(David Baker, Jill Bialosky, MB Caschetta, Rob Spillman, Melissa Stein) Top editors from W. W. Norton, Tin House, and the Kenyon Review join emerging writers (including a literary-rejection blog author) to dish about exactly how submissions are evaluated, what it's like to rebuff so many labors of love, the mysterious hierarchy of rejection slips, whether and how the best work really gets published, tips to avoid surefire rejection - and how to maintain faith in your work and your voice even when rejections keep piling up. Audience questions encouraged!

Published Date: June 3, 2015

Transcription

Voice:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2015 AWP Conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Rob Spillman, Jill Bialosky, David Baker, and M.B. Caschetta. You will now hear Melissa Stein provide introductions.

 

Melissa Stein:

We’re happy to have you here. So we’re hoping to provide an immensely entertaining, or at least mildly informative, panel to launch your AWP experience, and I wanted to start with a few brief rejection letters and see if you can guess what is being rejected.

 

“First we must ask, does it have to be a whale? Well, this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device. We recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the captain be struggling with the depravity toward young, perhaps voluptuous maidens?”

 

(Audience laughter)

 

“I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being. One at the same time. Not two, not three. Only one. Only one life to live. Only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your manuscript three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look. Only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one, hardly one.”

 

(Audience laughter)

 

“Overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. The whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

 

(Audience laughter)

 

So that of course was Moby Dick, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Lolita. So, apparently a couple more short rejection stories. Apparently Stephen King collected rejections of Carrie on a spike in his bedroom, okay, you know just put them there one by one, and his wife had to rescue the manuscript from the trash, because he threw it out because he just gave up on it. The E.E. Cummings best seller The Enormous Room actually has a dedication page with “With no thanks to all fifteen publishers who rejected it,” which is an idea for your acknowledgments page when you are, you know, ready to go. No, don’t do that, not a good idea. Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wracked up 121 rejections and is actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for most rejections for a best seller. So, something we can all aspire to.

 

So today we’re gonna be talking about rejection obviously, what happens on the way to those rejection slips, and how in the world to keep sending your work out, when it keeps getting turned down over, and over, and over again. So our plan is that each of us is going to chat for a few minutes about some aspect of rejection, and we’re gonna have a round-robin discussion. We’re also planning to leave time for questions. Hopefully you’ve got questions in case we don’t get to the topic that’s first on your list.

 

So to make things easy, we’re gonna start on this side of the room and work our way to the other side. Since you have full bios in your books, we’re not gonna have long ones, but I did want to introduce our panelists. Rob Spillman is editor and cofounder of Tin House, as well as the executive editor of Tin House Books. He’s written for publications as diverse as Baltimore Sun, British GQ, New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated. Jill Bialosky is an editor at W.W. Norton, and the author of several novels and books of poems. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, and many, many, many more. David Baker, poetry editor of Kenyon Review, is a poet, critic, and editor. His recent books include Scavenger Loop; Show Me Your Environment, a book of essays; and Never-Ending Birds, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. And M.B. Caschetta, the author of the newly published novel Miracle Girls—yay—has been blogging anonymously, until she very recently outed herself. She’s been blogging since 2007. And your friendly neighborhood moderator, I’m Melissa Stein, the author of Rough Honey. So we’re gonna kick things off with Rob Spillman.

 

Rob Spillman:

Thank you! Thanks, Melissa. Thanks, everybody, for coming out this morning. So, I have been rejected many, many, many times. I continue to be rejected, over and over and over. I have a memoir coming out from Grove next April, and that was rejected many, many places. So I, you know, I feel all of your pains, but I also...I reject a lot. I get anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 submissions per year for Tin House, so you can do the math on that, on how much I’m a quarter late. So I am a firm believer that good work rises and it needs to find an audience. I’m glad that my own work’s been rejected in a bunch of places, so I’m a firm believer that good work rises and finds it’s right home eventually, once you’ve, you know, made it as good as possible. Every single year I look in Best American Stories and see stories that I rejected, you know, and most of the time I’m okay with that. They were not a Tin House story. They’re just not something I wanted to put into the magazine. I’m happy for those authors. So I’m rejecting things all the time just because they’re not the right fit for me. Or, I just’ve done something very similar, you know? I just happen to have bought a story about, say, a three-legged dog, and you submit a three-legged-dog story. I have to send a contrite note saying, really, you know, it’d be a little weird to turn my magazine into the Three-Legged Dog Journal. So you know, I reject for all sorts of reasons, and my biggest piece of advice is to divorce your ego from the process. I know that’s really, really hard because you’ve put your heart and soul into your work and it’s really hard not to take rejection of your work as a rejection of yourself. It’s like, they’re not the right time or place, needs more polish, or it’s just not a right fit. It’s a rejection of yourself. You know, every single person does that. So what I found is really helpful is to not only do due diligence on giving yourself the best chance to not be rejected, and I mean that should be taken for granted: Send in your best possible work. Send it to where you think it should have a good home; don’t just scatter-shot it to wrack up rejections. Be really diligent in your homework on where it should be. Is this a Tin House story, or would this be more fitting in Gulf Coast? Whatever it is, target your audience, your work. And then send out your work when you are in an accounting mood. Do not send your work out when you’re in a creative mood. If you’re feeling creative, create. When you feel like cooking or arranging your shelves, or just getting things in order, that’s when...you know, your non-creative, organizational brain is doing, that in my experience, that gives you...that sort of protects your ego a little bit. Also remember that you are sending your work basically to yourself. Everybody who is receiving your work is a voracious reader. They are probably socially awkward, but they have figured out how to get paid to read work. And they love it! They love it! Or not get paid, a lot of them are volunteers, but we all do this because we love it! We love finding new exciting work, and having our assumptions overturned. That is a really exciting part of the job. So imagine yourself receiving something, you know, that you’re going to be excited about. You know, it’s a way of sort of demystifying. We’re not these people up on an ivory tower going, “Mwa-ha-ha. That mortal thinks he can write?” It’s like, when I’m reading a stack of work, I’m really hoping that there is something in there that reminds me of why I love my job. And I do love my job, you know? It’s just, I get paid to read. It’s crazy. So, I just want to end my sort of general remarks by saying it’s really exciting to discover someone. Like, in an early issue, I published a story by Emily Raboteau; it’s called “Kavita Through Glass.” And when I accepted the story, she was saying, “I was just about to give up on this one. It was rejected by twenty other journals.” And it was perfect for me, and it was picked up by Best American Stories. And it was her first short story. I have lots and lots of stories like that.

