My Name in Print

This week I finally got a copy of one of the journals where my work is appearing. It's funny how things work out. I've been working seriously on fiction for about a decade and have also dabbled in nonfiction and poetry, producing one piece each of those forms. Both of those pieces are now seeing publication while my fiction continues to be rejected. The nonfiction piece was written a few years ago, revised over a period of a couple years, and submitted to journals; one held onto it for a year before accepting it, and now several months later, I finally expect my copy in the mail any day. The poem was written one day a few years ago when I felt oddly inspired to put my thoughts into that form. I pretty much didn't touch it for about three years. Then last summer, I pulled it out, revised it, and sent it off. It was accepted to the first place I sent it, and now it's the first of my writing to actually see print. What an odd, odd process. I must say I am quite proud of this poem. I think it's damn fine, and I don't want to play down the accomplishment, but it's just so odd to achieve a bit of success on what is essentially my first effort when I've yet to truly taste that success on the work I've devoted thousands of hours to.

Anyway, this post isn't about the differences between fiction and poetry. (However, I do have one quick side note on that issue related to a previous post; I had earlier guessed that perhaps fewer people submit poetry, and since poetry takes up less physical space in a journal, more can be included; therefore, perhaps a higher percentage of poetry is accepted. Recently I read a statistic from one prominent journal: annually it receives about 800 poetry submissions and 3,200 prose submissions. Certainly that is only one example, but it again raises the question about acceptance rates among the different forms.) What I want to write about here is the quality of work that is out there being published in these tiny journals.

I must admit that after my poem was accepted so quickly (literally, the first place I submitted it wanted it), I started to wonder if perhaps that was a comment on the journal itself. If they wanted to publish ME, then maybe they weren't really very good. Maybe they had no taste and didn't recognize how crappy my work was. Maybe rather than working in my favor to demonstrate that I can write, being published at this journal would be a total waste of time because they're not legitimate. They're a joke, and putting this publication on my CV will show that I'm a joke, too.

So I got the issue in the mail this week. The first thing I did, of course, was turn to my poem and look at my own work in print. But shortly thereafter, I read through all the contributor's notes to see who else this little journal was publishing. Was it as I feared, that it was full of junk? I was stunned to read the bios of my fellow contributors. Most of them had published fairly widely, many in top tier literary journals. There were writers whose work had been in print for decades, authors of full length books, tenured professors, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate. Clearly this is not a tiny little insignificant journal that will publish any crap that is mailed to them in a manila envelope. And, yet, it is fairly small. I suspect it has few subscribers and is only sold at the school bookstore at the university that publishes it. But even so, accomplished writers are publishing in this journal.

Then again, perhaps writers who have achieved success at more prestigious journals send off their lesser work to smaller places. Maybe this is the place to throw away stuff that otherwise isn't good enough to be published. As I've read through the issue, I haven't found this to be the case. I'm very impressed with the quality of writing. Although small, this is a fine, fine journal. And I'm proud to have my work appear beside such fantastic writing.

The conclusion I come to then is this: even the very small journals you've never heard of are publishing truly great work. Established writers are not too proud to send their pieces to a wide variety of places, which means that when beginning writers are submitting their work, the competition is incredibly fierce. We don't simply need to be better than the other beginning writers. We need to be as good or better than the writers who have been publishing for decades. This experience reinforces my view that it is amazingly difficult to break in. But it also cements my understanding that getting published at all, having any small journal accept one's work, is quite meaningful. There are many, many great writers out in the world, and to be able to have one's words appear in the same place as those other writers is really a comment on one's abilities.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I'm getting another piece published, and this time it's something totally unlike what I normally write. I think of myself as a fiction writer, primarily as a novelist. I worked hard on one nonfiction piece that came together and is soon to be published. But I also wrote one poem that has recently been accepted for publicatoin. Apart from a handful of poems to fulfill a high school English class requirement, I don't think I've written any other poetry. But a couple of years ago, I had an idea for a poem and sat down and wrote it. It seemed halfway decent to me, but what do I know? I'm not a poet, and I don't read a lot of poetry, so I never bothered to submit it to journals or anything. Then this summer, I decided to pull it out and look at it again. I rewrote it and decided I might as well send it out. On the off chance that it got accepted somewhere, it would be nice to have an exra credit on my CV. Plus, unlike with my fiction, I didn't have much at stake in the submission process. If it got rejected, it wouldn't much hurt my feelings because I know I'm not a poet. So I sent it out, and it got accepted.

