I thought that might make you open this thread.
Here is an extract of the VQR article. Read the entire article here.
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/20...ditors-poetry/
Several years ago I sat on a conference panel in the presence of eager writers— all beginners, some young and some old, some with genuine talent and, among fiction writers probably some who could score commercial successes in genres like Romance or Gothic regardless of what an academic aesthete would consider “talent”—and I told them how we worked at
Southwest Review, about how I accepted poems. I told them that sending submissions to a literary magazine is a lot like sex. “How might that be?” they wondered.
“Well, there are many ways in which submitting to a literary magazine is
not like sex. But the two activities have one thing in common: Timing is everything. The problem is that the eager author has no sense of it.” I may arrive at my desk in a foul mood. If so, I probably will reject everything my eye passes over. If I feel the weight of a groaning backlog, I also feel less willing to add to it. But if the planets are in a proper alignment, my natural sanguinity may translate into greater flexibility and generosity, and give an unpredictable advantage to whoever wrote what I pick up that morning.
One earnest woman raised her hand. “Don’t you think that the Internet is a wonderful thing, because it allows more voices to be heard?” she asked hopefully.
How is submitting to a literary magaznie like sex?
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