More hubris and cruelty from editors

Sometimes literary editors are discouraging, and sometimes they miss the point—but sometimes their rejections are just … well, odd.

I recently rounded up some of my friends’ bizarre experiences with rejection, and the stories ranged from comical to heartbreaking. There was one theme, though, that fascinated me, and it happened when responses almost seemed like afterthoughts.

For almost all rejection notes, the wording is as meticulously crafted as in any submission the magazine might receive. I remember my first stab at writing the text of a rejection. A few considerations seemed vitally important. 

1. “No” should never be tacit. A writer is looking for one key piece of information when an editor responds to a submission: Is it accepted? A rejection slip needs to say “no” directly, and early; I always tried to include my “no” in the first sentence.
2. “Thank you” is necessary. A magazine needs submissions. Writers are critically important to any journal’s mission, and they deserve appreciation for helping to contribute in that way. (I know plenty of editors who regard large numbers of submissions as undesirable—a problem. While they are a lot of work, I welcome every one. More submissions means better work.)
3. False encouragement should never be offered. “No” and “thank you” are the basics. “We invite you to submit again”—now, that’s special. I never offered this language to any writer unless I actually wanted to see more of that person’s work. Journals get enough submissions that they don’t need to ask for more.
4. There should be no tone of apology unless the journal has done something wrong. If my response is late, I apologize. I’m not sorry for a simple no.
5. There should be no excuses. A rejection should not suggest that the journal “can’t” accept work. 
6. There should be no counseling or patronizing. It is inappropriate to point out that a journal’s decision represents only one person’s or group’s opinion, or that there are a lot of other fish in the litmag sea. Empty platitudes are disrespectful, and they have no place in rejection correspondence.

Most editors think about the message they are sending to writers, and how it reflects on (and how it will be received by) all parties involved. Suffice it to say, though, that “most” does not mean “all.”

Here are some of the less considered responses some of my writer friends have received:

• Many writers report the new trend of the non-response: If you don’t receive a contract, you should consider yourself rejected. This is the response that shows up when you log in to the submission management system and see that your work is declined without comment. A handful of magazines acknowledge up front that this is how they operate; some just quietly click “reject” without sending word of the decision. (Sometimes they do this accidentally.)
• R. reports that she once received a note that informed her “Only one of these even came close.” Remarked R.: “OK, then.”
• J.’s favorite rejection told him, “We don’t publish this type of material, and even if we did, we wouldn’t publish this.” A similar magazine later accepted the pice—and sent a nice-sized check.
• L. received a rejection that said simply, “We prefer poems that laugh down the well.” I admit I’m not sure what that means.
• One of my most celebrated writing friends, D., reports, “I once received a form rejection from a journal and then, two days later, a handwritten note from the editor saying that the form rejection wasn’t sufficient to express his dislike of my work—that he found it flat and unmusical and completely devoid of merit of any kind.” He adds, “A few years later, this same editor published a memoir about his unhappy childhood, and I thought, nah, not unhappy enough.
• C. says that an editor told her to read previous issues of the journal, because they publish only “phenomenal” poets. The weird part? C. herself had been in the journal twice before. “Does that make me a part-time, or an only-once-in-a-while, ‘phenomenal’ poet???!”
• S. remembers when he was a grad student, and as a class project he subscribed to a journal to write a detailed critique of it as a class project. Later, when he sent his work to that journal, he mentioned a few pieces he particularly enjoyed. “Within a week I received an angry handwritten note on my cover letter stating that it was ‘clear I had never bothered to read their journal, that my cover letter was an insult because the editor personally knew that he had no subscribers from Arizona, and that my submission went in the trash as soon as he saw praise for the poems from their last issue that I had clearly not read.” S. sent back a copy of the issue with a mail stamp addressed to him and “drew a big, full-fingered bird on the cover.”
• G. tells me that he has received a Post-it note rejection, as well as another rejection for which the first page of a manuscript was returned with “NO!” scrawled across it.
• R. notes that she received an acceptance on a Post-it—“the entirety of which read, ‘I’ll take [poem title].’”
• M. once received a standard rejection with an additional note that said only, “A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Because we all know there’s only one kind of story ….
• H. got a handwritten rejection once that was completely illegible. She says, “It was handwritten, presumably in English, but I literally couldn’t read a word of it, and it was also super-late, like over a year.” (Incidentally, H. says that she’s been writing a long time and isn’t bothered by rejection—“But when I think of beginning writers or writers who are insecure about the value of their work receiving the responses people are describing here and being hurt by them, I’m disgusted.”
• P. says she once received a a snail mail rejection with a flyer containing submission guidelines, with the submission window aggressively circled and highlighted. The editor had scrawled a message: “FOLLOW GUIDELINES CORRECTLY.” The problem was that the dates on the flyer contradicted the dates listed on the website, which had her submission occurring within the window. “This stuff doesn’t bother me as much now, but when I was just starting to send work out, it stung a bit.”
• F. remembers sending a note in her cover letter explaining that she felt a particular group of poems might be a good fit. The editors responded, “No matter how you feel, these poems aren’t a good fit for XXX Review.” The editor signed the note, “I.B. Scrood.”
• L. received a poetry rejection that said, “Your poetry is good, but alas, we can’t use it.” Alas?
• E. received a rejection slip in the mail in the old days of paper submissions. The clean but oddly angled cut made it clear an intern had prepared the rejection with one of those guillotine-style paper cutters. As did the smear of blood across the quarter-sheet ….
• Someone—an editor of a well-known feminist journal—once rejected A. with a note that admonished, “Only famous poets can write in lowercase.”
• Poor J. received a rejection once that had none of the typical language of a rejection slip—just a single sentence saying, “Don’t quit your day job.”

