(Annals of an Editor, #76)
The ongoing study of editors beset on all sides by personality conflicts, rights permission disputes, and editorial arguments in endless forms most awful. Authors' names have been removed, for the sake of privacy. Source texts other than the Editors' have been paraphrased, abridged and redacted for the sake of respecting copyright, and small changes may be made for the sake of clarity.
A real letter we sent to a real(ly despicable) submitter. Edited slightly for concision and to remove identifying information.
Dear AUTHOR:
I'm writing to you as a follow-up to the message ("Thank you for your non-form letter response...") you emailed yesterday to one of our staff members. I wish to advise you that if by adopting an antagonistic and wanton manner, your intention is to attract attention to your writing, you should not hope for much success.
In my experience such baiting will tend to work against you. (Happily, at the same time it works for the benefit of readers at large, for by such behavior editors are able to identify and ignore personalities who aren't likely to enter into constructive publishing relationships).
I encounter many different sorts of folks in this line of work, and I instruct the editors and readers under my supervision to expect to encounter the same. We take people as they come, and are as glad to advocate for the writing of an abject asshole as that of the nicest kid on the block, if the work in our view deserves the attention. I explain this so that when I tell you that your submissions and correspondence are no longer welcome at Clarion or any Pen & Anvil affiliate, you won't misunderstand our reason.
Your venomous message was abuse and vanity of so depraved a species that I find myself entirely uninterested in your experiments in literature.
Though your email is entirely disagreeable, I will admit to finding a scrap of pleasure in it: I look forward to sharing your message with my colleagues elsewhere in the writing world. They're going to get a kick out of you, vile racist misogynistic enfant risible that you are. (Though, I don't believe you will have much to teach them, however much you think you "know more about writing than they have forgotten." I daresay they know the words "kike" and "cunt" already.)
Should you require any clarification as to my message and meaning, feel free to look us up in Boston sometime. It'd be an additional pleasure to put a boot square on the flat of your ass.
With sincere prejudice, and on behalf of the whole pissed-off Clarion family,
Mr. Zachary Bos, Publisher
Edited to add a post-script:
People have asked, so here we offer one of the messages sent by this contributor to our staff member:
It's funny how starkly you can be reminded that society continues not to validate a woman. You don't have a right to professionalism... if you turn down a piece, you're a cunt.Edited to add another post-script:
We shared this author's submission with one of Clarion's contributing editors. He writes:
Understandably rejected. I also make my works shitty on purpose and then, instead of spending time to make them better, come up with uncreative insults. I gather from the email address that he is a student. Hopefully he isn't studying creative writing.
