Poetry Contest Rejection

I miss charts. Maybe I'll make some charts.

Last night, I was checking up on some older submissions I’d made and realized, the Poetry Center’s Juried Prize had still not been announced.  I entered in January.  Their website has finally been updated to list the winners, though I have yet to receive my SASE back.

Here are the luckies:

1st place: Lina ramona Vitkauskas

2nd place: Carrie Oeding

3rd place: Richard Fox

I think that was the last contest I entered on that weird binge last winter.  Praise the lord.  My sins are behind me.

Rejection 197

A nice break.

Is anyone else sending out paper rejections right now and receiving back rejections quicker than you ever dreamed?  Prairie Schooner just noped me in less than a month, too.

Is it that everyone has online submissions now, so that when you think about the hassle of getting together physical papers and two envelopes of different sizes and stamps and paperclips, it just doesn’t even seem worth it, so the good people of the archaic paper submissions are getting a nice little break in the speed of the slush pile?  Or are my stories just getting that much worse that they can tell from the look of the return address that I’m not the writer I’m looking for?

 

Rejection 196

My submission subject line got a tail! Good for it!

Whoa.  200 rejections feels damn close all of a sudden.

I think probably something should happen. Maybe I’ll light something on fire and blow it out.

I got a rejection from Diagram which was anonymous except for the subject line which reads as:

“re: your submission to DIAGRAM: this disturbed little evening, (sorry!)”
There’s a ‘(sorry!)’ tacked onto the end of my submission subject line.

Are they trying to amuse me?  It’s woooorking.

Rejection 195

I got a lightning fast rejection from Conjunctions: less than a month.  Considering I waited almost a year the last time I sent them work, I suppose this is a step up.

Man oh man, I love Conjunctions.  And, ricocheting off that hmtlgiant discussion, I think i might even like their web stuff more.  Some day, Web Conjunctions, someday…

New Story Up at MONKEYBICYCLE.

My story, “The Disasters,” is live on the MONKEYBICYCLE homepage.

There is so much to love in their archive: I recommend checking out  David Erlewine’s A Confounding Plague and Lydia Conklin’s cartoon The Lip Thing just as a jumping off point.

October! Boots! Cider! Burning Leaf Smell!

Down with Halloween Socks I feel somehow obligated to wear and not throw away because they are still useful as socks! I am wearing them now!  I resent them!

Non Sequitur.

I’ve started putting up some of my embroidery on etsy.

I needed a side-project.

Hey.  It’s only the truly best actresses that put out pop albums, right?

Rejection 194

A different kind of gold star.

Steven D. Schroeder was very polite in rejecting me from Anti-. He wished me luck, both with placing the poems elsewhere and with the rejection blog.

Gold-star for conduct!

Rejection 193

So creepy, right? I don't want text to hug me ever again. I wanna text to poke me violently until I back off.

Some encouragement arrived from Nate Pritts at H_ngm_n. He said to be sure to try them again sometime, and then revised that statement to transform ’sometime’ into ‘whenever you can,’ that my poems were ‘close.’

This is one of those times when an encouragement feels possibly better than an acceptance.  It just does. I’m a fan of a variety of emotions.

MLP [ FIRST YEAR ]

Toot Toodle Looooo!

The magnificent J.A. Tyler has collected the first year of ML Press chapbooks into a single volume?  Were you a late joiner?  Have you still not jumped on board?  Were you hesitant because you didn’t know what to do with all those tiny stapled books?  Well, there’s soon to be a conventional format version of these amazing little stories to wrap your hands and mind around: MLP [ FIRST YEAR ]

$15.  Available for pre-order.  It’ll be out 01.01.10 – binary date of  sweetness.

Work from the following luminaries:

 ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, & michael martone.

I’m really not sure why you’re still looking at this page and not at your paypal account screen. Go on.  It’s time to tell them to charge your card instead of deducting it straight from your bank account again. Sneaky little devils.

Rejection 192

A prostitute trying to divert sales from a lemonade stand. (It would really take a minute to explain the train of thought that led to this image and that caption, but trust me: it works.)

Blargh.

Smartish Pace is not interested in publishing my poems, and though they’d like me to submit again, they don’t want that to happen twice in one year, unless I pay a contest fee.  Understandable though not very subtle.