I may need to write another post about rejections that run the gamut from the cruel to the ridiculous to the nearly sublime. There are so many stories about odd and inappropriate rejection notes that I feel affirmed in my approach: Editors should just say no, politely and respectfully—and humbly. 

There is never any need to hurt a writer. A simple rejection says all they need to say.

.

When editors get creative with 'no'

A memo to editors of literary journals: You do important work. But you are not the important part of the work you do.

I know. I’m an editor myself, and I have been for years. I’ve learned on the job, through some pretty good decisions and some ridiculous mistakes. But the most important thing I learned about literary editing was that the work is the most important thing—the work, and the readers we connect to it.

Still important, but less so, are the writers of the work. The work has a life beyond the writer. It lives on the page and in the minds of those who receive it. The work originates with the writer, but it’s a lot bigger than that. Its potential, once a writer summons it into being, is nearly endless. It’s different for every reader. It’s a living thing.

So let’s recap. Here’s a list of the most important entities associated with literary publishing, in order:

1. The writing.
2. The audience who receives the writing.
3. The author who operated the pen or the keyboard.

Those are the top three—and not that editors and publishers aren’t on the list. Maybe they’d share the fourth spot. But as an editor, I know that these three entities come before all other considerations, and that I am their servant.

It is undeniably true that editors do holy work. They are the clerics who convey the prophecy from the prophet to the people. Without them, the reach of the work is limited; without their discretion and insight, excellence would never be known, past the writer, and worthwhile voices would be lost to a lot of noise. But a problem happens when editors exalt themselves over their vital and necessary work. It happens often enough that nearly every writer has a story.

I have a regular feature here, one I haven’t written in a while, called “Reading the Tea Leaves of Rejection.” In that feature, I parse the language of a rejection note so that writers can understand the messages they’re receiving. A rejection is both highly crafted and highly coded, and it’s important to pay close attention to the wording—to understand that a “send again” message is more than a breezy kindness, and to get a feel for how their work was received.

Today, I was kind of blanking on a blog topic, and I asked a large group of my friends for oddball rejections that I could choose from for a Tea Leaves feature. The response was huge and the examples were stunning. It became clear to me that among all of the excellent literary editors who are now operating, there are quite a lot of people operating not with a public servant’s heart, but rather on the engine of pure ego.

