Lost Yinzer: Mister Sensitive                                  John Grochalski

 

 

I’m a sensitive guy.  I never thought that I was until I started trying to get my writing published.  I always thought that I was a tough guy.  Not tough in the physical sense; I run from fights.  I always fancied myself to be more emotionally tough; stoic for lack of a better word; tough to make laugh; tough to make cry; a real John Wayne type, but without the guns and cowboy hats.  And while that may still be true of me (I really do find it hard to laugh openly, and other than on rare occasions, I don’t like to cry and I loathe to see others crying), at least in the emotional sense, something about the rejections handed to me by small press editors/agents/publishers has brought out the meek, whiney, and very emotional side of me.

 

This is not a diatribe against small press editors and publishers.  The vast bulk of those wonderful people take their time and energy to read piles of bad writing (and, in rare cases, some good writing) in order to put out a decent journal/book promoting some nobody who sits in his underwear at five in the morning, carrying a wine or scotch hangover, who proclaims himself a genius with every typed page, but is really just another dime-a-dozen jackass.  These kind folks do this willingly with their own time when they could be out mingling with people, or watching Mob Doctor.  Without these small press lords a good deal of us small press poets and fiction folk would be using our writing for kindling; unless you’re the kind of jaggoff who keeps all your writing on an iPad.  I praise and support these people whenever I can, even when they reject me, and I will give a shout-out (Christ, I hate slang) to some of my favorites at the end of this article.  I know I could never do what they do.  I like watching Mob Doctor too much.  But what makes me upset, what brings out the quiver-mouth, doe-eyed sensitive child in me, are the editors who take it upon themselves to comment upon and mock the writing they are rejecting.

 

Editors, a simple no thanks works.  Trust me.  Saying no thanks or sending back some standard rejection completes the transaction where I’m concerned.  We’ll pass.  These don’t fit our needs.  These are all good responses to poems, stories, or articles that have not cut the mustard.  When I get rejections as such I usually say “okay,” and send no response.  If it’s someone that I know I’ll thank them for taking a look, and then send the poems elsewhere to be rejected by another kind editor.  Sometimes I look at the rejected writing and say, “wow, this really is shit,” and then tell my wife to mark off toilet paper on the grocery list because we won’t need it this week.  I’m kidding about that one…I do the grocery list in my home.  It’s some of my favorite writing to do.  My wife writes the bills because she’s much less linear than I am.

 

But some of these editors have to get creative and hurtful in their rejections.  I had one pair of editors who wrote me back what appeared to be an acceptance before turning on me in a very snide manner.  They began by thanking me for sending them poems and telling me how much they enjoyed them.  Good deal, I thought, as I read on.  The journal in question wrote to me and told me that though they wanted to accept the poems, there was one problem.  What? I thought.  Grammar?  The last line?  I can fix the grammar, maybe.  Screw the last line; I ran out of things to say anyway and just tacked that fucker on at the end.  The editors chose not to accept my poems because unfortunately there was once a guy in Los Angeles who wrote poems; a man who went by the name of Charles Bukowski, and he wrote in a very similar way to me.  And because of Mr. Bukowski and his writing, the editors were unable to take my poems at this time, or any time after that.

 

Funny guys, I thought.  I wasn’t dealing with journal editors, I was dealing with comedians.  I mean why send someone a message like that other than to get at them?  Or to lower someone to the dirt?  Because instead of trying to put together a journal you’d rather start some shit with some asshole writer who sent you poems that are in the vein of some other poet.  I mean I’m not a fucking idiot I know how I write, and it’s nothing like this “Bukowski.”  My writing is much more in tune with that of a young Emily Dickinson, my fiction an understated Samuel Richardson, and no two-bit, low-class ignorant journal is going to tell me any different.  I wanted to write the editors back as such, but there was no point.  Doing so adds fuel to the fire.  Besides I hate poets who feel the need to write complaint letters to editors when they’ve been rejected.  It’s painful to read, as are the rants of those sad sack word slingers defending themselves against a bad review in the Sunday New York Times.  And trust me, editors, especially editors of small online journals, will post these egomaniacal ravings on their sites for all to read and make fun of.  The last thing I wanted was my pithy yet pathetic response to their insult available for public consumption.

