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 on 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 of 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. 

I kind of like literary journals asking for background on the story

Almost every literary journal a writer might send a story to for consideration will generally tell you that all they want in a cover letter is a brief statement of facts and a concise, third-person biography. Most advice will tell you the same thing. Just say your name, the title of your story and a word count, your previous publications, and then say thank you for considering it. No cute stuff, no pontificating on the meaning of your story or what compelled you to write it. 

Today, I submitted a story to the Gordon Square Review, a little journal in Cleveland, which is not far from where I grew up. They did something unusual in their instructions for submitting a story:

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.

Explaining something about your story before someone reads it might sound like a perfectly natural thing to a non-writer, but it was so unexpected, it made me stop to think why I found it so surprising. If you're writing a novel, the people looking at it generally want a whole lot of explanatory stuff before they even look at the manuscript. Often, they only look at the summary or pitch. Not so with short stories, though. Is it because short stories are high literature, and readers feel the story should be able to speak for itself? Or is it because journals are so swamped, they kind of want to know who else has already published you so they can cheat and use that as help for knowing whether they should pay more attention?

In any event, I really liked that Gordon Square did this. That's strange, because I hate writing pitches and summaries for the novels I've sent in. For some reason, these very informal directions for a cover letter to the short story, though, felt fresh and almost enjoyable to follow. 

I don't get a lot of comments on this blog considering the number of readers, which might be because it's such a pain to put comments in, but I'd like to hear from any writers out there to see if you have opinions on whether you like instructions like this or not.   

Two interpretations of the Taco Bell Quarterly (and its hate boner for The Paris Review)

If you're halfheartedly a part of literary Twitter like I am, you've probably come across The Taco Bell Quarterly at some point in the last few months. If you haven't, your first instinct might be to think it's a joke. Which it isn't, as much as it might disguise itself as one. It's definitely hard to explain exactly what TBQ is; even the magazine's founder, M.M. Carrigan, has offered differing and possibly contradictory explanations for the journal's raison d'etre, mostly through pithy and provocative Tweets. Although Carrigan is witty, the one thing TBQ is not is a joke. At 26,400 followers on Twitter and growing, they may not yet have made good on their boast to be "more relevant than The Paris Review" (which has a million followers), but they're certainly not a joke. Their following has grown to the size of a decent literary journal, and I've seen approving re-tweets from some very hip authors, if not yet many establishment darlings. 

There are two more assertions I can make with certainty about what TBQ isn't. The first is that it's not establishment. It's set up to poke and prod at the literary establishment, frequently taunting The Paris Review in particular. TBQ's Venmo/PayPal is @ParisReview, for example. The second is that it's unaffiliated--unaffiliated with Taco Bell, unaffiliated with The Paris Review, unaffiliated with everything. (At one point, Carrigan joked about asking Taco Bell for a million dollar literary grant, the result of which was that Taco Bell "continues not to sue" TBQ.) 

So that's what it's not, but what is it? TQB offers some explanations of its own, both in the journal itself and also through Carrigan's barrage of hilarious, come-and-get-me Tweets. I'd like to examine two different ways of looking at TBQ and its meaning--both what it hopes to signify as a literary artifact and also what it means as a product of its literary and economic time and place.  

I imagine Taco Bell isn't suing because it's realized that it has more to lose in public perception than it has to gain in suing the journal. It also isn't hurting Taco Bell to be associated with something hip and counter-culture, because that makes Taco Bell seem hip by association. Kind of like why Arby's changed its mind about suing Nihilist Arby's. 

But first, the meaning of TBQ in its own words

Here is how TBQ describes itself on its website: 

Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to be literary, artistic, important, and elite. We welcome writers and artists of all merit, whether you’re published in The Paris Review, rejected from The Paris Review, or DGAF what The Paris Review is. 

