Everyone I know has two job titles: the one they get paid to do, and the one they wish they got paid to do. I’m a waitress/writer. My girlfriend is a graphic designer/musician, and my brother is a lighting tech/filmmaker. They do the former to afford the equipment and studio time to do the latter, but as a writer I don’t need to pay for electronics or locations.

Writers don’t really need tools to create their art. A paper and pencil, a laptop, chalk and a pavement, a stick and an expanse of loose dirt; anything can be utilised to put words together. I’m sure it would be nice to write on thick sheets of handmade paper with a Mont Blanc pen engraved with your initials, but a ballpoint and a school jotter work just as well. There is one tool that all writers need. These necessary parts of the writing process — the initial drafts, the typing, the submitting — all cost time. I have to work my day job to pay for this time.

Time is a hard-won tool, but once a writer earns some time they can spend it when they please. Some writers are larks, arriving at their desks before dawn; some are owls and can only work when everyone else is in bed. Some prefer to write just after the lunch rush at their favourite coffee shop. Writers can work at midday or at midnight; at dawn or dusk or only between 3pm and 6pm. Time, once earned, is flexible. Not all creative individuals have this freedom to utilise time however they please. In the main, musicians and filmmakers must collaborate. It’s very difficult — if not impossible — to make a film or record an album entirely solo. Again, time is a tool that creative people cannot work without. We must wait for others to be ready; we must organize our own creative output around our collaborators’ families, day jobs, or other responsibilities. As a writer I rarely collaborate, and so I do not have to pay this time. All I need is a pen, a piece of paper, and a few spare minutes. I do not have to wait for other people to be ready, or for their equipment to be arranged, or for them to get just the right angle or light or tone. I can write as and when I please — excepting my own domestic and financial obligations. As I don’t have children, and share household chores and bills with my girlfriend, these obligations are minimal. All of the time I earn can be used as I choose.

None of this is trying to suggest that writers do not squander time. They frequently do, and I am certainly not exempt from this. If I wanted to hang a picture I would buy a hammer as a tool to help me; similarly when I want to write a novel I earn time. But I don’t wield time as effectively as I might wield a hammer. Every week I work as a waitress to earn enough to buy a little free
time for writing, and then I spend my hard-won Wednesday morning playing silly Facebook games and making unnecessarily complicated plans for lunch. I do not spend all of my precious minutes churning out beautiful, effortless prose and opening acceptance letters from London publishers. Although I work hard to earn time, I do not always take the best care of it. If I did have a Mont Blanc pen engraved with my initials then I’m sure I wouldn’t use it to dig loose hairs out of the drain; if I had thick sheets of handmade paper then I wouldn’t use it to mop up spills. But this is exactly what I’m doing with the only tool I have: time. Spending an hour on social networking websites is like letting decaying grass build up in the blade of my lawnmower.
What is the point in earning time only to waste it?

In writing this essay, I used several tricks to fool myself into feeling productive. I haven’t had my breakfast yet, which is a conscious attempt to feel super-productive and say to myself: ‘Look, you produce work before your day has even begun! Who needs meager foodstuffs when you have the sustenance of words? How wonderfully conscientious you are’. I also have a numb rear end, as I write at the wooden kitchen table and forgot to put a cushion on the chair. Getting up to fetch a cushion would be an admittance that my concentration has waned, so I must suffer the numbness until I have written my final paragraph. And so on.

It’s 9.30am on a Wednesday. My girlfriend is off designing corporate websites to pay for new guitar strings, and my brother is winding wires around his elbows to pay for camera hire. I spent the weekend making cappuccinos for strangers to pay for this time. Writing this essay isn’t as wasteful as playing FarmVille on Facebook, but it’s not improving that car-chase scene in my novel either. I’m going to get some cornflakes and a cushion, and then I am going to spend this time properly.

Kirsty Logan lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend and the rain. Her writing is in print or upcoming in Polluto, Word Riot, Velvet, Moondance, Chronogram, and others. She can be found at kirstylogan.com.

You write from Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the other boroughs. You live in Belfast and Nottingham, Prague, Budapest and cities in northern and southern India. You’re in Georgia. So many of you are in Georgia. You’re in California and West Texas and Michigan and Florida and Illinois. You are in transition, living with your parents or friends or an ex-boyfriend. You are losing your home or buying a new home or building a place for your family with your own two hands. You tell us not where you are but where you will be and for one of you lucky writers, you will soon make your home in Buenos Aires. Some of you love where you live. Some of you do not and feel like you’re doing time. A select few of you are literally doing time and you thoughtfully include your prisoner number which so cruelly has taken the place of your name.

