Leaving Inklette

Two years ago I wrote a post where I recommended that every new writer, as a rule, should work at a literary magazine. I still believe that, and I still consider myself a new writer (since I plan to keep this up for my whole life, being at it for five to six years still puts me well in the beginner category), but despite all that I’m breaking my own rule and leaving the magazine where I’ve worked the past five years. The reason is simple: I’m getting busier, taking on more writing projects, and I don’t want to keep my name on the masthead unless I’m an actively contributing member, which I can’t be anymore. But it still hurts to let go of the literary community that I devoted so many hours to and made so many friends on. So I’m going to spend this week’s post looking back on my time as part of it.

Before I joined Inklette, I didn’t think that there were really all that many real writers. There were hordes bright-eyed high schoolers and bored adults working at night and weekends on novels that would never make it beyond a few beta readers, of course, but the only a few people, as lucky and rare as lottery winners, actually ever got published. Joining Inklette was my introduction to the enormous ecosystem of how publishing actually operates, with millions of stories searching for publication in thousands of little magazines like us, which might gain traction and win contests and send the authors flying up to big name awards and publishers.

My job as an editor was a lot like a miner, or maybe it’s more accurate to say scavenger. We’d get a lot of submissions each issue, sometimes as many as five hundred, and read through each one, looking for promise. Even if you aren’t super picky with your reading and overlook grammar and spelling errors, it isn’t hard to sort through them. Most are simply poorly written, the sentences too simple or overloaded with adjectives, the stories and characters predictable or random, it’s easy enough to list why the story doesn’t work in two sentences. But every so often, there was a story that just simply worked. It’s hard to explain what exactly worked about them. They weren’t all typo-free, they didn’t all have well-rounded characters or some particular kind of elegance in the writing. Read through our issues, and you’ll see that there isn’t any unifying theme between all the stories. Not all of them are even stories, strictly speaking. The best way I can describe it is to say that the author promised something in the first few sentences, and after a page or so you learned to trust that promise, that you weren’t going to be let down, and you let yourself get swept along in the ride. It’s an odd feeling, reading a story that might be a winner: you want to be wise and discerning and objective, and so you try your best to mentally note weak phrases and spots for improvement, but another part of you really wants to like it, to trust it, and those two critical urges play off one another until some kind of breaking point when it works or it doesn’t, and if it does then you let the momentum rush you to the end.

But oddly, when I think back to those nights in the library, reading through submission after submission after submission, I don’t remember much about which ones we ended up rejecting or accepting. What sticks in my mind is that moment when I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not yet, when I weighed this weak characterization against that wonderful sentence and read on, waiting to see how it developed. That was the real joy of the appraisal, I think. Maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but it felt worth writing about.