Kicking this email off with a fun screenshot of my rejected submissions from my Submittable* account :)
*A submission platform, for those who aren’t familiar
***
As the year comes to a close, I’ve started reflecting a bit on my work, where it has gone, how it has made me feel. This has been a year full of growth and opportunity for me, and I’m so grateful for the places I’ve been able to share my poetry that I could’ve never imagined.
This has also been one of the driest years for me creatively. I didn’t write a lot of new poems this year, and I submitted even fewer to literary magazines. I feel very disconnected to the world of lit mags that I once enjoyed being part of, so I haven’t had a lot of rejected work to share with you recently for that reason!
Since I’ve been thinking about it, I thought I would share a quick story of my submission history.
Despite being a pretty shy kid all the way through high school, I never hesitated to share my creative work with others. It felt like the best way I could express myself; something I enjoyed and was good at. I submitted to any school writing contest I came across, and the ones I won gave me the confidence to get over the ones I didn’t. Toward the end of high school, I wrote a poem for English class that my teacher suggested I submit to a contest. So, months later, I googled “Poetry contests,” found one, and submitted the poem—a villanelle about Ruby Bridges.
It was rejected. And that was my first experience with Submittable. Jan 1, 2015.
My first acceptance? April 21, 2016. This poem.
In college, I took advanced poetry classes and learned more about literary magazines. I read those magazines and journals, poetry anthologies, and scoured the internet for work my favorite poets had published. The more I engaged with these places, the more I wanted to be part of them. Lit mags proved to be a way for my work to get out of my notebook and into the hands of others. And a way to connect with and learn about writers I’d have never have found otherwise. Plus, I found submitting to be like a fun game. A lottery. You win some, you lose some.
I buckled down about got serious about submitting my work in 2018/19. I created a spreadsheet of lit mags I liked and when their submissions opened. I was fresh out of an English major, so I had plenty of work to share. I wondered about publishing a book, going to grad school, going to workshops, getting grants. All those places would want some sort of proof that I’m a writer, right? So, I submitted.
I never tried keeping a tally of my acceptances and rejections, but I counted today to find that since 2015, I’ve gotten 55 rejections, 18 acceptances, 15 submissions withdrawn for various reasons. (Not including things I may have submitted on other platforms.) I don’t feel any certain way about this. I know people who send out over 100 submissions a year, so my numbers are pretty unimpressive. Still, now, I’ve started to get tired.
There are some lit mags/ journals I currently dream of seeing my work in. And I love the people I’ve gotten to know through my involvement in contests and submissions! But overall, I’m feeling less and less excited about sending work somewhere and waiting a year for someone to say whether they want to publish it or not. When I started this newsletter, I thought it was time to just… share my work myself. So now, mostly, I am.
What I didn’t anticipate was the weird void I would feel. I devoted so many hours to narrowing down and outlining places to share my work. To checking contest announcements, refreshing my inbox to see if I’d won something. I felt so much excitement to know, when I was accepted, that someone saw something in my poems. And now… I don’t know what I feel. Maybe my priorities are changing. Maybe I’m just in a dry spell with writing and I’ll be back into it next year and I’ll have to delete this whole post. Who knows!
The point is, I may not be sharing a lot of “rejected” writing in the near future. I will just be sharing… writing. I hope that’s okay with you. :)
Here’s a fun Sudoku poem I recently put on Instagram, a poem type I’m hoping to do more of soon.
Best,
Jae
This sounds so frustrating but I am so glad to hear that you're continuing on. At the end of the day, you're an amazing poet and writer and nothing changes that.
That first acceptance poem is amazing! I totally know what you mean about response times when submitting. So much work goes into submitting and it sucks when you have to wait a year just to be rejected.
I've taken Megan Falley's Poems That Don't Suck workshop a few times and she encourages students to aim for 100 rejections a year as a way to encourage them to submit and also to get used to rejections (as a normal part of the submission process). I've found this also helps with not having to wait forever to get a response. Partly because I have so many submissions out there and partly because the more places you submit, the more variety of response time.
It DOES mean that I'm not being incredibly picky. Like, I'm submitting to a lot of places that don't pay or that are smaller. And I know that's not for everyone.
Anyway, I hope you at least find yourself with an abundance of creativity next year, even if you take a break from submitting. It's a lot to create and submit simultaneous. Sometimes it's nice to just focus on one or the other.