First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. It’s about provoking and existing among the white noise of capitalism. We embrace the spectrum of trash to brilliance. Taco Bell Quarterly has tens of thousands of readers. We’ve been interviewed or mentioned in Vox, Salon, Food and Wine Magazine, Mental Floss, Yahoo, The Guardian, The New York Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Literary Hub, Bon Appetit and dozens more.

Is this real? A joke? A literary psy-op? We don’t fully know. We just decided to write about Taco Bell. We are absolutely not affiliated with Taco Bell and make no profits. We can’t even get extra sauce in the drive-thru. Employees treat that shit like unicorn blood.

That part-facetious, part-rebellious self-explanation holds within it all the seeds of the varied ways of looking at the magazine, both as a literary product and a social phenomenon. 

Meaning one: it's an outlet and a meeting place for the rejected

One unusual characteristic of the literary fiction community is that a significant percentage of its members frequently face rejection from the most powerful members of their own community. It's well known that a good percentage of the people who read literary magazines are those who hope to one day be published in them. Major literary conferences are largely attended by dreamers hoping to make connections with or soak up wisdom from the few who've made it. Most aspiring writers have found their way blocked by "gatekeepers" (who are often themselves just other struggling writers volunteering their time). Faced with rejection, there are three possible reactions: revolt, persistence, or giving up. TBQ represents a little of all three. 

The constant jabbing at The Paris Review is the revolt, of course. TBQ isn't the only journal to have been founded partly by people who were tired of being rejected by other journals, but it is one of the best at making its feelings about rejection known. The existence of a journal named for a fast-food restaurant perhaps best known to most people for being cheap and for being a great late-night post-drinking option also represents a kind of resignation. It's sort of like getting kicked out of a fancy, high-society restaurant for being underdressed, and rather than going home to get a coat and tie and going back to try again, you decide to just go to Taco Bell in your tank top and shorts, because who needs those snobs, anyhow? Carrigan once ran a string of Tweets about appearing at a literary conference with a trash can into which attendees were encouraged to throw their literary works, as if to say that at some point, continuing to struggle to "make it" is futile. 

Some examples of the revolt:

Revolt

Revolt

A Tweet very much on the fringe between giving up and persistence

There's plenty of anger in the revolt and the giving up. At times, TBQ accuses the establishment of not just being snobs, but fascists who hold onto authority and prevent the emergence of minority voices. Even when it's at its angriest, though, there's sometimes a note of sweetness mixed in and a call to persistence. A pinned Tweet that's been re-Tweeted nearly 7,000 times catches this vibe:

Not all of the Twitter followers of TBQ are the literary rejected, but nearly all of its followers are intimately familiar with rejection. TBQ lives in a world in which powers--some corporate, some of the elite cultural gatekeeper variety--are blocking the masses from publication and recognition as writers. Not just recognition, but money. TBQ recognizes our capitalistic backdrop and the need all artists have to make a living to sustain themselves. Which is what drives the second interpretation of TBQ.

Meaning Two: It's both a reaction against and a concession to art's commodification by capitalism

Taco Bell restaurants are faux southwestern missionary-style buildings with fake adobe exteriors. The cuisine is an unholy mix of Midwestern crockpot cuisine with other influences we might, if we take a wide view of things, call "Mexican." It's gauche and Philistine, like any culture is when it's dictated by commercial logic.

Naming the journal after a symbol of crassness is a call to storm the bell tower and take back real art. TBQ isn't about loving Taco Bell; it's about Taco Bell as a symbol of the ugliness of art run by gatekeepers in thrall to power. It's an aesthetic descendant of Dadaism, answering nonsense with nonsense.

Or so I thought. But while that might be lingering in the background, there is too much actual love for Taco Bell being professed by the journal for it all to be ironic or for Taco Bell to be purely a symbol of ugliness in art. In fact, much of the journal's actual literary output is more about how Taco Bell played a positive role in the lives of narrators than about how Taco Bell is a symbol of a dying and decaying society. Or perhaps the narrators do acknowledge that Taco Bell is a symbol of a sick society but still find room for elegies to that society's dying beauty. 

