December 7, 2013
Saturday

When I was very young I heard my father talk about “In-Service Ed,” and I imagined that this was a friend of his, in the same way that I thought Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, whose names came up a lot in my parents’ conversations, were also people they knew. It was years before I understood that the term was “in-service education,” and it meant programs that offered additional information or training in new protocols for people who had completed basic schooling and were working in a profession.

As a teacher, I attended in-service programs, by compulsion. “In-service days” were holidays for my students, but contracted work days for me. Sometimes there were county-wide programs held at a central location. I remember sitting in a large theater in the early 1970s listening to someone who had returned recently from southeast Asia. I have no idea what his message was, why he was chosen to talk to hundreds of public school teachers. I remember only that he had occasion to use the word “bosoms” several times, and that he pronounced it “ba-zooms.”

Most of the in-service days I served over my nearly three decades in the classroom were held in my own district, devised by committees that must have worked hard to find presenters and programs that were worth our time. I did get a lot out of a week-long course in learning styles and another covering values clarification. Even now, in my own work, I use the strategies I learned that were Peter Elbow’s theories and practices regarding teaching writing. The shorter programs, though, could be wearying. Really, how often do you need what is offered in “time management for teachers” or mandated instruction in what sorts of hazardous materials are used in the building?

I work as a writer now. I’ve had to empty my mind of Christmas preparation concerns for several hours every day for the past six weeks or so to work on a manuscript for a fellowship application due on Friday. Today I took a break from all things Fa, La, and La to attend a program that is part of my own self-directed in-service education, my DIY MFA.

The event was billed as “a panel discussion on literary magazines, and what the editors of literary magazines are looking for.” The panelists were five editors from four different publications. I had never heard of three of the magazines, and I’m not naming them here, nor the sponsor of the event, because, as the editors kept reminding us (the fewer than a dozen people who attended, three of whom left early), they hold they key to something I want — publication — so I think it best not to irritate them the next time they Google their names, lest they find my mildly negative assessments.

I attend a lot of presentations like this. Two or three years ago at Bread Loaf I sat through an hour-long lecture by the editor of an online journal that consisted almost entirely of tales of the time-wasting dumb query letters they get, the badly formatted manuscripts that are way over the word count they specify, and the submissions that manage to meet the requirements but are just terrible work cranked out by rank amateurs. She then read aloud from some particularly hilarious (to her) letters and manuscripts. I left knowing little about what this editor actually wanted but also knowing I had no interest in submitting to her, even if I could manage to write something short enough. (Her journal has a limit of 3500 words.)

A few months ago I blundered into an online discussion of a blog post an editor wrote that savaged a hapless submitter, mocking the writer’s ineptitude. The blogger was defending herself against criticisms that she had been too harsh. I did not know her, but I did know some of the other editors who were making comments, so I related my experience at Bread Loaf, in almost the same words I used above. I was told I did not understand the spirit of the discussion, my negative observations were unwelcome and, after all, just my opinion, and I was being “insufferably rude” and should go away. Well alrighty then.

The vibe coming off these editors toward authors was not as hostile as that which I had experienced at Bread Loaf and online, but they were definitely bent on telling the audience how difficult their jobs are made by clueless unprepared authors who do not even read the guidelines! “Disdain for authors” is the phrase I wrote in my notebook. All of these editors are so busy, I learned, they have hundreds of submissions to peruse, and they are just looking for an opportunity to stop reading. Manuscripts don’t pile up anymore, literally, since everyone uses an online submission protocol, but the backlog of unsolicited offerings is still referred to as the slush pile. Except one of the editors referred to his backlog at least twice as “the junk pile.” They kept reminding us that they are all volunteers.

Although I said in this very piece that “I work as a writer now,” I am a volunteer as well. The demand for the kind of work I do and the opportunities I have to place my work in a traditional venue are limited. There are way more writers than there are places for them to get published. In aesthetic sensibility and in reading preference, I am a novelist, more drawn to writing the generational saga than a brief glimpse of a moment in the lives of only two or three characters. But short fiction is where an emerging writer makes her reputation, gets the attention that leads to fellowships, residencies, scholarships, agent interest.

I have at least a dozen short stories in various stages of revision. Some have been sent out and rejected (one of them by a journal represented at the panel today). One of my writerly goals for 2014 is to send out send out send out, and, by dint of perseverance and dedicated revision, see a piece of short fiction published.

So when I make the effort to drive more than 25 miles on a Saturday afternoon during a very busy season (because we are all very busy), to an event advertised as one where I will learn “what the editors of literary magazines are looking for,” that’s what I want. Not complaints about writers who don’t follow your guidelines, who don’t read or subscribe to your journal, or who pester you about the status of their submission (or “junk,” if you will), not tales that hold up to ridicule naive beginners who have a lot to learn about craft.

The “what editors want” panel is, I now believe, the writer’s equivalent of an in-service program about time management for teachers. There’s only so many ways to say “send us well crafted stories that are free of cliché and formatting errors and that fall within our word count limit and that are not about ‘aging parents, broken marriages, tired academics overly aware of their midlife crises, or the heroic stoicism of the hypersensitive lonely.'” I copied that list from an article that appeared in Poets & Writers in 2004 and took it with me today to the panel I attended. It’s still a list of negatives (the article was billed as being about what editors don’t want), but it was more helpful than sighs about how busy editors are.

I am not sorry I went out to the event today. I learned about three journals I never knew about before. I’ll be sending something to the “junk pile” of at least one of them. It happens to be about an academic, although not an overly tired one, having a midlife hiccup, if not a full-blown crisis, but it’s formatted well, and within their word count. So we’ll see.