Let’s look at some examples—all names removed to protect some stunned writers and some editors who, like all of us, deserve the benefit of the doubt:

• M. recalls that an editor wrote to him about what poems were supposed to be like—and included a treatise she had written on Anthony Hecht, her paragon of poetic quality. “It was long, too,” he remembers. “A couple of pages and barely about my work except to say it wasn’t real poetry.”
• T. remembers an editor who felt helpless in regarding his writing. “My weirdest rejection situation came from an editor who stated their main sorrow in life was that they would never have enough time to teach me how to write, even if they set aside their other projects,” he says—and to be clear, T. never asked this editor to teach him anything; he was just wanting a decision on a submission.
• K. recalls two memorable rejections. “One journal used to use a form letter that was a play on an ‘it’s not you, it’s us’ breakup letter. Literally, it repeated that phrase a few times, which made it feel ironic and not so nice,” he says. “It was trying to be funny and cute, but a funny and cute rejection like that felt kind of disrespectful to me. I haven’t submitted there since.”
• K.’s other weird rejection was scrawled in pencil on a piece of the journal’s stationery: “Sorry, but no.” Says K., “This was so bad that I have kind of grown to like it. I still have a photo of it somewhere.”
• S. notes that her poetry was rejected for its “remorseless insistence on free verse.” She admits to being puzzled: “I’m still not sure what I should have felt sorry about.”
• L. received a weird fiction rejection once that sounded somewhat angry, as she recalls. “They didn’t think the one-sentence overview in the cover letter matched what happened in the story well enough. It was quite strange, and I’ve never submitted to that journal again.” L. hunted and found the correspondence, and she offered this actual quote from the editor’s rejection note: “Hmmm. I always try to be encouraging in my comments about a story, but your’e making it tough to do.”
• Another L. writes, “I just looked this up so I could get the wording right. I got one a couple of years ago that rejected all of the poems, but noted the one that was least offensive because ‘Despite its personal references, it felt less self-absorbed than some of the others.’ The whole tone and response felt really sexist to me. IDK, sorry for being a woman and connecting to the world around me, I guess?”
• My friend J. received a similarly dismissive and possibly sexist rejection slip, but while L. can laugh hers off, J.’s unfriendly rejection still works on her. She notes that her rejection “blasted me on writing about the experience of being a mother, and writing from personal experience at all.” She adds, “I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s one of the main reasons I’m still reluctant to send my work out.”

I’m going to interrupt my list here to point out that what J. describes is some of the real damage that can come out of an abuse in an unequal power relationship. Here’s J., new to publishing and sending her work in good faith to an editor, and that editor responds to her by saying that her lived experience is not sufficient to be the stuff of poetry. I’ve had the pleasure of reading J.’s poetry, and I found it to be both insightful and well crafted. Maybe the editor misspoke or was misconstrued. Maybe the editor has a strong preference for poems that avoid domestic topics. But the advice was phrased in a way that wasn’t meant to build J. up or to encourage her to keep trying; instead, it lingers with her as yet another societal voice telling her that women don’t matter, mothers don’t matter—she doesn’t matter. But I know for a fact she does.

The heck of it is, when writers send their work out for possible publication, the very act announces that the work is not intended for workshopping. An editor may have a critique to offer, but submitted work is regarded by the writer as finished work—not work in progress. What a writer is asking for is a decision—yes or no—and, ideally, a home.

Many writers love receiving advice from editors, and these folks should have some unique insights. No one reads more new poems than a literary editor, and few are as adept as saying what works and what doesn’t in a poem. But my strong sense is that if one editor doesn’t like a set of poems, another might—or might not. I just send it on along, while I focus on writing my new work and tracking what’s in the hopper. A rejection is a piece of information. A dozen rejections provide a compelling piece of information. That simple “yes” or “no” is the only information I really need from an editor who has spent a brief time with my work. If an editor shows interest, I’d be very happy to talk about edits or revisions, but barring that, an editor’s opinion is just one person’s idea about the work, and I’d just as soon keep it brief.

J.’s editor, though, went beyond the purview of an editor to comment on … what? J.’s humanity, maybe, and its value? But feedback about the choice of subject matter is just next to useless. I’m not even fully convinced that poets are fully responsible for their choice of subjects. I write what I’m compelled to write, and sometimes that’s motherhood—the most significant experience of my life.

