The First Time I realized God wasn’t a Publisher
The writer Charles Bukowski wrote a ton of poetry. According to even a very sympathetic biographer, he published way too much of it, as well. Still, among the massive overflow pile of poems that should have been scrapped, or reworked in later drafts, there are some true gems.
One of Bukowski’s favorite themes was rejection: rejection by women, rejection by potential employers, and, naturally, rejection by publishers. He claimed at one point that rejection by publishers was especially painful, because when one encounters a voice without a face (as in a letter), it feels like God is talking to them. Bukowski claimed that it was even worse to receive no response rather than a rejection, since, presumably, it meant that God wasn’t answering, and that therefore God might not exist or at least didn’t care about Buk’s imprecations and pleas. At least if God answers with a “No,” that is some kind of response.
I can’t speak for other writers, but I can remember vividly the first time I realized that God wasn’t in the publishing business, and that the person either rejecting or accepting my work was just some guy or gal (usually a guy) with an internet connection, perhaps a mimeo machine, and some kind of educational grant, as well as a day job. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it’s important to keep in mind so that the blow of rejection is softened.
This moment came for me when, shortly after returning from the war in Iraq, I wrote a story about my experiences over there. I didn’t filter anything out or sugarcoat my experience, and some of the quotes of conversation in the story were pretty close to verbatim remembrances. I edited the story, revised it, and then sent it out to various publishers.
One publisher responded, with an email and an attachment, saying that they (he and his team) really enjoyed the work, but that they had included some helpful suggestions on how to improve it.
I was clueless as to what this meant and clicked the attachment. In among my own story contained in the document were red-lettered comments (like when the “Track Changes” feature is enabled in MS-Word). To give you an idea of the flavor of the advice this guy offered, I had written a sentence, saying something to the effect of “Corporal Santana didn’t get along with Sergeant Pacheco. He claimed it was because he was Dominican and Pacheco was Puerto Rican, and there was some tension there. I was a white guy from Cincinnati, and the only racial tension that was a part of my world was black-white.” I thought it was just an honest statement, but this editor wrote something like, “Here’s a way to improve that sentence: ‘I’m a racist piece of shit who would rather prejudge people than get to know them.’”
It went on and on like this, throughout the piece, this enraged sort of editorial stretched like a skin over my original story (I don’t know how else to describe it).
At first I was mortified, feeling as if the Gods had rejected me, since, as per Bukowski, I was being attacked by what essentially felt like a disembodied voice making pronouncements from the clouds. Was I a bad person? For writing about things I’d seen and heard and learned? Very little in that story dealt with my own actions (some of which in the war were obviously questionable). For the most part, my story was essentially (as Christopher Isherwood would have it) a case of I am Camera. I was barely present in the story, except as an observer, and yet this guy I didn’t know was eviscerating me.
About halfway through my reading of his comments though, my mortification shaded into something else. I stopped reading, took a breath, and thought about it for a second: Publishers were busy people. Even if I was a vile human being and a terrible writer, and something I’d written had offended this guy’s sensibilities, or assaulted him in a deeper sense, the professional response would have been to send back a form rejection letter, with maybe a postscript that my writing might not be a good fit for this publisher (*hint* *hint*) and not to bother submitting there anymore. I’m also pretty sure his email service included a tool for blocking me as well. Why not do that for the racist, jingoistic wannabee writer sending stuff his way?
And then it hit me: He had spent almost as much time fisking my story for thoughtcrimes as I had spent writing it (maybe more). Something was off. This was not only not God speaking to me, but just a man, and a petty one at that. I later found out that this publisher was famous for falling out with even his friends in the literary community, and that after spats with colleagues he would sometimes retroactively remove their own published works from his website, and since this publisher was only online, that meant these stories had essentially been obliterated, deleted down the memory hole due to personal acrimony rather than the quality of the work.
Sitting there with that document, I thought of how best to respond to the email from the publisher. I typed “Dear Mr. -----, Thank you for considering my story. Best wishes, Joseph Hirsch.”
A month or so later I sent him another story. I never heard back this time.
All of this happened more than a decade ago, and since the writer Harry Crews said it takes about seven years for reality to become fiction, it’s much easier to sit back now and understand this guy’s rage. It was all there in his CV.
He’d grown up in Massachusetts, attended Emerson in the heart of Boston, gotten an MA, and had essentially matriculated in the nerve center of our elite, New England. If he had ever had dealings with the kind of guys I knew as an enlisted man in the Army, they were probably making him a sandwich or selling him coke at the end of a wild pub crawl one night. As someone who was trying to gain entry into the publishing industry, and went to a good school and was probably already thinking about marriage and a career, he probably had a totally different set of fears, experiences and observations than someone like me. He was in an environment where, to be called racist, could be career ending. I was in an environment where to not display insensitivity as regards race (at a bare minimum) would have made me a constant target for mockery. The disparity between the world of this publisher and my world at that point was probably as wide as the chasm between the subterranean Morlocks and the docile surface-dwelling Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
I wish I still had that strange email rejection he sent me, but I can’t find it anywhere in the Old Mail folder of my email account. Sometimes, I guess, even the internet forgets.
Anyway, this fellow’s zine ceased to publish in 2010, shuttering its virtual doors. His official paper trail consists of editing one book of short stories collected from his website, published about eleven years ago (right around the same time I started submitting to his zine).