You are married and you are single and you are living with lovers or partners or pets. Sometimes, you tell us what your significant other does and you say things like I live with the poet or novelist and then your partner’s name. We find that so very romantic though we don’t know why. You talk about your children and many of you have not just one or two but four or five and we wonder how you ever find the time to get any writing done. You live in old farm houses and in the middle of nowhere and in tiny apartments on narrow streets and with four other roommates who do not do their fair share of housework. We have been there. We are glad to no longer be there.

You are very   smart people. You’re undergraduates and doctoral students and a surprising number of you teach literature and composition and creative writing and history at universities and community colleges and high schools. You have studied under famous writers and sometimes you tell us who and when and what you learned. You’re surgeons and media buyers and financiers and psychologists and graphic designers and full time writers (that we do envy a bit). Many of you are editors or readers at other wonderful magazines.

You continue to tell us where you’ve been published. Some of you are selective in what you share while others among you offer your entire discography, so to speak. Once in a while if you’re making a magazine’s name up because it sounds so fanciful. A few of   you who are   fond of quantifying your publication history, noting your work has appeared in dozens or even hundreds of fine journals. You are, perhaps, the Wilt Chamberlains of the writing world.

You pass your time in very unique ways. You like sitting on your patios sipping beer and knitting and playing pick up basketball and singing in the shower and being the center of attention. Some of you don’t believe in cover letters or author bios. You feel such things constrain your work as artists. You have opinions and favorite numbers and favorite colors. One of you is allergic to twitter and tweets.

You know our names and sometimes you use them and sometimes you spell them wrong and sometimes, we forgive you.

You are kind and generous. You compliment us and make us blush when you tell us you not only read what we publish but also love what we publish. Sometimes, you tell us in great detail which stories and poems have moved you the most, the how and why of that, and you ask how you might get in touch with your favorite PANK writers.

You want us to know your work is a good or great or perfect fit for us. Some of you explain why and some of you don’t. Some of you are right and some of you are not. Sometimes, you simply say, “Thanks for reading,” or “Enjoy,” or “I want you to read this.” You strong, silent types say nothing at all.

No matter what you write, each and every day, you let us know you are still here. You are still that big red arrow behind the smudged plexiglass on the great big map that is the writing world. We read you. We hear you. We know you are here.

I spend a lot of time talking about all the “interesting” and “quirky” things writers do when they submit to us so for the sake of fairness and in the interest of full disclosure, I will confess the writerly sins I have been known to commit. Gather round, friends.

I do not always read (regularly) or subscribe to magazines unto whom I submit my writing. I do my due diligence and if a magazine has content available online I try to read a few back issues but I do not get intimately acquainted with every single magazine where I send my writing and I’ll tell you something else–I don’t feel guilty about that. I know all the fancy writers only submit to magazines they love and respect and so on and that’s nice, but I’m a cheap date. I’ll send you my writing even if I simply like you.

I don’t have an extensive drafting process. Most of the time, I write a story in one or two sittings, let it mellow for a day, then submit it to a few magazines.

I have been known to send an editor a revised version of an accepted story. This is a shameful transgression, I know but in my defense, it is very difficult for me to let a story be, even after I have sent it into the world. My revising process, you see, takes place after I submit a given story.

I tell more than I show. I don’t even really understand what it means when an editor says “show more than tell.” It has been so long since I was kindergarten.

I can overwrite an ending. I think of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and how there were like seven endings, each one more ridiculous than the last and I try to channel that into my writing so that every loose or frayed end is neatly tied up.

I read Clive Cussler and Dan Brown and John Sanford and Danielle Steele (when she actually wrote her books) and other mass market pablum and I don’t consider such reading my “guilty pleasure” reading. I pretty much love the hell out of that kind of thing and feel not a single solitary ounce of guilt about it.   Now, Clive Cussler’s books pretty much suck these days but in the 80s and 90s, his books were amazing and full of deep sea adventure and as a kid, I had the biggest crush on Dirk Pitt with his green eyes who is kind of old now and married and has these adult children, a boy and a girl who are twins who also work for the NUMA, the spawn of a romance Dirk had with a character in a much earlier book and it is all very complex and absurd but still, there is a fondness for Pitt’s adventures, you see. I also read People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly and ABC Soaps. I read smart stuff too but it’s the celebrity and soap opera gossip that bring me peace and joy.