• Another J., a memoirist, tells me that she was rejected because her piece was just too sad. “It made us want to cry,” the editor told her, explaining that the journal couldn’t publish something that sad. 
• W. writes that he received a rejection accompanied by a link to a website offering information on basic plot construction.
• My friend S. writes that she was rejected once because, in the words of the editor, she wasn’t “established” enough. She also notes that she was just recently rejected by the editor of a journal immediately after she had done the same to that editor—a would-be tit-for-tat situation—“And yes,” S. says, “they mentioned that in the rejection letter.”

I file all of these rejection under the category of editors behaving badly. Sometimes they’re behaving cruelly. Sometimes they’re behaving self-importantly. And sometimes they’re behaving ignorantly, with a very narrow view of what poems, essays, or stories are allowed to be.

Editors curate a journal. They work toward a publishing mission that they’re allowed to define, and they get to say no to work that doesn’t fit that mission or doesn’t meet the quality of the work they wish to print. All writers get rejections. I don’t even regard them as particularly negative. Rejecting, in and of itself, is a neutral act.

And incidentally, we read a lot into acceptances, because they’re what we want, and they’re a sign that our writing is going in a good direction, but they’re rather neutral, too. The writing is the thing, and the publishing activity is what happens around the thing. It’s so much nicer when the publishing efforts are successful, but excellent work is rejected every day—and ridiculously bad work is published. Acceptance is no indication that a writer should work less hard.

It kind of sounds like I don’t love or appreciate editors—but I do. I think my own editing work has been the most exhilarating and educational work of my life. I know that I’ve helped and encouraged writers, and I also know that without meaning to, I’ve hurt and discouraged my fair share.

But editors need to be humble, even when they choose to share hard news. I’m not referring to a simple rejection, but rather some element of commentary or critique that they feel compelled to spend precious time communicating to a writer—often this is exactly the information that the writer most needs to hear—they really ought to practice audience awareness. To newer writers, editors represent a voice of authority. That authority should be used with grace and discretion.

***

I received more editor horror stories than I could easily use in one post—plus lots of full rejection slips that I plan to parse in future installments of my Reading the Tea Leaves of Rejection series. Check back Wednesday for more unusual responses—and on Thursday we’ll turn the tables and discuss editors who are making the literary world a better place with their actions.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Would Like to Brace You for Impending Disappointment

Note: Do you rely on a digital reader? Complete readable text may be found in the first comment following this post.

Hello,

Listen, you’re going to get some distressing news about your three-year-old submission to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in roughly a day or two. We at McSweeney’s would like for you to prepare yourself for the worst—not death-type worst, but the worst thing that can happen to a writer’s submission, barring, say, outright theft and loss of movie rights for a story that becomes the next Avatar or Gone With the Wind or Disney blockbuster animated feature.

The news is not good. If you take statins to lower your cholesterol, we advise you to double up. The next time you check your e-mail, please make sure you are seated away from blunt or sharp edges.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

Are you OK? This is a test. Had this been your actual bad-news correspondence from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, it would have included some rather rough news about your submission. That’s coming, and we’d like for you to be prepared.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

How about if you go fetch a cup of tea, maybe prop your feet up, then go on ahead and open your e-mail again in four to seven minutes.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

***

***

***

Hello,

Oops. Just realized that nowhere in our multipart rejection series did we actually alert you to the sad truth that your work was, in fact, being rejected. To be clear, when we said, "We are clearing the deck," what we meant to say was, "Nope."

Sincerely, 

The Editors
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

We at McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern are, as our name implies, concerned. We would like you to know that we value you as a human, and that the world is a slightly better place because you are in it, sending submissions into the ether and waiting, with ever-diminishing hopefulness, for a response. We’re feeling kind of bad about that rejection we sent, or rather, that small series of rejections. Are you OK?

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

It has come to our attention that some consider a wholesale rejection of every submission (with a request to resubmit the same material) to be a poor procedure for dealing with a publication’s submissions backlog. We’re not sure why this didn’t occur to us, but we’ve been informed that we might instead have sent a respectful, ordinary rejection in just one iteration, instead of several. In fact, some experienced editors from other publications have suggested that we could have read, even skimmed, the submissions as an act of good faith, or that any number of grad students would have loved to serve as interns, even temporarily. Heck, a team of interns could have attacked our submissions and knocked them out in a week in exchange for pizza and beer or tasteful literary tattoos.