In "Un Espinella to a White Friend," J. Villanueva writes of a Mexican narrator talking about Taco Bell with an over-eager white friend. The white friend, perhaps motivated by wanting to show off to his Mexican friend how much he knows about "real" Mexican culture, has questioned why anyone would want to eat at Taco Bell when it's "not Mexican." The narrator responds that, "I know what's served at Taco Bell."  For the narrator, though, while he is well aware that Taco Bell isn't "real" like the Mexican food that is part of his "cultura," it's still "food for (him)." The poem seems to argue that if it tastes good, it is good, an argument that the millions of people who eat at Taco Bell would agree with. It's also a very democratic aesthetic when applied to art, like Duke Ellington's "if it sounds good, it is good." 

This hint of justification or apology for Taco Bell is all over editions four and five of the magazine (the two most recent). "Spondylolisthesis, or why I eat Taco Bell" has a narrator who finds comfort after an abusive relationship in the Crunchwrap Supreme, discovering "decency" in a meal that comes with napkins and straws. The short story "Crazy, Stupid, Tacos" features a protagonist who remains unhappy as long as she resists the crassness of a Taco Bell-themed hotel where she has gone unwillingly for a destination wedding. The character only finds happiness when she stops fighting the crassness and learns to make peace with it. 

The directions for writers submitting to TBQ are pretty much this: "Put Taco Bell in it somewhere." Carrigan advises that this can be as simple as "shoehorning a chalupa" in there somewhere. Most of the published works in TBQ 4 and 5, though, go the other route, highlighting Taco Bell front and center, either as a setting or as a symbol. About half make the connection to Taco Bell right in the title of the work. Rather than rejecting Taco Bell as a symbol of all that's bad in society and therefore art and therefore writing, most writers are celebrating it. 

The relationship to capitalism of TBQ, in fact, seems to be less, "It's all bad, let's burn it all down" than, "Okay, it's bad, but we can't change that, so let's at least try to get ours, too." No work demonstrates this more than Catherine Weiss's "Everyone at the KFC-Taco Bell drive-thru is on their way to the pro wrestling show." The narrator is watching fans of a garish, kayfabe, staged but still violent "sport" eat at a garish, fake establishment built on industrial violence toward animals. The narrator, who seems to have either decided not to have children or been unable to have children because of a disability, looks at all this absurdity and wonders if she, too, wants in. She wonders if she also wants to "order some small human a taco" and what her wrestling persona would have been. The narrator is, like so many rejected authors, looking at those who've managed to gain something she's hasn't, and rather than throw scorn on all of it, she decides to change herself slightly:

are there leagues for disabled people?
at 35      i have almost decided i will be happy

by staying happy i have almost decided      the sound
of a body percussing the mat would be enough

Many poems look on the surface like they take the whole TBQ project as a joke, offering comically mock-grandiose titles such as "Saturn Devouring His Crunchwrap Supreme" or "Six Modern Haiku for a Taco Bell Drive-thru" or "An Ode to the Taco Party Pack." While these begin as facetious, they often end up falling back into a tone that's mostly earnest. That's TBQ in general: a joke that seems to have become serious. 

There are some works in which Taco Bell holds negative connotations. In "Happy Birthday from Taco Bell," the restaurant is a continuing reminder for a young woman of the place where she was raped. No work, though, seems to confront the conflicting meanings of Taco Bell as a symbol and of a literary journal named for the restaurant as much as Cynthia Arrieu-King's "TBQH." 

The title itself is a reference both to the name of the journal itself and an introduction to the speaker's voice. Anyone not familiar with the abbreviation gets it immediately spelled out in the opening line, "To be quite honest." It is followed by an assertion that when art and capitalism mingle, art withers:

To be quite honest

If we want to make art, yet look for money to spring up in its place

Who will have extra lettuce but the bombers, artillery manufacturers, oat milk saboteurs?

