The Dark (Literary) Ages

I began sending some of my art pieces (particularly, the more recent paintings on my 'how' page) to several college literary journals. You know how all of us get déjà vu, but sometimes that déjà vu comes in the form of a nightmare?

When I was in college, I was obsessed with literature. Now I only read the occasional Shakespeare play or music autobiography, but back then, my bookshelves were stacked. I must have had over a hundred books, from contemporary fiction to the classics to about a dozen books on writing (you know, the kinds written by writers who mostly taught college and never really had a bestseller of their own).

I was also submitting my fiction and poetry to dozens of literary journals on a regular basis, eagerly awaiting the list of publications I would eventually put on my résumé, ranging from works published in underground college journals to the holy grail magazine of fiction and poetry pieces, The New Yorker.

Of course, I was like nineteen, so all of these pieces were routinely rejected by the jaded editors of all these magazines. At that age, what do you really have to say in a short story that hasn't been said by a thousand pimply-faced college undergrads who think they know everything because they took a class on Neoplatonic Philosophy?

Which isn't to say that I'm jinxing my chances of my art being accepted by one of these journals now, but let's just say this isn't my first rodeo. I was on the meatgrinding side of this biz (if you can even call it that) back in college when I volunteered as an associate editor for Hunter College's The Olivetree Review. The amount of submissions we had was outstanding, and so few of them were actually any good. Usually there's always that one truly good story that stands out among all the trash, and that's the one that all the editors unanimously agree is the one to publish. For art, I have no idea what the process is like, but I can't imagine it's any different.

The one time I actually did receive a consideration and a personal response for one of my stories was for this weird story I wrote called The Support Group which I don't even have anymore. It was from this now-defunct journal called The Bacon Review, which I think was one of the few literary journals at the time that was entirely online. The editor apparently liked the story, but said it needed to be fleshed out more (most of my stories were like, 900 words at the most), and that the secondary characters needed to have names and personalities—which I always neglected to include since my stories were usually these hazy first-person accounts from really solitary and unreliable narrators/degenerates. But I guess it does say something that for the several dozen stories and poems that I submitted at the time, that at least one editor saw promise.

Who knows what would have happened if I kept writing? Maybe I would have finally gotten a poem or a story into some journal published by some philosophy major at the University of Arkansas. Obviously these college journals don't really define the careers of a lot of writers and artists in the long run, but I figured as an homage to my past self, I'd give it another go with some of my art. If something hits, it'll kind of be like winning the lottery, except it's the kind of lottery ticket that will only afford a ham or turkey sandwich. But my, how good would that sandwich taste for that brief moment.

erasererhead

02/19/2025