The Process: Sending My Work to Literary Journals

I think my first experience was a bit haphazard. So what I did was scan through the Submittable twitter feed to look for contests journals were holding and if the subjects were something that would apply to my work. I already had several pieces that I wanted to send in mind. I chose pieces that I had written from my creative writing class that I had really liked, or past pieces I had been working on. They were all poetry, because I feel that my poetry is the strongest, and that it’d be most likely of all my writing to get accepted by a journal. So when picking journals, I was looking for places that accepted poetry, and that was pretty much it. I sent to three journals: Hermeneutic Chaos, Arcadia, and Alternating Current. I heard from them relatively quickly because they were smaller journals. But the feeling of sending off my pieces was a bit like sending a part of myself and chucking it off into the nether. I didn’t know what would happen to it or how soon I’d know about its outcome.

Before I knew how publishing actually worked, I imagined there was a woman with a clipboard of a list of what made objectively “good” writing, and as she read, she’d go down the clipboard and either nodded or frowned as she went down the list and either checked the boxes or not. Then, she’d take a red ink pad and a stamp and would pound either “accepted” or “rejected” on the paper. I thought there were some already agreed-upon list that all editors consulted that determined what was or wasn’t good writing until it was pointed out to me that the process is incredibly subjective and that there was no such list (if only it was that easy.) But this came as a comfort to me because it meant that a rejection wasn’t saying “this piece did not have good writing, you are a bad writer” but that it could mean that there’s a better home my work can find. I didn’t win or get accepted, but I got an encouragement to submit again in the future, which I found very hopeful that my work could find a home someplace.

Anna Wallace