Poems will have to remain garlands and garnish, the older ones our menu

Unlike most of the works in TBQ, "TBQH" never makes its peace with Taco Bell. It launches into a series of "Taco Bell questions," which are really questions about the sustainability and viability of society itself. It arrives, ultimately, at a "the party's nearly over and someone will have to be paid" attitude toward our society's unquestioning consumption. The narrator and an interlocutor pull up to the drive-thru window, the moment when, in most of the works in TBQ, a narrator would make peace with Taco Bell and enjoy what corrupt enjoyment is available to us. But "TBQH" is too honest for that. Instead, it keeps questioning right up to the very end, asking, ominously, whether the window they're approaching is the window for picking up their order or the window for paying. 

Unironic kitsch

Most of the work in TBQ, though, is much more forgiving of Taco Bell than that. Maybe that's because for most of us, Taco Bell is the kind of restaurant we've spent more of our lives in than fancy, high-brow restaurants. For most writers, the journals that have published us are more like Taco Bell than the five-star Paris Review. Taco Bell is a more realistic setting and symbol of our lives than other places. Nearly all of us have eaten there, have memories there. Most of the work in TBQ is nostalgic about Taco Bell, because most of us, when it comes down to it, are nostalgic about our lives, even though our lives are as far away from the high art we hoped they'd be as Taco Bell is from real Mexican food. 

TBQ is about surviving in the reality of an ugly, corporate-driven world where not even art is free from the ugliness. There are a number of ways to enact that survival. For TBQ, it means eating the Crunchwrap Supreme of capitalism with both hands, selling merch (I really like the "I survived the poetry discourse" coffee mug) and constantly hustling for donations. TBQ is a statement that if we live in a world with Taco Bells in every town, then an artist has a right to find a way to thrive in that world, even if it means embracing the madness. Embracing the madness that is itself an enemy of art can become an act of beauty in itself. 

I don't know how long TBQ is going to keep growing. One problem it's already running into is that its own success means the the journal that partly sprang up as a reaction against rejection is now having to reject an awful lot of writers seeking to be published by it. Carrigan recently Tweeted that less than half of a percent of people submitting would be published, but writers should "live más" anyway. The journal is perhaps less counter-literary-establishment than one would expect. It reads like a lot of other queer-focused literary journals might read, with the exception that every volume is a themed volume about Taco Bell. There are limits to how revolutionary a literary journal can be and still be a literary journal, just like there are limits to how anti-capitalist anyone can be and still survive in a capitalist society. 

TBQ doesn't ignore or deny these limitations, though. They're there, but that's not a reason to give up. The journal is always on the edge of saying fuck it, let's give up. It's always a breath away from becoming Nihilist Arby's, but it never quite goes there. TBQ may have adopted Taco Bell's "Live Más" slogan as part of the joke, but somewhere along the way, both its staff and its contributors have somehow mostly imbibed the message for real. If a term had to be applied to the journal and the Twitter community growing around it as a movement, the term might be unironic kitsch. It's an aesthetic of trying to make real art and real sentiment out of garishness, because garishness is the only raw material the world offers us to work with. 

Submittable settings might make objectivity harder for editors

 I have a friend who is kind of obsessive about not wanting to talk about movies he hasn't seen yet. It's not just that he wants to avoid hearing spoilers; he wants to not even hear a very broad opinion, like, "I liked it." He feels that even hearing this generic endorsement will color how he watches the movie, and he'd prefer, when he watches, to be doing so completely free of outside influence. 

That's hard to do for movies or shows on streaming services where buzz makes opinions ubiquitous in everyone's social media timelines. To be sure you don't get contaminated, you'd have to avoid social media and continually remind your co-workers within earshot that you want to avoid hearing any mention of the show. That's a lot of work, and likely to make you an unpopular co-worker with some people who really like to talk about what they've seen. 