 

 

I had another editor, one who had been accepting my poems for years; he wrote me a rejection in which he compared one of my poems to Glenn Danzig lyrics.  The first thing I thought upon reading the email was: Who in the hell is Glenn Danzig?  Did being compared to him make my poem good?  Then I looked this Danzig up on YouTube, and realized this editor’s statement was most decidedly meant as an insult.  So I filed the poem away with the other rejects.  I haven’t sent this editor my poems in almost a year.  I have no plans to send him anything anytime soon, and have essentially severed the relationship.  He probably doesn’t care because he has other writers to publish and abuse.  But it makes me feel good not to send him my stuff.  Well, sometimes it does.  Other times, when issues of their magazine come out, I just feel like the friend who stopped getting invited to parties, but has to see pictures of the soirée online.

 

This editor also included what I consider the note of horror in his rejection.  He told me that while he was rejecting this Glenn Danzig rip-off of a poem, my writing was also not up to snuff and/or the standard of my previous submissions.  Now, that burned me.  That hurt.  I also had a fiction editor tell me that this summer in regards to a short story of mine.  The story wasn’t up to my standards, and frankly they’d seen better of me.  When I read the rejection I knew how Sonny Liston felt as Cassius Clay stood over him.  I didn’t even know that I had a standard to maintain.  But I guess sending writing out for years and years gave me some sort of expected “Grochalski” standard that I had to uphold with each and every submission, and that I hadn’t done that well enough. 

 

I tried chalking these rejections up to the bad summer I’d been having.  My cat had died and on two separate occasions someone had threatened to kill me.  But deep down every single one of us who does it, knows when the writing isn’t good.  I don’t believe in writer’s block, so I’ll keep writing and sending things out during dry spells, spending each morning reaching for the word, accepting any lackluster outcome as befitting the day’s goals.  But rejections like that can shake a man.  The phrase, not up to snuff, can do more damage than a knife to the gut.  Those words, those types of called-out rejections get a writer questioning the very source of his intellectual and emotional bread and butter.  They get him looking in the mirror for that eye of the tiger; get him shouting to himself down the street while other people look on in fear.  They make him feel like a beat-up dog when he rises to sit in front of the machine each morning to do his business.  Writers carry comments as such with them.  They become one more monkey on our backs as we try and pound down the word.  Glenn Danzig?  Fuck Glenn Danzig.

 

But we move on, I guess.  We throw our hissy fit and then pick ourselves up off the floor to go and do it again.  We get the acceptances and the rejections.  We get told we’re a genius and then told that our poems have the structure of a bar room limerick.  It’s humbling to get accepted and it’s humbling to get rejected.  The rejections sting and chip away at our fragile egos, and make us more sensitive.  The joy of the acceptance lasts a cold second before we’re faced with the next poem, wondering if we’ll be able to do it again.  We learn how to cry on command.  But none of this business should stop us.  Good or bad the point is to get the word down; to do it and do it often.  Do it until it kills you.  Don’t be as sensitive as I am sometimes.  If you are, stop it.  Write.  As this so-called Bukowski said, “Don’t try.”  Although I’ve personally never read the guy.

 

Some personal shout-outs to places that I like whether they’ve rejected me or not: Eclectica, Rusty Truck, Carcinogenic Poetry, Underground Voices, The Lilliput Review, Front Porch Review, My Favorite Bullet, The Weekender, Drunk Monkeys, Words-Myth, Media Virus Magazine, Zygote In My Coffee, Dead Snakes, Ginosko Literary Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Re)verb, Why Vandalism, Unlikely 2.0, Delirio, Gutter Eloquence, Mad Swirl, Eviscerator Heaven, Clutching at Straws, The Camel Saloon, Boyslut, Montucky Review, Misfits’ Miscellany, Bartleby Snopes, The Big Stupid Review, and The Legendary.…There are many more great places, but I have a word count here…at least I think I do.  And I’m not in the position to be on the outs with another editor at this time.

 

 

 

 

John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out and Glass City.  He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.