How we read your pieces…

The idea of waiting around for a rejection isn’t on anyone’s “Favorite Things” list. As we gear up to send back our first batch of submissions (rest assured that we ARE reading your work and getting ready to publish our first issue by January!), we’re thinking a lot about the process of what should “make it in” and what our style/aesthetic actually is.

Our editorial team has decided to share some notes about what tiered rejections might mean and how you might improve your drafts the next time you submit your pieces. Although it can be demoralizing to get a rejection, we want you to take it as an invitation to improve what you have — because every story can be better, even the most polished.

In our first round, our readers examine pieces for content. Each submission is sent to a group of two readers, who review their stacks individually. If your work fits the general idea of what we are looking for, they might forward it on with a “yes.” In this section, the pair may agree or disagree, but either way, you’ve had two sets of eyes reviewing the work.

In our second round, things get a little tougher to distill. In this round, we currently have three readers reviewing the work moving forward from round one, and we make the hard decision to turn down at least 25% of our individual piles. As a group of three, the readers discuss the pieces that they think have particular strengths or might fit the issue particularly well. In this round, we start seeing the editor’s greatest challenge: leaving something behind simply because it is in competition with other great work. But our contest has a limit for a reason — we want to showcase great work, but also the stuff that makes us feel something as editors and readers. There’s also the chance that we might feel the work needs to go through some more structural revision; we try to give a little feedback, if this is the case.

In the third round, we once again run into the problem outlined above. Here, we are also looking for smaller line errors, and we discuss as a group, using a ranking system, who our top ten will be. At this point, we’re down to stories that our editors loved, so it’s statistically likely that if you’re being eliminated, it’s not because there’s something completely wrong with the story. It might need a bit of tweaking and refinement, but it’s possible that you just need to try again — and we invite our third-rounders to work on their pieces and resubmit.