It shouldn't be that hard for editors of literary journals to do with stories submitted for consideration, though. After all, these are unpublished works they're dealing with. The only people who've seen them, maybe, are small workshop groups. There's no danger of having been contaminated by a public discourse on a story that's still seeking to enter public discourse. 

Except there is. The danger arises from the way Submittable presents work in progress to editors. In a typical set-up, stories sit in a queue, usually according to the date submitted (you can arrange them by other criteria, but this seems to be the fairest way to go through a queue, starting with what came in first and working to what came in last). There are a number of ways journals handle the first stages, depending on the preferences of the head editor and the staff on hand. 

One common method is for first-line editors to pick entries and vote on them. Once the first vote is made, subsequent readers can see that a vote has been made and, more importantly, which kind of vote. 

The snip above is from my own Submittable work queue. I was the one who voted no on the three entries you see there. This means that everyone except the first reader (me) is going to already know what another reader (me) thought before starting in on reading. If that second reader has any particular feelings about me, those could end up influencing the next vote. It could be, "Jake's usually a good reader, so I'll probably agree with him," or it could be, "I hate Jake, so I'm going to vote the opposite of whatever he said," or it could be anything in between. The point is that my vote is likely to have at least some influence on the next votes, even if it's an unconscious influence. And that means objectivity, always difficult to achieve for judges, is going to be a little bit more tainted.

For many journals, the majority of readers doing the lion's share of the work are new. The work is unpaid and grueling, so it's understandable why journals would cycle through readers. When someone new comes on board, it's natural for them to feel their way out before they get comfortable. When I read for the Baltimore Review, I had two conflicting impulses: to vote with the majority so people didn't think I was a pain in the ass, and to vote against the majority so it appeared I had a unique take that made me valuable to have around. Both of these impulses were a distraction from what should have been my only desire, which was to vote the way I really thought. 

No matter which impulse I followed, the presence of other votes represented an influence on me. This was especially true because the Baltimore Review used a two-strikes-and-you're-out approach: the editor figured if two readers both didn't like something, it had too long of an uphill climb to make it, and she'd send a rejection notice. That means that once I saw something had a down vote, there was a motivation for me to go in and vote no, too, because then the story would be out of the queue, which felt like progress. 

A lot of journals use a blind reading to protect them from knowing who the writer is and being influenced by that. They do this in the interests of fairness. Journals should probably also consider protecting themselves from their own influence internally. It's possible there may be some way to configure Submittable settings so you can see that a vote has been made, but not know what the vote was or who made it. But if so, it's not the default setting, and I sure can't figure out how to apply it. A journal could instead have everyone send a private note to a central editor with votes and thoughts, so that only the central editor could see them. But that's a big burden on that one editor, and a system like this would mean Submittable wasn't much more efficient than a journal working entirely off of email. 

If a technical solution became available, making anonymous and masked voting possible, that doesn't mean votes shouldn't stay anonymous and hidden forever. Once enough are in, the blinders could come off, and if necessary, editors could have discussions among themselves and argue through points of disagreement. The idea isn't to avoid disagreement. Quite the opposite. It's to avoid agreement that comes too easily. Journals struggle to achieve diversity in their editorial staff in order to be fair in judging work. That diversity can be undone, though, by subtly encouraging groupthink through the voting process. A simple tweak to Submittable could probably do a surprising lot of good for encouraging diversity. It would certainly be an interesting experiment for journals to try and see if they get more disagreement than they've had before. 

The story I thought would never get published

Although I've been fond of this story since it came off my fingers two years ago, I really thought it would never get published. As a friend of mine I shared it with told me, even though it seems like I'm not making fun of #metoo, it's not so clear that an editor can be sure, so they're just going to be safe and reject it. I finally found one editor at the Maryland Literary Review crazy enough to take a chance on it. See what you think. Wonderfully fabulist tale of wrongs that can't be undone, or white guy spewing nonsense: 

I give you: Collision.  