What we’re hearing is that there may have been a better way. It’s a notion we thought we’d toss your way, see what you think.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

*** 

Hello,

Something else has come to our attention, and it is the fact that most people who submitted to us over the past three years probably have new work, better work, that they could send our way. Maybe requesting the resubmission of work that hasn’t found another home in the past 1,095 days is not the optimal way for us to get our hands on the best new writing. We’re confused on this point, and we wondered what you thought. Fact is, we’re starting to feel a certain comity, or maybe even a friendly acquaintanceship, with you. We were so close to your writing—the very best you had to offer of yourself, woven of hope and invention—and we think it grew on us in a very subtle way, despite the fact that we didn’t actually look at it. Please write back. We miss you.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

Uh-oh. Some people have noticed the excuses we slipped into our series of rejection letters. We tried to blame our long response time, and our ultimate lack of consideration, on our small staff. We’ve been made aware that a lot of journals have even smaller staffs and less money than we do. We could even list some of those journals, but, you know—the list is really long. Just take our word for it. Some of the best magazines out there have similarly sized staffs.

We’re starting to think we were just careless with writers’ work—again, the very best part of them, submitted with a great deal of trust and good faith. We’re starting to think this isn’t funny.

I think it’s safe to say that we’re starting to feel kind of sorry.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

***

Hello,

We’ve been informed that our brand is known for its archness and its love of parody, and some have even suggested that our unconventional (or, to quote our detractors, our “irresponsible,” or “impersonal,” or “cold,” or “ridiculous”) multiple-form rejection might open us up to the same kind of treatment we love to dole out. Funny thing about satire. It only works when the satirist herself is beyond any real reproach. At any rate, we can dish it up, so we’re sure we can take it.

Still, if you’d put in a good word for us with random bloggers, we’d be grateful. Just tell them they ought to go back to talking about the great pen-versus-keyboard controversy, or the role of meditation in writing, or, really, anything about their cat, loosely linked to the topic of writing. People love that shit.

Tell them we’ll do better. You can tell from our series of notes we mean it; we just exercised some poor judgment, and someone told us that everyone deserves a little slack from time to time. This looks bad, though. We know this looks very bad.

Sincerely,

The Editors

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern

When you get a "send again" ... again

So you got rejected. If you’re like me, you utter a “darn” and then update your log and wait for some acceptances to roll in.

But wait. What if you came close … again? What if editors really admired your work … again? What if editors want you to try again … again?

I know a lot of writers who can handle a straightforward rejection, but who feel tremendous frustration with the “almost” rejection. It’s especially hard when a journal has sent more than one of these rejections with a note saying a particular element of the submission was appreciated, or editors would like to see more work.

I’m not sure why slightly warmer rejections cause such frustration among writers. They strike me as a very positive message. I’m always in favor of a little encouragement—a small sign that I’m on the right track.

But they do cause a fair bit of consternation, and for an obvious reason. Lose a footrace by a furlong, with dozens of people between you and the tape, and you’ve lost a footrace. Lose a footrace in such a way that you brush against the falling tape another runner has broken, and that hurts. You nearly had it.

As an editor myself, I can attest that these rejections are not, in fact, a silver medal, but they’re also not a green participation ribbon. They offer some useful information for submitters, and the encouragement is real.

A major literary journal might get five thousand submissions per year. Most of this work is instantly rejectable—and some of it is very solid and good, but still instantly rejectable. Editors sometimes complain about their volume of submissions, because the work can be a lot to weed through. But the great boon of a huge submission pool is that editors can let good work go and still have a lot of really good work to choose from—so much, in fact, that not all of the really good work can fit.

The fact is that it isn’t enough to write good work, when it comes to top journals. A good story has interesting characters and a compelling plot. A great story has unforgettable characters involved in a series of events that compel a reader’s attention.

Likewise, a good essay has strong writing and some interesting ideas. A great essay changes the way we think about some aspect of the world, and it remains on a reader’s mind for a long time after it is read.

And the difference between a good and a great poem is pretty obvious, too. A good poem may have some clever wordplay, some images that linger, a set of ideas that matter. I can think of plenty of good poems that I really appreciate—that speak to me and have memorable passages. But an editor can usually do much better than good. An editor with thousands of poems to choose from can probably find something that approaches a level of really-goodness or even, we can dare to hope, greatness.