 

(Applause)

 

Jill Bialosky:

So, imagine your work, your novel or stories or poems, is on submission with the publisher and after all the waiting, you receive feedback. “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Harsh! And who was the unfortunate, untalented author in question? Sylvia Plath. The history of books and literature is riddled with these sorts of rejections.

 

“I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently, the author intends to be funny, possibly even satire, but it is really not funny at any intellectual level.” The now classic satire Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

 

‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have the special perception or feeling that would lift that book above the curiosity level.’  This publisher did not foresee the power of The Diary of Anne Frank. It was rejected fifteen times before it was published.

 

Louisa May Alcott was told to stick to teaching. Proust had to pay for his own publisher for Remembrance of Things Past, self-published. Lord of the Flies was rejected twenty times, Joyce’s Dubliners twenty-two times, Gone with the Wind thirty-eight times, and as Melissa said, E.E. Cummings faced rejections so frequently that the title of his mid-career collection No Thanks referred to his publishers’ rejections.

 

So here are some snippets from letters editors wish they hadn’t written, and these were collected in a really fun book called Rotten Rejections by Andre Bernard. So, about Jorge Luis Borges: “Utterly untranslatable.” Isaac Singer: “It’s Poland and the rich Jews again.” Anaïs Nin: “There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and in my opinion, no artistic.” So basically, these anecdotes prove that rejection, of course, is not a marker of worth or talent. The most successful, esteemed, best-selling writers have been rejected, their work criticized, panned, and misunderstood.

 

But while age-old wisdom will advise you to rise above rejection, to not take it so personally, I suggest the opposite. Do take it personally. Use the sting of rejection to further your work. The poet Phillip Schultz, if I understand him correctly, calls this phenomenon “The Shit Bird.” The bird that rests on your shoulders that tells you you’re not good enough. Defy it. Prove it wrong. Rejection, although painful and frustrating, can be a positive experience for a writer, fueling the fire and maintaining motivation and dedication. The drive to prove someone wrong is a powerful one. It forces authors to become more rigorous with their own work, their own vision, and their own intention. And it...I think it can act as a catalyst to help a writer rethink their project sometimes—revise, perfect, and embolden with the drive to get it right. To get it to be the work that you want it to be. Not the work that you want an editor to accept. My first manuscript of poems, The End of Desire, underwent at least five or six titles, numerous configurations, was a finalist for so many competitions I couldn’t count them anymore, until finally it was taken by an editor at Knopf, who told me he absolutely felt there was no chance in how he’d ever be able to take this book, but he’d read it anyway. And then I wanted to also say, my first novel, House Under Snow, was rejected so many times, and written over from three different points of view, that at one time I considered burying it in my backyard.

 

So the point here is to be emboldened by rejection—to be liberated by the knowledge that approval does not equal worthiness. Use it to own your project, to hold it up to the highest standards, and just make sure those standards are your own. So as a writer I would advise: Do take it personally. As an editor I would assure you, the reasons why we reject projects are completely impersonal. They often have little to do with how good or bad the writer is. Many manuscripts cross our desk. Most are worthy or well written to some degree. Few are great or brilliant or completely singular. When assessing a submission, I have to ask myself whether the book is right for the house that employs me. For instance, a manuscript might be right for Simon & Schuster, or a house like Riverhead, but not really a great fit for Norton—and that would be based on the experiences we’ve had publishing different kinds of novels or nonfiction or different kinds of poetry. That’s why I guess over the years I have found that, in fact, in writing rejection letters, I used to do this very earnestly, very thoughtfully, very carefully if I liked a novel, and I would sort of come up with the reasons why I felt that the book wasn’t completely working, and sometimes these, you know, would spend, you know, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes on one letter, just really thinking about it, and then it occurred to me after a couple of years of doing this, that really I was wasting my time, and the author’s time, because I’ve come to feel that you should not put your work in the hands of somebody who’s not fully committed to it. Who hasn’t really made a...hasn’t, you know, decided that they want to come to Norton, or that I want...I feel this is a book that I could really work on. In other words, I have friends who have submitted their novels to twenty or thirty publishers and they can come up with at least ten reasons why the book didn’t work for that particular editor, but it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with that book; it just meant that it didn’t speak to that particular editor.

 

And I think that that’s the message that I want to get across today—that it’s very subjective. It’s very much about finding the right fit, and about...I think all the editors on this panel would say that we really have to fall in love with something and really feel that we understand the book, the novel, this book of stories, the work of poetry, and feel that we know how to...that we...that I guess I feel as an editor that I have to make the commitment to the work itself and know how to project that to the reader and that’s really what a job...in other words, an editor works, I think, best for a project they’ve already committed to, and that one should not take personally anything an editor says unless they’re willing to buy your book. That’s how I feel about it.