Apropos of America's football holiday, my latest story comes out in The Adirondack Review

I'm still trying to fit in my Best American Short Stories analysis between all that's going on this week, with the holiday and the end-of-semester home schooling work and my daughter suddenly needing surgery for an ankle she mangled on her birthday. I barely have time to enjoy the release of my latest story to get published, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. It's appropriate that it came out right on Thanksgiving, the day we all watch football, since it's about a model married to a famous quarterback. 

In the sense that anyone who knows anything about football will immediately think of Tom Brady and his wife Gisele Bundchen, I had the same challenge to face that Carolynn Ferrell did in her short story "Something Street," which I recently looked at: how to draw inspiration from real-world events, but still let the characters in the story have a life of their own. Feel free to let me know how you think I did. 

You may notice that this is the second story to come out in a short period of time. I was just commenting on social media about how crazily feast-or-famine writing is. I've gone over a year twice with nothing but rejections. In 2020, while the whole world has been on fire, I've had nine acceptances. That includes three in the last three weeks. This story actually got accepted and then published in the same day, something I've never seen happen before, but I guess that's just how the Adirondack Review works. I'm hoping I can store up the good feelings of all this acceptance for the lean times that are no doubt up ahead. In any event, enjoy the story and happy Thanksgiving.  

The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

"This is not our customary rejection letter"

Writers trying to get journals to publish their work are always trying to read tea leaves. Does the fact they've held onto my work so long mean they're seriously considering it? Will I have a better chance getting published if I change my cover letter to something more personal? One of the things writers who get rejected a lot (which is everyone) often find themselves wondering is this: "Is that rejection letter I just got a standard rejection, or an "encouraging" or personal rejection, one that means I was close and should try again?"

There's a whole wiki dedicated to the rejection letters of literary journals, trying to determine which are the form rejections and which mean they actually liked your work but just couldn't use it. It's kind of a big deal to get one of these personal rejection, especially from a higher-prestige journal. They don't give them out like candy. (I know, because I've gotten a lot of the form rejections before I started getting the personal ones.)

Some form letters are easy to identify. The formula goes something like, "Thank you for submitting, but it's not right for us at this time." If that's all it says, you got a form rejection. But there are some letters that leave you guessing. The contain phrases like "but we encourage you to submit again," or "we enjoyed your work." Those could be form rejections or they could be meant as the encouraging kind of rejection. (And of course, even a second-tier rejection that encourages you to submit again is often still going to be written using a template, so that might be why some of these phrases are still impersonal.)

One magazine, however, makes it completely clear if you got the other kind of rejection letter, as I've just discovered. Agni just sent a rejection that said this: "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read X. The manuscript isn't right for us just now, but please consider sending other work in the future. The is not our customary rejection letter. We hope you'll keep us in mind."

What an excellent response! Rather than leave the writer guessing if her work resonated at all, they make it very clear. I wish every journal did that, or something similar to it.

I've had over a year now of getting these personalized kinds of rejection letters, after many years of mostly only getting the standard rejections from everybody. It's nice to know I've gotten better, but I think I've already made the big improvements that allowed me to make easy improvements. From here, it's all going to be greater grinding to make increasingly smaller gains in order to make it over the hump to get into the better journals. It's so insanely competitive. And for the last few months, I've really been leaning toward feeling like it's not worth the effort. So I'm simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. But it's not even a bad form of discouragement. It's more like I've been far enough down the road to know what the landscape is really like, and I'm kind of thinking it's not for me. That's different from the kind of giving up that leaves you with regrets. It's the kind that's informed. It's more like a 26-year-old semi-pro tennis player with bad knees giving up his dream of joining the pro circuit than it is like a high schooler giving up after not qualifying for state one year.