To that end, I watch TV and movies more than I read. There’s just too much televisual greatness. Not only do we have the networks, there are the cable channels now putting out awesome shows and there’s the reality dreck like Jersey Shore that is so compelling and cannot be ignored. I am only human.

The saddest part of my Monday was realizing I forgot to record the new season of The Bachelor. I will rectify this oversight by watching it online on Tuesday.

I don’t always keep track of where I’ve sent what. I try to keep track of everything on Duotrope, but I am prone to submitting between 3 and 5 am and sometimes, I don’t have my wits about me and I fail to update my Submission Tracker.

Sometimes, I send an editor a new submission immediately upon receiving a rejection. This is a habit I have mostly broken myself of, but there was a time when I was so eager as to behave inconsiderately. I am deeply ashamed of having committed this particular sin again and again and seven days later… again.

There are times when I take rejection personally even though I know it’s not personal. I sulk and pout and stomp around my apartment like a petulant child. I rend my garments and shake my fists at the sky and make declarations (to my stuffed animals and my unfortunate friends) about how my genius is misunderstand. I vow to never send that editor my work again. Then I wake up in the morning, forget my sorrows and contradict myself.

I take acceptances personally too. Acceptance feels good.   I mean, it’s not like my self-worth is tied up in acceptance (she says, lying through her teeth) but I do get a bit of a thrill.

I am now going to go read submissions with nary a complaint as penance. Please accept my confession.

I started playing EverQuest in 2001. Most video game addiction stories start with a friend who coaxes you into playing, and mine is no different. Over the course of two weeks I went from “I dunno…” to a full time career as a bronze-plated, hammer-wielding, high elf cleric healer.

It was a weird time in my real life. I’d quit writing fiction a few years before, and I’d just left a reasonably lucrative career as a marketing writer because my employer had been irritated by the inconveniences of my high risk pregnancy. Now, I was working second shift at a call center with a baby at home. All of my priorities had changed dramatically in less than a year. Cracking the skulls of giant rats outside the gates of West Freeport was cathartic in its violence, and comforting in its predictability.

I went through an mild addiction phase with EverQuest, where I sometimes ate dinner at the computer screen. I still think of it as a happy time. My friends and I would go home from work and play for hours. We’d fight crocodiles in an oasis, or hole up in the goblin-filled dungeon of Highpass Hold and fill our bags with loot. But the best part was the joking around. Playing a game like EverQuest or World of Warcraft is like standing in the Hall of Presidents in Disney World without a tour guide. One is asked to take it seriously, but the degree to which that’s actually done is entirely up to the participants. That choice can make the difference between being bored out of one’s mind and going to bed early, or staying for hours before noticing that the sun is coming up. My friends and I had a lot of adventures that way. We once spent a night just jumping off of the Plane of Air to land in the Ocean of Tears below. Once we fought to the center of a witch’s lair, and the keyholder fell asleep at his monitor. During the day, we sent each other links describing new places we wanted to visit, quests we wanted to finish, treasure we wanted to loot. Everyone else thought we were completely intolerable.

Because the game occupied my intellectual energy (the baby, happily, took up the rest of my energy), I was thinking about other things besides how angry I was at the enormous change in my real life circumstances. I could make a stupid mistake in a dark dungeon, and then laugh about it by the fax machine the next afternoon. My friends had play styles that reflected their personalities, and asking each other to correct tactics could sometimes end up as personal criticisms. Part of what broke that first gaming addiction for me was realizing that despite appearances, I was ill-suited to play a healer. I still deal with the consequences of that discovery, on both sides of the monitor.

The big surprise came when I wanted to write fiction again. One afternoon at work, I was (sleepily) reading the forums at eqcleric.com and someone had posted this:

“Does anyone else think it’s strange how we heal? We wait until people are nearly dead before we do anything, in order to conserve mana. But in real life, could you really wait until your friend was almost dead before you did something about it?”

Many clerics replied that the total absence of mana in the real world was an important consideration, but it got me to thinking. Thanks to EverQuest, I had gained some new points of view. As a cleric, sure — I’d learned a way to turn a blind eye to suffering in the interest of the greater good. But I’d also learned what can happen when someone who claims to have the same allegiances has lied. I’d learned about wanting a reward for weeks, only to get it and realize it wasn’t quite what I’d hoped before — even though I’d known exactly what it was the whole time. I’d learned that the pleasure of arriving someplace new can be wholly contingent on one’s traveling companion. And I knew what could lead to stepping back from a world and a life that had been generally good, and nearly all consuming.

