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. As a general rule, because we reject as we go, the longer you do not hear from us, the further your piece has advanced (We’re not ignoring you, we promise!).

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 three readers, who review their stacks individually. If the majority feels the work may fit with the journal, they might forward it on with a “yes.”

In our second round, things get a little tougher to distill. In this round, all of our readers evaluate the pieces and assign a score. By this point, we’ve made the hard decision to turn down 90% of our pieces, leaving us with 20 left for the final round. 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 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!