Labor of Love
Writers always remember their first.
Acceptance that is.
After the work is done, and IF we feel we’re finally ready to share it with the world, we send out our stuff.
Submitting stories to literary magazine is bit like applying for a job. You must research the journal, read the editors’ bios, understand their aesthetic, subscribe and be a regular reader, and then you must try to emulate their voice to prove to them that you can fit in there.
The process is agonizingly long. If you submit a story in the fall, you might hear back a year later. Truly. Or you might not hear back at all. Those are the most defeating.
Or you might hear back relatively fast, only for the editors to tell you, “We didn’t feel this was a good fit for us.”
Or they’ll say, “We really like your writing, just not this time.”
Or, “This was a tough decision, but we have to pass. Please consider submitting again.”
And then there is the one: “We loved this story and wanted to ask if we can publish it in our upcoming issue.”
YES! YES, of course you can!
My first was from Pearl Magazine, and the acceptance letter came in the mail, which made it all the more exciting. Most submissions these days live in a Submittalbe queue, their status forever PENDING.
But oh, those days of sending a typed manuscript on paper in a brown envelope with your self-addressed-stamped-envelope. Those journals meant love.
And love was exactly what Pearl Magazine was about. The letter came from one of the editors named Marilyn. She loved my story about a Mexican-American girl whose out-of-wedlock baby fell under a mal de ojo curse.
After a spring acceptance, my story was supposed to run that fall, but it was delayed for production reasons. The magazine later said health problems had struck the staff, and that they were going on hiatus. Later, Marilyn and her staff notified contributors that Pearl was going to officially close.
Though my story never ran in Pearl Magazine, it came out a few years later in another journal, and it is now in my short story collection publishing this fall.
If a story is meant to be in the world, it will be told. It will live somewhere, sometime. Maybe not the time you want it to be there, but somewhere, when you least expect it. And when it does, you’ll remember it forever.
◊♦◊
Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash
