On "humankind & nature"

Graphic from the homepage for the course "Human Nature and Human Diversity" at Rutgers University.

The following text was included in a call for submissions sent out earlier this year for our journal of nature poetry:

      Hawk & Whippoorwill, whose theme is “man and nature,” is now reading submissions for our December issue. We invite you to submit yourselves, or, to share this call for submissions with other writers in your circle.
      Originally published back in the 60s, H&W has been host to poets from all walks of life, and we hope to continue that tradition with the “new series” revival of the magazine ... We will gladly accept any unpublished poems which deal with our theme of man and nature. (Of course, we read “man” as “humanity” here, not as a gendered term. While we inherit the original tagline, we are definitely interested in challenging its restrictive implication!)

Among the replies we received to this solicitation, we got a particularly thought-provoking email from Barbara Ras. She wrote:

An honest reply to an unpleasant author

(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.

E.B. White to Shirley Wiley, 1954

"An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write." From a letter from E.B. White to Shirley Wiley, 1954. 

Extracts from our author correspondence

Over the course of our working with an author to bring a text to a publishable state of completion, it is par for the course to see many dozens of emails and letters exchanged. It seems a shame at times that the attention, appreciation and rapport on display in this correspondence can't also be shared in the book, alongside and around the text which was its cause for being. There is much in this halo of text-around-the-text that would charm or illuminate the reader. By way of example:

One of our Press authors (an actor, professionally) not long ago wrote to us regarding her novel in progress. Her reflection on novel-writing is a valuable insight into her self-knowledge as a writer:

I find I cannot write but inch-by-inch, word-by-word, like a poet does. Somehow I cannot make the large picture into a motor. The intricate specificity of a chain of moments: this is the province of an actor. I am not a terrible director, but my chief talent is for another type of thought; but I hope maybe someday to come up with not-a-terrible novel. 

And now for a bit of charm. In this excerpt from our correspondence with the same author, she responds to our editor's suggestions for the revision of a line of text. Of the two alternatives proposed, she writes:

The first is clearly lovelier, though you know I liked the image of being on "stilts in a sea of jelly." I'm such a sucker for an unusual metaphor and a clear image. . . I have never cared for poems that play hard to get. I have no time for it in personal relationships, either. A smiler, not smirker. That's my goal. Some would argue this was to my detriment in both cases.

(Emphasis added). The phrase "stilts on a sea of jelly" just begs for focused attention on its playful image, doesn't it? Well: we keep scrupulous records here in the office, so perhaps there will be a time when we produce a 'social text' edition of one of our books. It's a project we shall have to see done someday...