This morning I received a rejection from a “big name” publication.
To be expected.
First of all, the email landed in my spam, which I am now afraid not to check regularly since I’ve had acceptances land there, too.
What was really unexpected, though, was that it arrived with eleven other email addresses attached, all of us gathered together in a kind of accidental literary circle.
No BCC used. Just… all of us like awkward students at a dance.
Word Raccoon leaned over my shoulder, squinted at the email, and said, “Well. This is new. Are we meant to start a support group?”
I don’t know what the etiquette is here, but I must admit, ten out of ten, would not recommend.
It may have been a mistake. I’ve been that person, the one to embarrass myself by hitting “reply all” when I’ve had a poem accepted, gushing with thanks when there’s a group of us. But it’s rare that there’s more than one email address attached, and I’ve tried to be more careful since then.
As to this event, do I:
Reply all and say, “Better luck to us all next time”?
Ask if they’d like to form a small but scrappy alliance that possibly starts an underground zine?
Send them a link to this post? (Absolutely not.)
Start writing poems about our rejection as a group project and publish these poems in an anthology? (That actually sounds…almost tempting, a little Salon des Refusés of our own.)
WR is already drafting a group message titled:
“Rejected But Still Hot: A Community Initiative.”
I told her absolutely not.
She told me I lack whimsy.
I told her she lacks discretion.
Someone come and take Word Raccoon for the day, would you! She’s wearing me out.
Still, there’s something intimate about being rejected in the round.
As I said, on occasion I’ve received mass acceptances, which also felt a little odd, but so much better than this.
This feels like:
Dear Drema and Also These Eleven Other Souls Who Now Know You Dared Cross Our Email Threshold and FAILED…”
Word Raccoon really, really, does want to start that online support group, or at the very least reach out to everyone except the email’s author and declare said author a ding dong.
(Again, it may have been a mistake or someone’s limited familiarity with the “BCC” function. Or an exhausted editor wading through a stuffed inbox at 2 am. I am not unsympathetic.)
Not completely unsympathetic.
While not all of the email addresses contain actual names, some do, and Word Raccoon is begging to google them.
Who are they?
What did they send?
Is there someone in there already writing a blog post about this very thing?
No, WR, NO!
Now I wish I had created an email address just for submitting the way some of these folks clearly have. Not exactly this, but some of their email addresses are kinda like:
Why didn’t I think of that?
Word Raccoon has one final suggestion before I close this out.
She would like me to end with:
“To my fellow ‘rejects:’ I will not Reply All, but know that in another life, we might have been a very powerful group chat.”
I told her that was… actually not bad.
She’s insufferable when she’s right.
At any rate, back to the work. Probably.
P.S. One of the rejected poems has already been accepted elsewhere.
Word Raccoon is giggling at that. I don’t blame her.
We are submitting tonight (Friday), trying not to put our arms protectively around our time this weekend and refuse to let it all disappear, as it will.
Even the great Amy Tan once said that you can’t write every minute of every day.
A band is practicing nearby, down the alley, and WR really wants to go investigate, but no.
dremadrudge.com 