they are for everyone else. This might be true for established writers, but I don't think it's true for people trying to break in. The math just doesn't support that.