None of those events was reliant on blessed claymores, angry pixies, or dragons that respawn once a week. But they were part of the gaming life, because they’re part of any life. Realizing that is what brought me back to fiction. There have been times since when my gaming and writing balance has been off kilter, especially when one of them offers me something shiny and new. But is life ever completely balanced? In the end, the two reap rewards for each other, and I can’t complain.

Later, I spent some time in a role playing guild. From a more technical point of view, that was also very educational. Roleplaying gamer decisions — what armor to wear, what quests to choose, even whether to walk or run — must be justified by narrative and backstory. Even on an ordinary day, good roleplay gaming presents small but interesting writing challenges. Cheat on those, and guildmates will notice. Do well at them, and become an architect for larger stories.

Eight years and eight games* after EverQuest, I play Aion once or twice a week. It’s cookie cutter in design, but very pretty to look at. My character Ambiguous is musclebound with broad shoulders, purple armor, long flowing black hair, and just a hint of lip color. The female characters seem to like Ambiguous a lot. I also play Left 4 Dead. That game is only about stumbling through warehouses and sewers and forests with a rifle, zombies at every turn. Left 4 Dead gave me strange dreams for a while. (One of them led to There are always children.) All of that said, I’m waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which will come out next year. There’s going to be a smuggler class. Lately I’ve been thinking about how people can be unintentionally heroic while just trying to make a living. I can’t wait to try that out.

*Dark Ages of Camelot, City of Heroes/Villains, Lineage 2, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, and, of course, EverQuest 2.

Erin Fitzgerald is editor of The Northville Review. Ambiguous’s character profile is here.

Sometimes Sex Is Just Sex

My conservative aunt once asked my mother, after reading one of my poems, “Why does he always have to write about sex?” My mother, trying to smooth things over, responded, “Sometimes the sex isn’t about sex. It can mean different things, like getting screwed by the government.” I appreciated my mother’s attempt, though I don’t think it made my aunt feel any better (at the time, under the Bush administration, my aunt trusted the government quite a bit and couldn’t imagine it screwing her). In many ways, both my aunt’s and my mother’s responses were typical. We often feel the need to question all sexual content or to justify sex by making it about something more. But what if the sex is just that, sex? Is that so wrong?

A few years ago, I would have bought into that need to make sex into some metaphor or symbol for something “grander,” but I’ve now come to terms with the fact that sex is a valid topic on its own and needs no other justification. For anyone who has read much of my work, they will know that I devote a lot of my poetry to examining sexuality. Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the time I’m writing about gay sex? This makes it even worse. Some can handle heterosexual sex, but gay sex just crosses the line. The questions start flying: Why do you have to rub your gayness in my face? Why are you being so graphic? Why are you helping push the stereotype that gay men are sex-obsessed?

I remember in a graduate poetry workshop someone questioned one of my poems by saying it was just trying to be shocking. This is a response many people take to sex in general. If you are showing or writing about sex, you are just trying to shock people. To me this comment says more about the person saying it than the poem in question. Shock is relative. Are you shocked because mass media and politicians have told you that you should be shocked by gay sex? Are you shocked because you are uncomfortable with your own sex life or sexuality? Perhaps this is the point of such a poem: to make you think.

Being gay you quickly learn that no matter what you do you will shock people. Once you accept this you suddenly stop caring and are truly free. You realize it doesn’t matter if you are cautious or not, you will still make people uncomfortable, so you might as well go full force. I write openly about gay sex because so few do. Even other gay poets often refrain from dealing head-on with the intimate details.

I’ve been with my partner for six years now and I love examining, in my work, the ever-changing elements of a relationship and of a sex life. This is something I haven’t seen that much of in gay poetry, or really even in straight poetry. In the gay world there are many “hook-up poems,” or “club poems,” or “let me compare you to a Greek god poems,” but very few, what I call, “ever-after poems.” What happens after you meet the man of your dreams? This is what I try to examine in all my work and part of that examination is sex based. Sure, sex is hot the first time, but how do you maintain that good sex? Yes, many are turned off by it. But I refuse to write any differently.

A few weeks ago I had two poems published in Velvet Mafia, which is an online queer magazine that seeks alternative gay work and erotica. I found the site months ago, but hesitated to submit. I kept thinking do I want my work associated with an erotica-type publication? As someone who has been academically trained, I had that feeling of not wanting to associate myself and my work with something “low-brow.” Of course, I eventually came to my senses and realized nothing on the site is any different in quality than the work I write. Many would try to classify some of my poems as erotica, though most are not written with the intent to get you off.