 

(Audience applause)

 

Melissa Stein:

So I kept banging and banging on this door of publication for years and years and years before my book got picked up. I mean, seriously, I couldn’t count, but do not want to count, and have deliberately avoided counting how many contests I submitted to, how many different manuscripts I submitted, how many...you know...for a couple of years I was sending out two separate full-length manuscripts at twenty-five dollars a pop. You can imagine how much that wracks up to, you know, if you’re submitting to all of the contests, and then finally I took the strongest poems from each of those two manuscripts and did sort of a “best of” manuscript, sent that out for a year and a half, and that won the APR/Honickman Prize. So you never know; I mean, I probably spent all my prize money before I even saw any prize money. Also, the poem contest that you send out to, and, you know, hundreds and hundreds of submissions...I was preparing for this. I just counted...there’s one poem that I sent out thirty-four times over fourteen years before it got taken. And that’s kind of representative of several poems. And sometimes, you know, you’d let go of work along the way because it just doesn’t meet your standards anymore. But sometimes you maintain a tenderness and belief in this work. And you stay with it over time and eventually it finds a home, and you’re still tickled when it comes out. So, as in my case, many first books these days are actually fourth or fifth books because it takes so long to get them published, and it might seem like a horrible thing to you that your first work was not seen in the way you intended, but on the flip side it might be a more mature book that actually serves you better in the long run and gets you read in a different way, and that’s how, you know, that’s how I see it. Then maybe your MFA thesis might, maybe if it gets picked up right out of the gate. So if that does happen to you, if it takes a while, you don’t have to despair. You can let go of some of your earlier work and it’s not, you know, it’s not a bad thing to do that. You just keep sending your work out, keep building up your publication lists, keep building up your acknowledgment lists, because it can move you forward and make a difference. A lot of this stuff is cumulative. You get one publication; you get a better publication. And it snow balls, and you find you’re getting a lot more attention. So, I mean, all that said, until your career gains momentum and people know who you are and even after that, and maybe especially after, as Rob and Jill have mentioned, it can really be a crapshoot, whether you get published...whether a particular work gets published.

 

And one thing that might not have occurred to you if you’re an emerging writer who is submitting and submitting and submitting and getting rejected, is that you’re actually in this space of total freedom, where anything could happen. You know, you could win any award, you could get published in the New Yorker, you’re just starting out, and that’s an amazing feeling, you know. If you don’t know editors personally, you can send out without feeling the pressure that this editor won’t feel like this is your best work, that you’re not living up to yourself and the poems that you...that people know you for, or even worse, that this editor is publishing you because he or she knows you personally, and then you know...you’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” you know, it’s like you’re thinking First-World problems, right? But I’m just bringing this up because I don’t think anyone ever talks about it. Once you do cross the threshold, there are just as many ways to feel insecure and, you know, to come flagellate yourself about your work, and...as there are when you’re just beginning. So, I just want you to treasure that sense of possibility, and it’s such a breathtaking feeling, I think, having everything in front of you.

 

Just a couple more things...I mean, it might take a year, it might take five years, it make take ten years, but I believe also that the best work does eventually find a home. If the work is strong, it’s gonna get out there whether it’s through a book contest or through another route. Also, if you think about the work that you love, and the work that you do not like, I mean I probably dislike ninety-five or maybe ninety-nine percent of the poems that I read. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect them and think they’re fine work, but I don’t “love” them; I don’t respond to them. So how can you fault an editor, or a contest reader, or a judge for feeling the same way about your work? You are not your work, you know? Your work is your work. So, as has been mentioned, it’s not a personal thing. It can take a while to find the right readers. Major Jackson, the poetry editor at Harvard Review, says he spends a maximum of two minutes on submissions and rarely gets to the fifth line of the poem. I’ll read a little quote:

 

“The dirty secret of journals and probably what defines most of the literary world: we are a culture of rejection, and I am doing my small part to keep the status quo. ... Yet, when one encounters a work of art that challenges and reaffirms, that seems magical by its mere existence, one can only say Amen and feel blessed for once again having been baptized in the art of poetry.”

 

So there’s preparations, and there’s kick-ass poems and stories, but there’s also timing and luck. So once your book gets out there, once your work gets out there, it’s not gonna matter to you how long it took, or who rejected you along the line—well, maybe a little bit—but mostly no. So the doors that you felt were closed to you all that time are gonna start opening one by one, and it’s really a miraculous feeling, and when your work starts getting read and you go out to bookstores and bars and schools to meet the people who are reading your work, you realize that your writing doesn’t belong just to you, and a kind of circle gets completed that began when you wrote the first word of that story or the first word of that poem, and there’s a sense of completion, and there’s nothing like it. And if that doesn’t happen, well, then you still put something you feel is strong and beautiful in the world and you’ve made something, you’ve added something, and I think that’s worthy.

 

(Audience applause)

 

David Baker:

Hi everybody. How many of you are in this room, do you figure? Four hundred? Something like five hundred? When we began last fall at the Kenyon Review (this is why I do this), our open-submission reading period on September 15th, over the next four days, this is how many people submitted to my magazine. Do the math. How many people are here at AWP? Did you hear numbers?

 

Audience member:

Twelve thousand.

 

David Baker:

Twelve thousand. That’s exactly how many submissions we got in three months last year at the Kenyon Review. I am pleased to speak with you today and sit here with these other editors. We tend to be a lonely and set-upon group. It’s not an accident that this looks like the coliseum. (laughter) What does that make us down here? I wish we were talking today about editors and saying yes. That’s why we do this work. Not to say no. It’s a much more pleasurable and rare occurrence to say yes. I would like to be clear about this, in fact. This is not why I became a literary editor. I’m gonna talk for just a few minutes and try to leave us a lot of time because I know you have questions.