Let’s be clear—greatness is a pretty high expectation for even a large slush pile. But it becomes harder to stand out when our work is among other work, some of it excellent or at least memorable and different. It’s especially hard for those quieter pieces to break through.

What an encouraging rejection means is that the work is good, or even very good. A personal note from a busy editor is like gold; when a piece of writing is singled out for praise, there is a reason. Someone who reads a lot of stuff thought this particular stuff had, well, the stuff. Because most editors care deeply about writing, their encouragement reflects a wish by an educated reader for more work from a specific writer. They’re in a position to know when a voice is special and the work has promise, and their sheer busy-ness ensures that they aren’t sending this personal encouragement to everyone (although I certainly hope they’re taking the time to say thanks—but that’s a post for another day).

My suggestion: Writers should try to resist feeling frustrated by specialized rejections. They’re a good thing. They show the writer’s progress; they offer an endorsement by an educated reader who sees promise in the writer’s work. And that’s something to celebrate.

In Praise of Rejects

            True or false: There’s no such thing as a good rejection.

            The answer is complicated. Most magazines use a system of tiered rejections, so there is, quite literally, a “good” rejection, as opposed to a “regular” rejection. I used to work at a magazine that even had a “bad” rejection, although we nixed that pretty quickly.

A “good” rejection slip typically invites another submission, and it is unambiguous in that message. Such a rejection may read, “We read your work with interest, and although we are not accepting it, we would like to consider more.”

A “regular” rejection just turns the work down, ideally with a word of appreciation: “Thank you for submitting; unfortunately, we are not going to accept any of your work at this time.”

My former magazine’s “bad” rejection was reserved for only the worst work (rhyming doggerel and the like), and its language aimed to discourage further submissions. It contained the text, “Please familiarize yourself with our magazine before submitting again.” I refused to use this rather rude rejection, and shortly after I joined the staff, the text of the “bad” rejection disappeared mysteriously from the office computer leaving, rather incongruously, only the files for the “good” and “medium” rejection slips.

So that’s the basic answer—magazines have a “good” rejection, so there is, in fact, such a thing. I would go a little bit further, though, to say that all rejections are good rejections.

As literary artists, we try to publish in an effort to find an audience. Our goal is to have our work accepted by a literary journal and, ultimately, to gain an even wider audience through books, anthologies … heck, canonization, while we’re at it.

As a post-MFA writer who operates more or less alone in the universe, I don’t have many readers. I float a few poems by my husband and post the occasional piece to Facebook; I have a writing group, and of course I have my blog. Other than these venues, efforts to publish provide my only audience. Sometimes I hit the jackpot and have a poem accepted, and sometimes I have a much smaller audience—an editor and maybe her staff.

When a poem is read with the kind of care a publication decision requires, it has truly found an audience. When I am functioning as an editor, I put a lot of time and thought into each and every manuscript I consider. All work gets a good look; the better work gets several readings. The care of a good editor is not to be discounted; that is an audience of great worth.

Beyond these actual readers, though, a rejection also provides proof that I am in the game—I am an active poet who is putting forth effort to increase my audience.

There’s nothing inherently hurtful about a rejection. Each one just means that some (shortsighted) editor didn’t like my poems and (foolishly) chose not to accept them. And with each rejected submission, I have three or four more poems to shuffle into new submissions for other magazines. There are hundreds of them, and new ones are launched almost daily.

Another benefit of rejections is that they give a writer a fairly good sense of the effectiveness of her work. After a poem is rejected a dozen times, I start to get the idea that it may not be very good. I can eyeball it for possible revisions, or I can shitcan it, or I can keep it circulating, because why the hell not. At some point, the much-rejected poem becomes the filler poem, the one you stick in with the better pieces to round out a manuscript. (Once you start regarding it as a filler poem, it will probably be accepted right away—or is that just how my luck works?)

Despite the fact that some rejections feel deeply disappointing, and despite the fact that they seem to represent wasted time and effort, and despite the fact that a rejection stalls us on our route to inclusion in a Norton Anthology, rejections are not bad things.

In fact, upon reflection, I would maintain that the opposite of the opening question is true. There’s no such thing as a bad rejection.