In this situation, I had to confront my own stereotypes and ask myself why do I deem erotica as something less? It’s just another form of writing and has just as much place in the world as any epic poem does. I’m not saying all erotica is well-written, but not all poetry is well-written either. I also made myself admit that the poems that are posted on Velvet Mafia will probably get more readers than my poem published in The Antioch Review, which is a well-established and respected literary magazine. That is not saying anything against The Antioch Review, but it is putting it all in perspective. People may be shocked by sex, but secretly they love to read about it.

I’m a firm believer in writing those poems that are hard to write. The poems some will never respect or understand. These are the poems that need to be written. I always tell my students if you are scared to write it, or scared of what others might think of you, then that’s the thing to write. As for my aunt, she might never appreciate a good gay sex poem, but I like to think just maybe I’ve made her think.

Stephen S. Mills earned his MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, Hoboeye Online Arts Journal, The Broken Bridge Review, PANK, Velvet Mafia, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, Redheaded Stepchild, and the anthologies Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 and Ganymede Poets, One. Others are forthcoming in Knockout, Limp Wrist, and Word Riot. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. He currently lives in Orlando, FL with his partner and his dog. Website: http://joesjacket.blogspot.com/

I am invited by hand delivered letter to visit the McSweeney’s office. Re: Urgent. I don’t know why. It’s a big surprise. I didn’t know they knew me. How could, why would they?

I am standing outside an unmarked office door in a long hallway of unmarked office doors. I enter and am greeted by a prim secretary in a dark pants suit. She invites me to wait in the conference room.

“May I take your jacket?” she asks.

“I’m not wearing a jacket.”

The conference room is monolithic, Brutalist, stark fluorescent lighting, heavily seasonscaped in poinsettia. A large fake Christmas tree buried under silver tinsel stands in one corner. Dominating the center of the room, a long concrete conference table is surrounded by empty chairs, save one high backed executive’s chair, at the head, clearly occupied, but turned with its back to the room.

“Mr. Eggers will see you in a moment,” the secretary says. She closes the door.

The instant the door clicks shut, the chair at the head of the table swivels round. A young Dave Eggers, a Dave Eggers in his twenties, is standing in the chair. He is two feet tall. I sense, from where I stand, that he smells very, very good. Cardamom. I breath him in. I am extremely nervous.

“I. See. You,” Little Eggers says. “Look. McSweeney’s is launching a new magazine, a kind of Fortune 500 money magazine, but McSweeney’s-style. It’s going to be big. This big.” Little Eggers holds his hands straight above his head and stretches them out and around until they come full circle and are pressed in prayer at his chest. “We thought immediately of you.”

“Why me?”

“We actually drew your name from a hat.”

“How did anyone ever think to put my name in a hat?”

“No time. Focus!”

Little Eggers holds forth a blue child’s lunch box, plastic, with a white handle. He slides it the length of the table.

“What you will need is there,” he says, pointing at the lunch box, then returns his hands to prayer position.

I open the box after some difficulty. Inside is one pair of men’s XXXL white cotton underpants, a gallon size zip lock bag filled with heavily used child’s crayons, a battered copy of US Weekly, and a neatly looped length of yellow nylon rope.

“One last thing before you go,” Little Eggers says. “You must give me $70.”

“All I have is my debit card.”

“Sorry, cash only.”

“Oh, you’re a writer, huh?  Where are you published?”

I was asked this question last week.  I’d ventured into the employee lounge to get another cup of coffee when a coworker walked in. The conversation which followed was typical and light, going from the happenings on CNN to the weather and, finally, to my plans for the weekend.

“I’m going to work on my next novel,” I told him.

The coworker seemed startled at first.  A writer?  Here? The reaction is usually the same. People in the workplace don’t expect to find a writer in the wild.

I like to imagine my writer-self as a kind of secret identity.  I work from 8 to 5 every day, then return home where I take off my normal person hat, and put on my writer hat.  Most people who know me also know about this identity, so I suppose it’s not so secret.  On the other hand, the folks with whom I have limited interaction every working day haven’t the slightest clue, and sometimes I prefer that.  It prevents the interrogatives.