 

The first thing you should know is that there’s no conspiracy. There’s no insider trading. There are no secrets. A few people do a massive amount of work. This is not my job. I have a job. I’m a teacher at another college—not Kenyon. That makes me a real moron, doesn’t it? (laughter) I do not have an MFA. I never took a summer workshop on how to be a publisher or editor. I never took the class. None of that stuff. A few people show up and do the work. That’s how it gets done. More about that professional thing...I really regret and am worried about the amped up hyper-professional atmosphere of all of this. Or the fiction of the professionalization of all of this. What is at stake, after all? I think this is more important than anything else I’m gonna say today or this week. I try to teach my own students, and I try to practice the absolute value of amateur status. I was in the elevator yesterday. Two handsome young men looking at each other, and one looked down and said, I swear to God, “Where did you get those poetry shoes?” We have websites; somebody is sitting in here tweeting this shit right now. We have agents for readings and our books. People make up spreadsheets, playlists, so they can be bad-asses or rock stars. Are you kidding me? Here’s why I do this work. I live in a little town. Three thousand people. And this is my way of participating in a really big, cool conversation. Why I read all of this stuff. I do it because I’m good at it. And it matters. I do it because this is a kind of citizenship in a world that I prefer to live in; I’m kind of a social skeptic. I don’t do a lot of social things that a lot of people do in the political world. I like this one. And this is my way of being a citizen. I do this work so that the poets I read tell me what’s important.

 

I don’t...this is extremely important maybe to me...I don’t know what I’m looking for. That’s the first question people ask. “What are you looking for for poetry?” I don’t know. I don’t know. I want you to tell me that. And that’s the poem I’m looking for. The one that says, “David, shut the hell up. Listen to this. You didn’t know this before.” And those are the hard ones. The ones I have to sit with. I don’t know if I agree with Major, saying I know in five lines I’m not gonna read that poem. I spend a little more than that. But I go through them pretty quickly. I have to. It’s the ones that are remarkably strange, or new, or estranging, or challenging, that I have to sit with for a while and let them readjust what I know about reading. It’s like that. That’s the one you’re looking for. I’ve written about this before if you are interested. There’s a great book called Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry that a guy named Steve Corey put together ten years ago. If you want to read editors talking about what they’re looking for, go find that book. I won’t waste your time with that. Here, I’ve written an essay called, “Why I Chose It” about a long poem by a woman named Solmaz Sharif that was published in the Kenyon Review online about a year ago. Find that. In the very next issue of the Kenyon Review, I have another essay called “Why I Chose It” about a special feature in the next issue of my magazine on eco-poetry. So read those things.

 

Here’s what I look for. Four things. I just made this up, by the way. But they seemed to be true when I wrote them down. I look to be surprised. I’m not kidding. I’m looking for the thing I didn’t know I was looking for. I want to be refocused. I want to feel that something new is being added to the world with this thing that I’m gonna take. I want to be profoundly engaged. I’m looking for that. I want my attention to go zoom! And it may be the subject. It may be the form. It may be the language. I want to be reengaged with my art, and a single poem can do that. It can say, “Pay attention. You didn’t know this.” I want to read that piece that seems more curious about the world than even I am. And it’s working through its curiosities right there on the page. That is to say, it wasn’t done before the person began writing. The person in the course of the writing of this thing and the revising of this thing answered some curiosity that she had, and I follow along and see that. And four, and I don’t know how to explain this one, but I know it when I see it: authenticity. The real one. Not bullshit. Not somebody doing another fucking prompt. I hate that word. Prompt. Like here, here’s why I say no: ’cause it wasn’t good enough.

 

I mean, there’s a lot of other reasons. The numbers, the math, is ridiculous. There are eleven poets in this issue of the Kenyon Review. Sixteen poems in this whole issue. Now we come out—we publish six times a year instead of four. The magazine’s a little more streamlined—a hundred and twenty. But do the math, do the math. What’s sixteen poems times six, seven? About seventy-five? Ninety-six? Yeah. See? Close. Less than a hundred poems over a year, and how many...let’s see...that’s about five thousand submissions...how many poems per submission? Five...twenty...twenty-five thousand poems for a hundred? I say “no” because almost always the poem needs another draft. Or two. Stop writing so many poems. Instead of writing ten poems, revise that one ten times. Do that one. I say no because of the trite, the clichéd, the overfamiliar, the sloppy, the worst thing that you can do in a poem. I say ‘no’ to the slick, just as bad as the sloppy, and again, I say ‘no’ to that poem that feels to me like it was the fulfillment of a prompt. There’s a lot more to say. I even brought some of my own rejection slips. This is a cool one. I know you can’t see it. I miss paper! I have this whole collection of all the rejection slips I’ve ever received. This is a picture of a dapper 17th-century man punching another one right in the mouth. This was the rejection slip. This was from Kayak magazine. They were very famous. They had dozens of pictures, and according to the picture, you know how bad they hated you. I kind of liked that. Didn’t have to say much, although it’s typed down here: “Sorry.” As this guy’s punching the other one. I miss paper.

 

Now what I do at the Kenyon Review is hit a button and it says “no.” I have two different buttons. I have a “no” button and I have a “really nice no” button. I don’t have time to write back. I don’t even have time to write, “I’m sorry.” If I did that, say, a hundred times today, well, I’m just like everybody else, whatever I’m doing, if I’m doing my editing, I should be doing something else, and I just don’t have time. You have a lot of questions, and I’ll move this along.

 

(Audience applause)

 

M.B. Caschetta:

I will be posting that rejection on Literary Rejections on Display today. I took a picture.