The process of deciding what to publish never seems less legitimate than when I'm in charge of it

For the last few weeks, I've been part of a couple of processes to help pick the winners in writing contests. One was Sixfold's writing contest, which I've written about already and in which I only played a small role. (A very, very small role, since the winners were stories I didn't like.) But I have a much bigger role in the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction contest. The deadline to enter was November 15th.

The publishing house is a co-op. We run a poetry contest and a fiction contest every year. Anyone within 75 miles of D.C. is eligible to enter. So it's aimed at giving a boost to local writers. And it has. A few of the past winners, like Melanie Hatter and Dave Ebenbach, have gone on to pretty big things after winning our contest. The way it's supposed to work is that after you win, you come give of your time to the publishing house for at least two years afterwards. This is my third year after my own win. I'm now in charge of running the fiction contest. That doesn't mean I have sole responsibility for picking the winner, but I am the one getting everyone else together to make the decision, and so I have a lot of influence over the eventual winner.

We got the most entries this year since I've been part of judging it. I've really put a lot of effort into trying to pick the best entry, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the feeling that what we're doing just isn't good enough. I always felt this way during my year I spent as an editor for the Baltimore Review, as well.

One reason our method for picking what to publish seems so inadequate has to do with the review/analysis I've been doing for the past few years on the Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. One of the important things I've learned from doing this is how often my impression of a story ends up being profoundly different after a second reading than it was after a first. That probably sounds a little bit obvious. Everyone knows a story is different the second time through. But I've been really surprised just how different the second reading sometimes leaves matters. Many stories I didn't like after one read became my favorites the second time through.

So really, the minimum I ought to do for the entries is to give them each two reads. But it's also impossible. I don't have time to read them all twice. Nobody helping to make the decision does. The fact is we don't read most entries all the way through once. The process is something like this: I read roughly the first 25 pages of each entry. I pick the five to seven most promising out of that. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I offer my list to everyone else. Those with time to read through everything and make recommendations send out their lists. The people with less time just read through our recommended best lists. So only two or three people are deciding what the whole board of five or six even narrow in on. Our of the five to seven I picked as the most promising, I then read those all the way through once. Unless I don't, because sometimes about halfway through a reading, I just know it's not going to be a winner and I move on.

I've always consoled myself with this sampling approach by saying that if I don't want to keep reading something after 25 pages, no potential reader we're trying to market to would, either. But I don't know how satisfying that really is, given how profoundly I've changed my opinion after giving something a deeper reading than I otherwise might have. Even if I didn't love it immediately, if we market the book well, the reader is going to give it the benefit of the doubt and get past the beginning to place where she loves it like we did.

Beyond just the basic philosophical question of fairness, there's an emotional aspect to the process. I get rejected over a hundred times a year, and one of the biggest questions I always have is how that decision was made. Was it a really skilled editor whose opinion I would respect? If so, did he hate it completely, or was it just a shade shy of making it? Or was it some grad student just looking for credit for working on the school's lit mag? Did the person or people who voted down on it give it serious consideration, or were they just trying to clear out the queue, so they latched onto something unimportant and used that a reason to make a quick no-vote and move on? Every hint of laziness I see in myself makes me wonder how many other decision makers allow themselves an equal or greater latitude.

I wonder if this isn't having an impact on content in American literature. Some people have made the criticism that a lot of American literature, especially that coming from writing program graduates, all sound the same. I don't agree that it all sounds the same, but sometimes I do wonder if I'm not just reading a variety of ways to say something similar. The political viewpoints of most stories I read in good journals now is pretty much similar to everything else. I don't mean that as a dog whistle, like it would be if someone wrote that in Quilette. I'm not asking for more stories written with traditional, nationalist political viewpoints. But I wouldn't mind some heterogeneity within the side of the political spectrum I did I identify with.  It's not just themes; a lot of the subject matter is becoming very familiar. I wonder if writers aren't learning to hit the things that overworked editors have shown will respond to. I know the stories I've written that got published tend to fit this mold more than the ones that haven't, although some of the ones I've written that haven't are quite likely better. The more stories with certain characteristics get published, the more they lead to other work doing something similar.