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If you don’t know Sean Lovelace is in love with nachos, where are you? His obsession is bordering on perverse. Someone stage an intervention. What you can’t know is that I share a similar, but more restrained, passion. A fixation that also maketh my stomach spilleth over: the potato. How sadly stereotypical, an Irish cailan and her praita, but it’s true. I am in love with potatoes. I have eaten a potato every day since the tender age of six months. I will take my potatoes any way and in alarming portions: boiled, mashed, baked, roasted, fried, au-gratin, deep-fat-fried. I have never eaten a raw potato—

I do not recommend raw potatoes, too much crunch and soapy starch. Cooked potato is my comfort staple. Chocolate is my indulgence staple. My oldest daughter shares my potato fixation. My husband and youngest daughter hate potatoes. At least the teams are even. Every day, I insist on cooking too many potatoes for dinner, infuriating my husband. I don’t seem to know how to do potatoes unless the pot is full to the brim, a bad habit carried over from childhood. I grew-up in a family of eight. We were working-class and potatoes were cheap. Every day, an enormous pot packed with potatoes sat on our stove. It’s not a particularly happy memory: our hunger and greed, how awful those dried-out, white-turning-green, we-know-our-fate, potatoes looked, and yet I still love the potato. Few things (I will not expand) satisfy me more than potatoes mashed with kale cabbage, milk, butter, salt, and pepper, a traditional Irish dish we call colcannon—

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In all that free time I have between the writing life, work life and home life (there really isn’t all that much social life), I get to squeeze in my editing life: I’m the Poetry and Book Reviews Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and I’m an Associate Poetry Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. Selecting work for these publications is one of my favorite tasks—just yesterday, I came across a poem in my Fifth Wednesday submissions that was so good I had to stand up and walk around for a while. There’s nothing like that kind of visceral reaction a piece of truly good writing can create, and there’s no better part of editing than discovering that kind of work.

It’s become clear to me recently, though, that a number of writers have a really different idea about what editors are doing and thinking: last week, I got an email from a very distraught submitter. He had failed to note in his initial cover letter that he’d simultaneously submitted his work. This follow-up communication was full of nearly obsequious apology. All this chest-beating and self-flaggellation over what he called his “gross oversight” freaked me out a little—we’ve always accepted simultaneous submissions, so it was really no problem. Another writer submitted his work in a file I couldn’t open. When I asked him to send them in another form, he gushed about what a wonderful change it was that I had not immediately trashed his work due to a compatibility issue (what kind of magazine editor would do that?).

It always surprises me when writers think of lit mag editors as heartless creatures, capriciously tossing people’s creative work into the recycling bin for our own inscrutable purposes. So, in the spirit of knowledge, allow me to disabuse you of a few apparantly-common fallacies about literary magazine editors (of course, I can speak only for myself and the other editors I know, but I imagine the below hold true for the vast majority of us):

Fallacy 1: We think we’re better than you because we are editors, and you are not. We scorn your work.

Reality: Editors tend to be pretty nice, pretty generous people. It’s not like editing a journal is a very glamorous job—we do a mighty hunk of work for low or no pay because we believe in the importance of showcasing good writing.   We’re giving our time and effort so that your work can be read, not because we’re power-tripping.

Fallacy 2: We’re looking for any reason to reject your writing.

Reality: We want you to succeed! When your poem starts well, we’re smiling. If it continues to be good through the middle, our hearts beat a little faster. If it ends well, too, we might just sound our barbaric yawp. We love good writing, and we want you to give it to us! But no matter how much we’re rooting for you, if the writing is flawed, we’re going to pass.

Fallacy 3: We don’t read your submissions thoroughly.

Reality: We read it all. Even if we’re pretty sure a poem is not for us, we read it. Much of the time, several editors read it. We read the poems guys write about their junk. We read homages to the writer’s cats. We read what appear to be left-aligned journal entries. We read about the flora and fauna of the American back yard. Let me repeat: we read it all.

Fallacy 4: We’re extremely concerned with your prior publications.

Reality: While it’s cool if you’ve had work in a journal we really like, it’s unlikely to influence our final decision. And nothing makes us happier than to be the first to publish a great new writer. So tell us where you’ve been before, but don’t worry if you’re still trying to break into the magazine world. It’s all about the work you’ve put in front of us.

Fallacy 5: We have no feelings.

Reality: Okay, so it’s unlikely any writers actually believe editors are devoid of human emotion, but sometimes it seems that way, especially when one responds to a rejection notice with nasty or abusive material. We’re writers, too, and know that rejection doesn’t feel great. However, it’s not personal. When writers make it personal by being unkind, well, that’s just weird. What would their mothers say?

All this is to say, go don’t be so darn scared or suspicious of editors or of the whole submissions process—just send us your best work, be nice, and we’ll consider your writing with the kind of respect we hope to have from others.