Regarding lit mag submissions and prior publication

(Annals of an Editor, #75)

This weekend I was at a reading for a group of plein air poets whose work had been gathered together for yet another chapbook by editor Susan Richmond. The poets had been invited to visit the orchards and sculpture gardens of Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Mass., where each of them selected a spot to stand or sit, and in that moment take in the landscape, as a painter does when capturing a scene in the moment. The poems produced in response were each in accordance with this year’s theme: “memoir.”

(At the reading, many people said it was a perfect day for poetry, commenting on the bright sunshine, on the late summer gold in the air. I rather felt that this was a terrible day for poetry… A day suitable for a picnic, or sitting beside the beach, is not a good day for a poem. Snowy days, foggy days, thunderstorm days—any day you have to stay inside, that’s a good day for poetry reading.)

After the reading, we two dozen poets and sixty-something guests mingled on the grass beside the mill pond and ate canapés and drank lemonade while we chatted. More than once, I was asked about our new publication, Hawk & Whippoorwill. Or rather, not a new publication, but one renewed, for H&W was first published in the 60s, edited by August Derleth of Arkham House; and then again in a “new series”, edited by a group of Boston-based writers, about a decade ago. This latest revival is therefore the third life for the magazine.

Given that the order of the day at Old Frog Pond Farm was plein air poetry, it was natural enough that people wanted to talk about the new Hawk & Whippoorwill, the focus of which is poems “of humanity and nature.” It turns out that my call for submissions had been circulating among this crowd, and more than one person there had already submitted. And here is where I get to the point of today’s post.

More than one poet expressed concern that they had committed a faux pas by submitting material that has previously appeared somewhere, be it a blog, chapbook, or even, in one case, as a spoken word performance on the radio.

Here’s what I told them: They should not have patience, as I do not have patience, with publications that give a damn about prior appearances. 

Pushcart editor on The Right to Publish

The right to publish what you believe is an essential of any democracy. It is not to be denied by government, local censorship or publishing conglomerates. 

-- Bill Henderson, editor of Pushcart Press, in his Preface to the revised edition (1980) of The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition and Know-How.

Tearing it up

Pictured: Proof pages of a forthcoming poetry collection proof,
torn in half this morning when we finished working with them.

One of the ways we avoid drowning in a sea of hard-copy mss and tss in our editorial operations is making sure to discard what we don't need. When we've marked up a proof, we scan the pages to PDF (for the benefit of future bibliographers) and then do what we need to with the paper. In the case of the pages pictured, we needed to transfer corrections from hard copy to the electronic file. When all of the instructions on any single sheet of paper have been followed, we rip the page in half. That way, there's no risk of coming across the paper again in some other context and finding ourselves uncertain whether we need to do something with it, or if its ready to be tossed.

When you measure the magnitude of your week's work obligations in terms of the height of the stacks of paper piled around your work desk, as editors do, there are few things more satisfying that being able to tear a sheet in half and know that you have banished its demands forever. [P&A]

On slow submissions

This stock rejection form from the Essanay Film Management Company of Chicago back in the day has been making the rounds in the literary blogosphere for a few years, popping up on blogs like Literary Rejections on Display. We laughed out loud when we first saw it; it's a gas! Then we 'shopped it up nice and sharp and framed it for our press office wall.

Authors have a lot of time on their hands around the holidays, when the business of their workaday jobs slows down, and many shops turn out their employees for seasonal time off. This means that the pace of correspondence in a literary press picks up, since authors have the time to follow-up on submissions, and check in on projects that have been hanging fire, and buzz the tower about forgotten commitments.