Quotes of the week

TV screen of empty bar whose proprietor is watching an old French movie

Tiny new potatoes

Overheard after a performance of the Messiah, singalong:

"Wrinkles and laxity are wrinkles and laxity."

"I am a living, breathing, walking, talking potato."

It's ART, for heaven's sake, not widgets

There is a new practice I've noticed among editors using the submission manager Submittable. No complaints about Submittable, by the way. It seems to be a good engine for organizing and tracking the hundreds of submissions editors of a given journal might receive during an open reading period. That part is fine. Lately, though, editors of said journals have taken to using only Submittable to advise writers of the writers' submission status. No emails. Not even a tacky and insensitive form email. (See:  Co-Axial Reply to a Snippy Form Letter, http://www.riddledwitharrows.com/issue-1-4-toc/poetry/#reject) Just a change in  status, of which no notice sent to the writer, so you have to check in at Submittable to find out if there is any news. 

A paying market is a rare place. I understand the economic realities of publishing poetry; supply/demand comes to mind. But it is art, and it's hand-made, so to speak, and we folk who work on writing it give a lot of time and devotion to bringing it forth. And not only is poetry art, we write it essentially for the love of it, for free. How dreadfully hard can it be to send out an individual email to the rejected writer? or the accepted one, for that matter? Just two months ago, I nearly missed an acceptance from  B O D Y, a very cool venue that is open to some of my weirder productions. And these editors are extraordinarily gracious and supportive. They paid me the compliment of rejecting an earlier submission by telling me that the work wasn't as good as my best work, so they weren't going to take it. And they were right!

So OK. I've incorporated checking my Submittable account into my daily routine. But I do miss the one-to-one notifications, and I do not find the new efficiency an improvement.