By Paul Crowley
May 2, 2018
We’ve got some proofs to preview, which are like a book before it’s a book. It’s the final stop before you get on the phone and say, with a cigar in the corner of your mouth, “Print ‘em, Morty, and to hell with the consequences!” You have to do that, by the way. The whole chewed cigar and old-timey speech. I’m not just making this all up to reach a word count. How dare you? Have you spent a semester learning how to browbeat print-press workers? I thought not. Where was I? The proofs! Yes.
We’ll get to it later.
First we’re going to do some super fun retrospection. I am a big fan of these kinds of posts, because I have to do very little in the form of actual work. If I wanted to work, I’d have been a dance major.
A terrible, terrible dance major.
First, though, let me set the scene for you. We’re barreling towards the end of the semester, and towards our super exciting release party, which you should plan to attend at Art*Bar on May 7, in this the Year of Our Lord 2018. (We’re all devout adherents to None of Your Business-ism.) Our professor, the Captain America to our plucky group of Literary Avengers, is having us review what we’ve learned. This is done in a darkened room, with a PowerPoint presentation prepared by each student. I did mine, and I don’t want to brag, but I was met with silence that I would describe as “barely tolerant,” but also “real, real angry.” So pretty much a home run.
Without further verbal stalling, here is a personally curated collection of what we’ve learned thus far. Italicized comments are mine and mine alone, and are absolutely not the responsibility of the stellar individuals I’ve tried to quote accurately. Not everything gets italics, either. Some of them are funny on their own, and some of them need to have some mystery. Or I’m trying to plié.
Shenandoah (Web Editor & Event Planner)
- You need a strong password for your WordPress site, so your website doesn’t get hacked. Like ours did.
This is absolutely true. Our site got hacked by a low cost Japanese plumbing site, which is still the funniest thing that has happened to me in my time in school. I will never not love telling people this surreal bit. - You will need to talk to people. I hate talking to people.
I don’t know how much she hates talking to people. Shenandoah is pretty great at it, and communicates a lot better than some other English majors I know.
Meghan (Poetry Editor & Art Editor)
- Red Bull, oh my God so much Red Bull.
- Reading poetry isn’t hard. It’s not, it’s actually fun!
- Especially when you get poems about chlamydia.
- Good does not mean publishable.
So the hard and uncomfortable fact is that we get a lot of “good” submissions, and we want to publish them, but we have to go for great Further, while something might be technically good, it may lack whatever it is that we’re looking for in a piece we want to publish. It’s rarely a matter of getting crap submissions. But we have a responsibility to our community, and to our readers, to publish the best stuff we can get our hands on. - Harder to argue for a grotesque piece when it’s visual.
I think Meghan meant that a piece that might be considered grotesque is harder to advocate for when it’s visual, as opposed to genre written works. I think she’s trying to say that you’re going to encounter art that speaks to you personally, but you need to be able to articulate exactly what qualities about it make it something that we should publish. I prefer to think that it’s harder to argue for a grotesque visual piece because everyone is busy saying “Ewwwwwwwww!” like a bunch of six year olds. - Pick your battles.
Kellyn (Fiction Editor & Art Editor)
- Can you separate your preferences?
There is a difference between loving a genre and working on a literary journal. You need to remember the voice and direction of the journal, and you have to leave your own personal tastes at the door. - Attempt to have patience, but if you’re not feeling it you’re not feeling it.
- Beauty is in the eye of the editors.
This needs to be on a coffee mug. - You can’t fight a color.
Scott (Editor in Chief)
- If it’s not a yes, it’s a no.
Scott was feeling especially chatty one day, and said this to Kat, one of our editors. It means that we don’t have the space for every maybe, possibly, or I-don’t-know-kind of work that we come across. It has to be yes, it has to be a strong yes, and it has to be a yes you’re willing to fight and kill for.
Deanna (Poetry Editor & Layout Design)
- We had 350 poems before the closing of the date.
- Length vs. Content: you have to weigh the options.
- Does the length of one poem justify losing other poems?
Deanna does a great job in her presentation of giving me ALMOST NOTHING TO RIFF ON. THANKS FOR THAT. She also makes a great point about length. Longer poems (and we had some humdingers) take up more pages, which, you know, duh. If you’ve got one great long poem, or six great shorter poems, you’re not advocating for just that one long poem one time. You’re doing it six
Kat (Fiction Editor & Copyeditor)
- The biggest problem I had was reading fatigue. I was reading 120 pages a day.
- If there’s nothing by page four, I’m going to stop.
- It’s a “no” until the piece earns a “yes.”
I also want this on a coffee mug. - A contentious topic does not lead to an interesting conflict.
We got a lot stuff that is at first glance controversial. There’s a lot of sex, a lot of race-language, and just tons of debate about who was the best Darren on Bewitched. While all of that can be grist for a great submission, the controversy in and of itself is not usually what gets us to bite. - We kept this thing called the “titty tally.”
Let me break this down for a minute. There is a subset of writers, and I won’t say who, that tend to describe women’s breasts with a lot more detail than I am given to understand women actually do. Breasts, in fact, do not count as a character trait in 99% of all written material. You do not want to be part of the “titty tally,” because that is basically informing us that your writing is not where it needs to be. But Larry Flynt might be interested. - Rejection isn’t personal
I want this on a coffee mug as well. I’m starting to smell an Etsy shop with merch generated from student presenters. It’s time to rake in the dozens upon dozens of dollars!
What? Oh. Right. Rejection.
It’s not personal. It’s never personal, with us. We review our submissions blind, which means we don’t get the names until after we’ve selected the pieces. It’s never been a matter of saying, “Oh, this dude goes to Cooley? Ha! No, never, not even if he one day becomes the President of the United States’ personal attorney!” It just doesn’t happen that way. We look for the best submissions we can find, and once we have them, we have to send out rejection notices. We hate it. The only silver lining is that it gives you an opportunity to pursue publication elsewhere. - Luck is a factor in publishing
Jessie (Nonfiction Editor & Publicist)
- I had to figure out if I could pitch a piece I liked in an elevator.
The “elevator pitch,” so called because Babe Ruth was famous for practicing his free throws in an elevator car suspended over Churchill Downs during the Super Bowl. Its lesser known definition is about advocating for a story (“pitching it”) in the amount of time it takes a normal elevator (so, you know, not the ones in most universities, amirite?) to go up three to five floors. It’s about fifteen seconds, and it’s harder than you’d think. Harder even than what Babe Ruth, the Gipper, used to do. - No one can build on something if it has a shitty foundation.
Potty mouth.
So there you have it. The first week’s worth of what we’ve learned. There’s good stuff in here. Some of it is pretty profound. Some of it is taken wholly out of context because it made me laugh. Some of it is just damn good advice (rejection is not personal). We’ll do another one of these again, because, once again, I would be a dreadful dance major.
Oh, right. We saw a proof copy today. It was awesome. You should buy a copy, which you can do at our release party, or here:
www.etsy.com/shop/FurrowMagazine