Of course, I'm thrilled to have one more thing published. This will be another credit on my CV, and publishing in multiple genres could help me get teaching jobs as it demonstrates that I am qualified to teach a mixed workshop course without completely alienating those writers interested in poetry. And when I looked over the poem again, I must admit that I think it's pretty good. The language is carefully chosen, there's a nice rhythm to it, and there's some alliteration that I think really helps the whole thing resonate. But having this piece of writing accepted while I'm still waiting for acceptances for my fiction, which I've worked much harder and longer on, leaves me wondering if I can draw any conclusions from this experience.

One thing that I've decided about this--one great, wonderful, positive thing--is that I do in fact have an ability to use language well. I've long felt that, as a writer, beautiful writing is not my specialty. I've read a number of stories in workshops over the years where I have greatly admired the writer's ability to put words together into beautiful sentences even when I didn't much care for the actual story the writer was telling. I've seen this same thing with published stories as well. Literary journals are full of beautifully written, boring stories (this is often what I think about when I hear criticism of MFA style writing). And while I admired my peers' abilities, I accepted that I wasn't so naturally gifted. But I've worked hard to hone my language skills. I try to pay attention to my diction and to the rhythm and flow of my writing, and I think my prose is much nicer now. So having a success in the world of poetry, which is so much more about one's ability to use language than it is to convey meaning or be clear, well, that tells me that I have been successful in developing my skills there. So, well done me.

But there's another conclusion I draw. I'm hesitant to bring this up because I fear it will seem derogatory and I don't intend it that way. I have admiration and respect for poets. I fully acknowledge that I am not one of them and apart from this one instance of dabbling in their field, I cannot do what they do. But the conclusion I draw is that it may actually be easier to get poetry published than to get fiction published. And what I mean by this is not that it's easier to write poetry or that the standards for poetry are less vigorous. I mean that purely from a numbers standpoint, there's more room for journals to publish poetry. I was glancing at a few journals the other day and counted up the different types of work. From my extremely limited survey I concluded that many journals publish in a typical issue perhaps four or five short stories, two or three essays, and twenty or so poems. This, of course, varies greatly. Some journals will publish dozens of stories. Others publish no nonfiction at all. But of those journals that publish both poetry and fiction, it is highly likely that while the number of pages dedicated to fiction in a given issue outnumber the pages of poetry, there are more actual poems than there are stories.

I also imagine (and again, this is pure speculation) that there are fewer poets out in the world submitting their work. Because it is something that many view as specialized and difficult and almost magical, many writers are reluctant to attempt poetry. But many of those same people assume they can write a story because it's the same kind of language they use everyday when writing e-mails. Any literate person knows how to write prose, so why not a piece of fiction? So I would guess that there are more aspiring fiction writers than aspiring poets in the world and more writers submit fiction than submit poetry. But even if I'm wrong there and the numbers are even, that still means that a journal could recieve a hundred poems and a hundred stories and find space in an issue to publish twenty percent of those poems and in the same number of pages only two or three percent of the stories. So while all of those poems may be wonderful, it's quite likely that some wonderful stories are rejected at the same time because there simply isn't enough space for all the good ones.

It's possible (or likely) that I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all wild speculation, but I'd guess that on a whole it is statistically likelier to have a poem accepted than a story. Once again, let me emphasize that I don't intend to show disrespect for poets and what they do; however, when I finally get a story published, it will feel more significant to me than having this poem published.