 

So when we met this morning, just before the conference, I walked up and I said, “Oh, you guys are the rejecters and I’m the rejected, right?” So I’m like everybody else in the audience and it’s sort of a miracle that I would be invited on this panel, but you might know me better as the green frowny face from Literary Rejections on Display. People know that blog? Anybody? One person...two people. Well, back in the day when blogs were alive, as my spouse always says, it was quite something, but it was 2007 and I wanted to start a blog and I didn’t know what I had that was different about me, so I knew I had a million rejections. Turns out it’s not any different than you, but I didn’t know that then because nobody talked about rejections. Everything you heard here before me we weren’t privy to until very recently when this became a subject. So I started a literary rejection display, and I just started posting my rejections, and I crossed out my name, but I kept the other...the rejecter’s name on it, and I made a little fun sometimes about what they said, yeah, like, “You don’t want to fall in love with me really.” Whatever. So that went on and it...no one had done this, so I began to get legal letters and death threats. Somebody said, “You’ll never get published in this town.” And I said, “I’m not getting published anyway; that’s why I have the blog!” Eventually someone noticed, and Entertainment Weekly said about the blog, “Failure is the new funny.” And it became a thing.

 

And then when I ran out of my rejections, I think my rejections at the time—I would send out thirty and get one acceptance, so thirty-to-one was my ratio. And many of you wrote in and told me what your ratios were, but then you all started sending me your rejections, so then we put all those up, and we talked about those, and sometimes we had a few controversies. The Virginia Quarterly was one. Darin Strauss was one. You can look at www.literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com and you can see what those controversies were. They were fun. And then also started to find the famous rejections and started putting those up. Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, all of the ones that were read today are up there on that blog, and I did use the book that you mentioned, Jill. So this was probably the rejection that got me to write the blog, or sort of convinced me:

 

“Sorry. These stories are well enough written, but the material seems rather showily outsider. More posture than we like. But thanks.”

 

That’s from the New Yorker. That editor is no longer there. When I posted, it she was no longer there. And it was the week that they published Junot Díaz. I think it’s because of—it was like a story that had a lesbian in it. She thought that was showily outsider—which was fun.

 

So for fifteen years, I had fifteen years of rejections up there. And then I...including contests, including sending it out. Just like you. I got a community gathered on that blog, and we all were, you know, we all have rejections. We talked about whether you should get an MFA. We talked about every possible thing that you can possibly think about as a writer rejected, and that was of course my anonymous name. I blogged under Writer, Rejected, with a green frowny face.

 

So in 2014, after all those rejections that we all lived through, my book got published, and it was covered in People Magazine (audience applause). On the same week that Stephen King and Annie Lamott, who—they’re always trying to steal my spotlight, I’m telling you. That’s crazy, as you know, that’s like literary lottery. And I got this book published because I entered it in a contest. It’s a novel I was writing for fifteen years. It did not win the contest, which I think is funny, but the publisher wrote to me at the end of the year, which was like December 31st, and said, “I can’t stop thinking about your characters. I think I should make that my fourth book.” So to micropress Engine Books. Wonderful literary press, Engine Books, prizes, you should all send your manuscripts there. The publishers’ mom and pop out of Indianapolis are wonderful. And I’m gonna be signing today at two if you want to come by and talk to me there. But anyway, about rejection, here’s what I want to tell you, very quickly.

 

Do what you need to do with your pain. Seriously. Cry to your shrink. Cry to your spouse. Scream in a pillow. See your shrink. Think about a bonfire. I know someone who papered his bathroom with his rejections. Or write a blog—I mean, so now it’s already been done and now everyone’s doing it, so think of something else that no one’s doing, and do that. But decipher what the letter says. You’re not good enough. You know what? There’s no shame in that. Nobody starts out good enough. You’re not good enough. That’s the message. Usually that’s a kind of form rejection where the first no that gets pressed. You are good enough, but your story’s not good enough. People, fifteen years, it takes a long time. And we’re writers. We’re controlling this book. But at some point we have to let it go and let it be its own thing. That’s so hard. So when we’re controlling it, we’re gonna send it out to everybody we know in publishing and they’re gonna say whatever they say that we can decipher that means it’s not good enough yet. And there’s no shame in that. It takes a long time, and sometimes you need feedback. Sometimes you need a rejection, because you don’t know. You are good enough, and your story is good enough, but it’s missing something. It takes a long time to figure out what the hell it’s missing. But don’t give up. You never give up. If you’re getting rejections, you’re just a writer. That’s all it means. It doesn’t mean anything else. If you can decipher what those rejection letters say, that’s great. You are ahead of other writers, and you can figure it out. And continue to cry and scream in your...I mean, it’s painful, it sucks, it’s horrible to be rejected. I mean I wouldn’t have started a blog and kept a blog for eight years, you know, if I could have done something else with it, like, I don’t know, drink or something. So that’s all I really want to say. That’s the story. If you haven’t been to Literary Rejections on Display, please do, or follow @WriterRejected at Twitter. So, thanks everybody.

 

Melissa Stein:

Great! So we have about half an hour left. So I think we’re gonna take maybe ten minutes and do a little round robin, answer some of our own questions, and then turn it over to you and whatever questions you have. That was a good lead-in to the first question, which is: What one piece of advice would you give to emerging writers about rejection?

 

Rob Spillman:

I’ve got one, since VIDA is very much near. If you’ve been under a rock and don’t know about VIDA, they track gender bias in literary publishing, and it’s caused us all to do a lot of soul searching and looking at our numbers, and one of the things that I’ve found that was interesting in looking at our rejections is that when I send people a friendly rejection note, like a personal letter, like you know, this one isn’t right for me, but keep me in mind for future work—and just FYI, as David said, you know, I can barely press the no button, I’m so busy, so when I take time to write a letter, I do not need to do this. I’m doing it because I actually do want to see your work. What I found is that women are four times less likely as men to send follow-up work. Four times less likely. Even if I send a second note saying I really meant it. I am married to a writer, so I know what this is about. You know, in general, women tend to take rejection more personally, and it’s a generality that men tend to send me less polished work, in general. When women send me work, it tends to be much more polished, because they feel like it has to be. So I am just saying—and even women I published. You have, on one side, if I’ve published you, you have a sort of cart-blanche invitation to send me your latest work. Women are half as likely to do so than men. Men feel entitled to, at AWP, write something down on a napkin and slide it across the bar to me. So my piece of advice to men is, maybe polish your work a little more. Women, you know, don’t...I mean, when you get a friendly rejection, take it seriously, and if you get an unfriendly rejection, also take it seriously, and keep sending your work in.


