A Sword of Ours, Poetical

Recently I (this is Pat) ran into a former student at a conference. As we caught up, I learned that he was working as the nonfiction editor for Prestigious Literary Magazine, a place I'd long ago given up on, I told him, after coming close so many times but receiving no cigar. What's more, I told him, they'd twice handwritten on my rejection form some version of “We couldn't find a narrative arc,” to which I replied in my inner voice, “Of course you couldn't; you were reading an essay.” In any case, I decided that they weren't likely to get what I was doing, so I'd stop bothering them and wasting my time. Try again, my friend exhorted, suggesting that with his pull, we could finally see a Pat Madden essay in Name Redacted Review. OK, fine, I decided, and soon after I got home, I sent him what I thought was one of my best new pieces.Predictably, for the purposes of this essay at least, I soon got an email from him expressing gratitude for the submission, noting a few of its strengths, and concluding, “Our editors have decided against publishing this essay, but please know that it received robust discussion.”So now I'm back to not sending my work to Journal for Others but Not for Me, though I still enjoy things I read there.All of which is to say that I've been there. We've all been. We're all still there. Here. Rejectionland. It's not our favorite place, but it's not a permanent destination, either. That introduction is meant to prepare you for the topic of this editorial essay: rejections. If you know Joey, it should come as no surprise that when he devised last issue's editor's note, envisioning this complementary note for me, he chose for himself the role of “good cop” and wrote about the many reasons we choose to publish the exceptional work that comes our way. Now it falls to me to round out the project he started by grousing and grinching, sharing with you some of our anonymized and generalized reasons for turning down some of the many essays we receive. You know the game, of course. When we can publish less than 5 percent of submissions, we've got to be discerning. Here, then, are some of our (ourselves, our consulting editors, our readers) notes from rejected essays. I've edited them (cut out some of the copious praise, since Joey already covered that) to highlight their key points, which we hope may illuminate some patterns and serve you as insight into our process of judging and critiquing: Our readers appreciated this piece as an homage to Well-known Pop-culture Person. The facts alone were interesting and compelling. At times, however, we wondered what the stakes were. Why are we on this trail? What's the big question for the author?The braid is well done, and the parts themselves are strong, but they don't seem to coalesce into a single narrative. Readers were waiting for the essay to “rise above the level of displaying the things, taking us on a tour, pointing out the various ingredients along the way” to some deeper thinking about the meaning of the ingredients.This is a wonderfully odd-angled memoir about alienation from one's body. We found it funny, sad, wry, well written. Although the author hints at some self-reflection, it sometimes feels performative.The language is rich and vivid in places, but lacks a syntactic confidence that such vivid language needs. The creative energy would be better spent developing a smaller grouping of these vignettes. instead of having so many that don't have the same narrative punch.Our readers loved how the essay provided a different and authentic voice and a worthy perspective. They recommended more reflection and less sunny predictability.This is a nice meditation on aging and culture. We didn't get a sense of urgency, though, and we want the language and perceptions to surprise and move us more.The biggest stumbling block was the length of the piece. Twenty-six pages of second-person began to feel too heavy, too hard to keep track of, especially without the conceit of a “how to” format.There is a generosity in the way the writer conveys their relationship to what grows in place; it cultivates an intimacy with the reader and asks us to pay attention, too. It's perhaps for this reason that we would have loved to learn more about the writer and glimpse another aspect of their life and past, which is alluded to but not woven into this essay.Our readers found this essay arresting and propulsive, with the voice and cadence mirroring the urgency of the subject matter. They noted, too, that the ending felt a little inauthentic because we weren't sufficiently prepared.How say you, reader? Do not these lines conjure for you some general understanding of the predilections and partialities that guide our judgments?And speaking of judgments, perhaps here would be a good place to explain why I'm doing this kind of Sly and the Family Stone goof with my title. Joey's piece was called “An Ars Poetica, Sort Of,” and it seemed good and right to me to find a mirror to revisit but reverse the phrase, and once “sword of ours” presented itself, homophonically, from “sort of Ars” (trailing Damocles? Alexander's solution to the Gordian Knot?), it seemed to fit well enough. It's mostly wordplay, soundplay, but I think it makes a kind of sense, too. This sword of ours, with which we mete poetical judgment, sometimes quickly resolves a knotty problem (how to pare down to a 20-piece issue from hundreds of submissions) but it hangs over our heads, too. We try to remain conscious of this fact, which is one reason we share our readers’ responses with submitters. We want you to know that we did, in fact, read and consider your work, and we do not dismiss it out of hand. We believe that we're all in this together, even if, for a time, and in one place, some of us have editorial power.I feel like I should mention one other thing that nearly always results in a rejection. I'll get there by way of James Baldwin, who in 1963 told Jane Howard of Life magazine, You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional spiritual historian.There's a category of pieces, or at least I perceive a category of pieces, whose common element is that their authors have not made the step to the second half of Baldwin's revelation. They're stuck thinking that their pain and heartbreak are unprecedented; their pieces are written as if their story weren't a story we all share, but a story unique to their writer. There's no recognition of and no endeavor to bridge the gap from writer to reader. In other words, they're self-absorbed, egotistical, calling for attention, showing off, so to speak. They are not essaying experience; they're just displaying it, in a sad and lonely, sometimes vainglorious way. Not only in the realm of publishing creative nonfiction, but in the everyday living peaceably among our fellow humans, we discourage this kind of attitude.For the sake roundedness in our editorial excursion here, I'd love to report that my abovementioned rejected essay found a home in another, maybe even more prestigious journal, earned me even more money than it would have had my former student and his coeditors accepted it, but the truth is that as of today, it remains unpublished. Not the kind of vindication that makes for a great story, but it's the truth, and sometimes the truth is more important than tidy resolution.No matter, I know plenty of stories where the piece that nobody seemed to want eventually got published to great acclaim. For just one example, there's Desirae Matherly's “Final: Comprehensive, Roughly,” which made the rounds at over a dozen journals before Fourth Genre picked it up (this was many years ago, before Joey and I were involved) and then was selected for the following year's Best Creative Nonfiction. It appears most recently in our anniversary anthology Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years. You should check it out.It is always difficult rejecting essays that people have crafted with such passion and hope, and we never do so flippantly. We care for your work as if it were our own, and we hope that our reasons and explanations provide some benefit as you dust off and submit again.Patrick Madden & Joey Franklin