I just checked on him while doing a little prep for this blog entry, and it appears that he has moved up from proofreader at a reputable publishing house to literary agent. He’s not quite God but maybe he’ll get there eventually.
One of Bukowski’s favorite themes was rejection: rejection by women, rejection by potential employers, and, naturally, rejection by publishers. He claimed at one point that rejection by publishers was especially painful, because when one encounters a voice without a face (as in a letter), it feels like God is talking to them. Bukowski claimed that it was even worse to receive no response rather than a rejection, since, presumably, it meant that God wasn’t answering, and that therefore God might not exist or at least didn’t care about Buk’s imprecations and pleas. At least if God answers with a “No,” that is some kind of response.
I can’t speak for other writers, but I can remember vividly the first time I realized that God wasn’t in the publishing business, and that the person either rejecting or accepting my work was just some guy or gal (usually a guy) with an internet connection, perhaps a mimeo machine, and some kind of educational grant, as well as a day job. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it’s important to keep in mind so that the blow of rejection is softened.
This moment came for me when, shortly after returning from the war in Iraq, I wrote a story about my experiences over there. I didn’t filter anything out or sugarcoat my experience, and some of the quotes of conversation in the story were pretty close to verbatim remembrances. I edited the story, revised it, and then sent it out to various publishers.
One publisher responded, with an email and an attachment, saying that they (he and his team) really enjoyed the work, but that they had included some helpful suggestions on how to improve it.
I was clueless as to what this meant and clicked the attachment. In among my own story contained in the document were red-lettered comments (like when the “Track Changes” feature is enabled in MS-Word). To give you an idea of the flavor of the advice this guy offered, I had written a sentence, saying something to the effect of “Corporal Santana didn’t get along with Sergeant Pacheco. He claimed it was because he was Dominican and Pacheco was Puerto Rican, and there was some tension there. I was a white guy from Cincinnati, and the only racial tension that was a part of my world was black-white.” I thought it was just an honest statement, but this editor wrote something like, “Here’s a way to improve that sentence: ‘I’m a racist piece of shit who would rather prejudge people than get to know them.’”
It went on and on like this, throughout the piece, this enraged sort of editorial stretched like a skin over my original story (I don’t know how else to describe it).
At first I was mortified, feeling as if the Gods had rejected me, since, as per Bukowski, I was being attacked by what essentially felt like a disembodied voice making pronouncements from the clouds. Was I a bad person? For writing about things I’d seen and heard and learned? Very little in that story dealt with my own actions (some of which in the war were obviously questionable). For the most part, my story was essentially (as Christopher Isherwood would have it) a case of I am Camera. I was barely present in the story, except as an observer, and yet this guy I didn’t know was eviscerating me.
About halfway through my reading of his comments though, my mortification shaded into something else. I stopped reading, took a breath, and thought about it for a second: Publishers were busy people. Even if I was a vile human being and a terrible writer, and something I’d written had offended this guy’s sensibilities, or assaulted him in a deeper sense, the professional response would have been to send back a form rejection letter, with maybe a postscript that my writing might not be a good fit for this publisher (*hint* *hint*) and not to bother submitting there anymore. I’m also pretty sure his email service included a tool for blocking me as well. Why not do that for the racist, jingoistic wannabee writer sending stuff his way?
And then it hit me: He had spent almost as much time fisking my story for thoughtcrimes as I had spent writing it (maybe more). Something was off. This was not only not God speaking to me, but just a man, and a petty one at that. I later found out that this publisher was famous for falling out with even his friends in the literary community, and that after spats with colleagues he would sometimes retroactively remove their own published works from his website, and since this publisher was only online, that meant these stories had essentially been obliterated, deleted down the memory hole due to personal acrimony rather than the quality of the work.
Sitting there with that document, I thought of how best to respond to the email from the publisher. I typed “Dear Mr. -----, Thank you for considering my story. Best wishes, Joseph Hirsch.”
A month or so later I sent him another story. I never heard back this time.
All of this happened more than a decade ago, and since the writer Harry Crews said it takes about seven years for reality to become fiction, it’s much easier to sit back now and understand this guy’s rage. It was all there in his CV.
He’d grown up in Massachusetts, attended Emerson in the heart of Boston, gotten an MA, and had essentially matriculated in the nerve center of our elite, New England. If he had ever had dealings with the kind of guys I knew as an enlisted man in the Army, they were probably making him a sandwich or selling him coke at the end of a wild pub crawl one night. As someone who was trying to gain entry into the publishing industry, and went to a good school and was probably already thinking about marriage and a career, he probably had a totally different set of fears, experiences and observations than someone like me. He was in an environment where, to be called racist, could be career ending. I was in an environment where to not display insensitivity as regards race (at a bare minimum) would have made me a constant target for mockery. The disparity between the world of this publisher and my world at that point was probably as wide as the chasm between the subterranean Morlocks and the docile surface-dwelling Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
I wish I still had that strange email rejection he sent me, but I can’t find it anywhere in the Old Mail folder of my email account. Sometimes, I guess, even the internet forgets.
Anyway, this fellow’s zine ceased to publish in 2010, shuttering its virtual doors. His official paper trail consists of editing one book of short stories collected from his website, published about eleven years ago (right around the same time I started submitting to his zine).
I just checked on him while doing a little prep for this blog entry, and it appears that he has moved up from proofreader at a reputable publishing house to literary agent. He’s not quite God but maybe he’ll get there eventually.
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