(Applause)

 

David Baker:

Let me just add something about that emerging thing, too. That’s who I’m looking for. I’m looking for the name of somebody I don’t know. That’s one of the joys of doing a job like this. There are contests. There are calls for manuscripts for emerging writers. Find those. Go to the place where somebody’s looking for a new writer. Go to the contest. Go to the magazines that seem particularly welcoming. Best advice for everybody, not just those who are emerging: Read more. Read the magazines. Don’t read the blogs about the magazines. Read the magazines. Not kidding. (laughter) And as you read the magazine, you’ll get a sense of what those editors may think, what they may like, what they look for. Read the magazines.

 

M.B. Caschetta:

I just want to ride off what Rob said that when I first started the blog, people thought I was just...people thought for sure I was a man, because they didn’t think a woman would be, I guess, ballsy, or whatever you want to say enough to, you know, put it out there and say, “This rejection is ridiculous,” or “This rejection is great,” or “This rejection means this.” So I just wanted to say that I do think that...be bold, women, be bold.

 

Jill Bialosky:

And I’d like to just add that, I guess the piece of advice that I would....well, because I work for a trade publisher, I’m an editor at Norton, and I think that there’s different...I think it’s important to recognize when you are submitting to a publisher—I think the best thing that you can ask yourself is really, is this book ready? Because what we find so often is that I think because writing, as Mary Beth said, takes so much time, and we spend years on a manuscript and we revise it, and we get to the point in which we feel that there’s nothing more that we can do with this book at this point, and so the impulse is to, you know, push the send button.  And what I would advise is not to push the send button, when you feel that you have taken your book as far as you can take it. I would advise to put it away for maybe six weeks, and then maybe read it again, and try to read the manuscript with the idea that this is not your book anymore. You know? With some kind of objectivity, which is a very hard thing to do. And the other thing that I would say is to really find two or three people that you really trust as readers, that really you can have a conversation and ask this reader, “Is this plot working? Is the structure right? Did you understand what I was doing here?” Because even when you’re submitting to look for an agent, I think the agents more and more want polished, finished work. And so that’s the advice that I would give from my perch as an editor, that we see so much and the manuscripts that leap off the page are the ones that really have a spark, you know?  They make you cry or they make you laugh or they make you feel something, and whether it’s, you know, a book of poems that—there’s some urgency to the writing, and there’s something alive in the writing, and there’s something original there, and that’s what we’re looking for, and it does take time.

 

M.B. Caschetta:

I do think also that you can hire somebody to help you edit a book. I think that happens much, much more than it used to, because the editors, the agents, there’s no editing anymore really until you have a very polished manuscript, really. So there’s no shame in hiring someone who used to be an editor, and the business is slowly getting smaller, so find one of those people, and if you can, if you have money, or if you can barter, have someone help you.

 

Melissa Stein:

Jill brought up something that leads really well into the next question. I’m just curious: What are some of the things writers can do to make sure they get rejected? Or, said the other way: What’s the one thing you should avoid doing like the plague?

 

Jill Bialosky:

I have one. Don’t send a five-page cover letter. You know? Try to really describe your work in one paragraph, because again, we all get so...we have so much to read. And also don’t send an email with an attachment. Because it clogs up the email, and an editor will just have to delete it, because they won’t be able to continue working, so I think the right protocol is to really send an email describing your work, in maybe two paragraphs, and then maybe ask if the editor maybe would like to see it or not.

 

David Baker:

I had...there are two. I said them before: sloppy and clichéd. Those are the two things that are very hard to see about your own work, too. One doesn’t write a poem and say, well, clearly I have a clichéd mind. That’s where you’d need two or three very good, hard, friendly readers to say, you know, you thought that was a great idea, you know? So did 900 other people today. Those are the two things.

 

Rob Spillman:

Yeah, amen. You have to think about you’re receiving, again, you’re receiving your own work, and you know, we have a huge volume, we love what we do, and I just want to echo what David said. I...what it comes down to...I want to miss my subway stop. I live in New York City. I love nothing more than: I’m going to Columbia to teach, and I look up, and I’m in Harlem. Like, you’ve won, because I’m so engrossed in your manuscript that I’ve missed my subway stop. I also love to be proven wrong. That comes into the surprise. Like, I have pet peeves: Second-person stories really kind of bug me. “You’re walking down the street.” No, I’m not; I’m reading your story, and I’m pissed. So, all of my editors go out of their way to find second-person stories to put on my desk every single week. And I love it when I have to eat my words. It’s exciting! Like, oh, I didn’t know it was possible to, you know, have an effective second-person story. Yet, clichés, sloppiness… It’s one of those things where like, if you don’t care about your work, why should we care about it? You know, if we see typos and sort of lazy language right on the first page, we’re like, really? You didn’t even bother to proofread this, or have somebody proofread it? A great way to also check for sort of clichés is read your work aloud. No matter how many times you’ve written a piece, read the whole thing out loud, because you read it in a visceral way, not in an intellectual way. Your body has a BS detector. You get to clichés; you get to lazy language; you start rushing over it. You’re sort of like, “mmmm hmmm mmmm.” If you’re like mumbling and feeling not excited about it, imagine how the reader’s gonna feel, you know. So give it that extra read. We want you to succeed. We want your piece to be the one that like, “Oh, wow, this makes me realize why I do my job, and what it is to be alive today.” It really is we are looking for art.

 

M.B. Caschetta:

And even if you do everything that all of the sage panelists just told you, you’re still gonna get rejected because it’s a needle in a haystack. Tin House rejected Miracle Girls I can’t tell you how many times. But it wasn’t right for Tin House, and now it’s nominated for a Lammy with Anne-Marie MacDonald’s book, and I can’t wait... It comes out in May?