Maybe that's too alarmist. I really don't know. I only have my own very small experience as a writer, editor, and reader to go off of. But even if the editorial processes out there aren't actively killing American literature, I think it's almost a given that there is great work getting missed, and it's our fault--the fault of those of us who, at any level, play gatekeeper without living up to the responsibility.

At the very least, if you're a writer I've rejected in my life, just know I didn't take any joy in it, and I haven't yet become calloused about doing it. I hate every rejection I give, and I know exactly what you feel when you get one.

The results are out, and they seem to say that people need to be ruled

I recently mentioned that I entered a story in a Sixfold contest, the literary journal that picks its stories through reader voting rather than a board. I finished in the middle. I didn't even get out of round one.

I actually happen to have read the top three stories that won. They were assigned to me during the final round of voting. I didn't vote very high for two of them, including the winner, which I thought was pretty weak. The second place story was awful. The third place story is okay. If I had been on an editorial board and they had picked the two top stories over some of the other, better entries I saw, I'd have quit the magazine. It's a little hard to tell, because not everybody lets their names go into the final voting list, but I don't see any of the stories I actually liked during voting anywhere near the top. So I think my preferences just don't match the magazine's. I honestly don't think most of the stories they picked as the winners would make it through a halfway decent literary magazine with an editorial board.

As far as the feedback I got on my story from the voters goes, the funniest feedback I got was from one reader who said she gave my story a high vote. But she actually put my story fifth out of six in the first round. That means she was confused about how the ranking works: one is the highest and six is the lowest. She meant to put me second, but she put me next-to-last. Her misunderstanding might have been enough to knock me out after round one. Overall, out of the six votes I got in round one, I got three second place votes, two fifth, one of which was by mistake, and a fourth place vote. The other person who put me in fifth wrote this: " I found the presentation of Jenna as a ‘hypocrite’ for being a powerful woman, but also having emotions, quite problematic. It wasn’t clear enough to me whether this was an intentional comment on the catch 22 of being a powerful woman or not, but it definitely struck me a little incongruous with the overall effect that I think you were trying to create." I don't know what to tell you, dude. It's a first-person story with an obviously flawed narrator, and I found it incredibly clear that you shouldn't take his attitude as the attitude of the story. If you don't get that it's satire after the uber-absurd ending, I don't know how to help you.

Overall, I'm sorry to say that Sixfold's voting process does not seem to work better than a board. There were, like there are with most journals, a lot of bad stories submitted, and each of those bad writers got a vote. The results are sad to me, because I really think it's a great idea to try. I wonder if more journals tried it, if there'd be a place where it worked better. I think the problem with this particular journal, based on the stories I read, is that the taste of the people submitting is rather sentimental. There were a lot of stories where the whole story was a series of sad events resolved with a sudden happy ending that referred to the title, which is kind of a bush league writing tactic. But I can imagine a community forming that has a different taste. If other journals did this, I think you might see identifiable styles emerge from those communities. Sixfold's idea is solid, it just so happens that the writers who submitted, at least in the contest I entered, don't seem to really like sophisticated stories, based on what I read and what I see the readers chose. I'd like to see other journals that try this idea, but with a grass-roots push for a particular aesthetic at the same time. I would describe Sixfold's aesthetic as "ninth-grade girl who's watched a lot of Hallmark Channel."

I'm really kind of sad. Not that I didn't do well. I mean, I wish I'd done better, mostly so it didn't seem so much like I'm just questioning the results now because I didn't do well. But I sort of thought, after reading the stories I saw during voting, that this wasn't my audience. I just really hoped that readers voting would lead to better work getting selected. I wanted to believe in democracy. But it turns out that, as the Internet proves every day, the masses quite often aren't very discerning.