 

Rob Spillman:

Yeah.

 

M.B. Caschetta:

...I can’t wait for that book. I wanna get a reading copy from you. And two IndieFAB books. So it wasn’t bad. And I felt bad when they rejected it, but it wasn’t right. So you’re gonna get rejected even if you do everything right for a while, until you find your haystack with that one needle in it. And it’s just not, it’s not easy as you all know. I’m not telling you anything new.

 

Melissa Stein:

Okay. One more quick question that I myself am curious about how the panelists are gonna answer. Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press said that “often the weakest poems in a manuscript are the ones who have been published in the best journals, and the best poems haven’t been published in magazines at all, and thus rejection doesn’t really mean very much.” And I’m just kind of curious because it’s also something that isn’t talked about very much, where you would stand on that, whether there’s some “homogenation” that goes on, or a certain safety, or whether the best work really does get published.

 

Rob Spillman:

Yeah, it’s a tough one. I see, frankly, a lot of big name poets at the bottom of the barrel sometimes. You know, I see the last poems and things coming my way, and I’m like, my rejection of really, really, really good poets is long, just because I, you know, I...at first I might have been tempted to, but I’ve been publishing at Tin House for seventeen years now, and I’d much rather publish three emerging voices that I’m really excited about than a big-name poet’s kind of tossed-off poem. You know, I don’t need to have a big-name poet make me feel important. That’s the way I feel. But I do, I see it, I see, especially big-name poets with agents, you know, that it’s that the last poem coming my way, kind of thing.

 

Jill Bialosky:

My perspective is probably a little different because I do publish collections of stories, and sometimes some of the best stories in the collection have not been published, and I think it’s because certain magazines, they have their own personalities, so you kind of know what a New Yorker story is, for instance, or your might get a sense for what the Paris Review might publish, or what Tin House might publish, and sometimes just stories that don’t have, like, a strong ending—because I think many, well, I guess my panelists can tell me if that’s true or not, but you know, sometimes some of the rawer stories—I really like raw stories that just have a real sense of voice and energy, and sometimes those kinds of stories are not taken by magazines. So I don’t think it really matters in terms of for book publication. Maybe we’d like to see that some stories are published in magazines, but it’s not required at all.

 

David Baker:

Yeah, I’ll do this real quick as well. I don’t know, I think I like Jeffrey, but I think that’s a glib thing to say—depends on the magazine, not—here’s the...here are the cool magazines. The whole universe of literary magazines has changed so much in the last few years anyway. What used to be the really big magazines...heh? You know. A lot of ’em aren’t very interesting. And the little magazines, some of the...many of the little magazines are publishing cool stuff. It depends on the magazine and on the editor. They’re magazines that I just trust because I know that they’re...I know that if I’m gonna go read the Yale Review, J. D. McClatchy’s taste in poetry; it’s a very specific taste, but oh my god, he knows what he’s doing. I know those are gonna be terrific poems. So it depends on the editor and it depends on the magazine, and online now. At the Kenyon Review—I’ll hold it up again—we essentially do two separate magazines now. The same number of people. We have a print magazine, and we have a whole separate magazine called Kenyon Review Online with totally separate content online. There’s so many exciting things being published online, on the Internet, in the magazines there. So I mean you have to find those places. I don’t necessarily trust the big names as, you know, surefire hits.

 

Melissa Stein:

Great, so we’re gonna open it up to questions. If you have one or two, we’d be happy to take them. Gentleman in the checked shirt.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

So the question is whether the editors wish that writers would adhere more thoroughly to the guidelines to just eliminate some submissions right off the bat?

 

David Baker:

Yes.

 

Rob Spillman:

We see a ton of things that get rejected just because you clearly have never even looked at Tin House. Or the Kenyon Review. You’ve gone to, you know, a Submittable, and just, you know, pressed a bunch of buttons. You have a much better chance if you actually at least go online to see what our personality is like. And I feel like I’m judged by the company I keep. I would much rather be in a really interesting magazine that has a circulation of 500 that I would be happy to press on all my friends than something that’s big and kind of “meh” that I’m not happy with the company I’m in. But yes, follow the guidelines. A couple of the things, like don’t be annoying, is another...it should be a given...like a week after submitting, don’t send me an email asking, “Hey! Read my story yet?” “Nope, and now it’s at the bottom of the stack.” You know? Don’t ask me via Facebook.

 

David Baker:

We have lists.

 

Rob Spillman:

Yeah, we have a...you know. There’s a panel later today. I think it’s today, called, “What We Hate: Editors on Their Pet Peeves.” So this is a preamble to that. But we really are looking for your work. Yeah, people do violate the guidelines all the time and it just makes work for us. We try to be clear.

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

Melissa Stein:

Is it necessary for an emerging writer to have an agent?

 

M.B. Caschetta:

I can say no, because I don’t have an agent for this book. I had an agent for something that I published in the New York Times, which was an essay on being disinherited in modern love, and I have an agent for that because I think it’s commercial. This was literary, not commercial, but I didn’t need an agent ultimately. It depends.

 

Jill Bialosky:

I think for a place like Norton or some of the big publishers, we really do like to see submissions with, that are agented, and only because of the intense volume that, in other words, our company doesn’t even accept unsolicited manuscripts in the sense that we don’t feel an obligation to have to read through unsolicited manuscripts and respond. We used to have what we called the slush pile. You’re probably familiar with that term. But actually, after 9/11, we stopped because nobody wanted to open packages by people we didn’t know. And after that, we realized that actually agents can be really very helpful in knowing, you know, what Rob was saying about know where you’re submitting. An agent can be very valuable because the agent has relationships with certain houses and certain editors and therefore would understand a particular novel might be a great fit for this particular editor. So that’s why it’s very useful, but it really does depend on where you want to submit. I think for major—if you want to submit your work to major trade publishers, you probably need an agent, and with smaller houses I don’t think you do.

 

Rob Spillman:

Well, you...

 

Jill Bialosky:

Do you?

 

Rob Spillman:

Well, yeah, you do now because so many, especially with literary fiction, especially with short stories, are being published more and more. The things that the big houses used to take on regularly are now being taken on by Graywolf, Other, Soho, us. You know, there are so many great little publi...you know, Coffeehouse, here in town, and agents are sending to those places. And what Jill is saying about...there are agents who are like travelling salesmen. They have reputations. They come knocking on the door, with their vacuum cleaners, and you know, if they were there the year before with a really wonky vacuum cleaner, you’d be like, “Mmm, yeah.” But they can cut right...they can do all the things that it would be very hard for you to do. So, like, say you wanted to, that you were thinking, “Oh, Random House would be great for me.” It’s like, Random House is a massive thing and your agent would be able to say, “This specific editor would like your work, and I can get them on the phone and explain to them why, you know, because for our past relationship, I can make all these connections that will give you a really good shot.” So, yes, it is...for a book manuscript it is really...and I match-make all the time. I have, you know, emerging writers who’ve been published, that I’ve published, have a collection ready to go, and if they want to submit it to me, I first take them to meet agents, just, you know, just to make the process much more professional and have another advocate.

 

David Baker:

Just real quickly, too: for book manuscripts, yes; for magazines, nah; for prose, yes; for poetry, maybe not so much. I don’t have an agent. I also realized just as I said that with some pride, I’ve got a batch of poems that’s been sitting in a magazine since February 2014, too, so maybe I should have one.

 

M.B. Caschetta:

But if you have access to the different... In another way, you know, if you’re an editor of a magazine, you know, if you have access, you know, and things are really changing—I think we can say that at this moment the picture of publishing right now, what everybody said is probably true, but it’s really changing.

 

Melissa Stein:

Other questions. In the back.

 

(Audience members speaks inaudibly)

 

So the question is about the actual submission process. When does the work reach these editors?

 

David Baker:

You submit stuff to us only through Submittable now, and we have a first reading tier. I’m one of the first readers. Everybody reads slush. We have a group called the Kenyon Associates. These are very well trained English majors at Kenyon. They read. We have some poet friends of mine who read and help and give advice. We have two associate editors who read slush. We have two Kenyon Fellows, teachers there, young writers who read the slush pile and then send it on to the next level, which is usually the next editors, or me, or the editor David Lynn, or the Fellows again. It takes two independent “no’s” on that first level to get a manuscript turned down, by the way. They don’t see what each other is voting; it takes two “no’s,” and one “no” and one “yes” will get it on to the next level, and then there’s a third level, and then for the stuff that makes it up to or down to wherever I’m at, the poetry editor—that’s me—sometimes those poems have been read by many, many people. One of the nice things about Submittable, though I don’t like the whole web system of doing this, is that when you submit work to us, it gets logged in automatically, and tracked automatically, and we can write notes back and forth to each other really fast. We’ll have ten, twenty, thirty comments about a batch of poems among the three or four or five of us sometimes, just as we argue over or talk about the poems. That’s kind of the process. There are tiers.

 

Rob Spillman:

Yeah. We’re similar. I have twenty-five readers at any one time, and they tend to be MFA or post-MFA, and they’re all over the country because it’s by Submittable. I select for diversity, gender, LGBTQ, class, race. I try to have a variety of readers. Each piece is read by three to five readers who vote on it. One “yes” kicks it up to my assistant editor who will then look at it and then decide whether it goes to the weekly editorial meeting. And at the weekly editorial meeting, any editor can put something forward to be talked about, and we have...generally it’s a three-way Skype. I have an editor in Madison, Wisconsin, and I have editors in Portland, Oregon, and in New York, and we have just a brawl every week. We’ve all been working together for a very long time so it’s personal, it’s heated, because everything that’s put up for the weekly editorial meeting everybody has to read, and it gets testy. So, things that tend to get kicked up are things that are argued about. If there’s the worst insult you can have, I think it’s “neh.”

 

Someone:

It’s what?

 

Rob Spillman:

It’s “neh.” N-E-H. This beast exists. It’s like it’s perfectly good. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing particularly exciting. But if people are fighting about it, or are engaged about it, you know, or feel passionately about it, that means there’s something worth engaging with, and then we can have a conversation.

 

Jill Bialosky:

We have a similar process at Norton. We have terrific interns who read manuscripts and write reports for us, and then we have editorial assistants who are also often first readers. And when an editor is excited about a manuscript and wants to potentially buy it for the house, we bring it in to an editorial meeting, and we have a group of editors who also have read the work, or part of it, before our meeting, and we have terrific discussions. We also, I think on a good day, our editorial meetings are like a great book group, where people really are engaged, and we think about questions about, you know, market, and what other author this book is like, and it’s a very thoughtful conversation. And oftentimes the books that I think we end up signing are the ones where it may be half the room likes and half doesn’t.

 

Melissa:

So we have four minutes left. Does anybody have a quick question?

 

(Audience member speaks inaudibly)

 

Very quickly, does lack or abundance of publishing credits affect your evaluation of writers?

 

(Inaudible speaking)

 

Rob Spillman:

For magazines, or books? For magazines, no, because I’m always looking for emerging voices. It’s harder to get a book manuscript without any credits at all. It just, it kind of means that you’re in the wilderness a little bit. That you haven’t engaged in the ecosystem of publishing and so you probably will be looked at a little suspect, maybe? But I’m always looking for emerging voices, so it’s a plus. It’s also how you pitch yourself, too. Like, I’ve studied here and here, and I’ve


No Comments