Four of my poems were accepted for publication yesterday!

Earlier this month, a new literary journal contacted me on Instagram and asked me if I would consider submitting to their next issue. I was, of course, very flattered and excited because any acceptance is a step towards getting a full length book published. I asked them their submission guidelines, picked out my four poems, and sent emailed them. I figured I likely wouldn’t hear back for a while, considering that most selection processes take several months, depending on how large and frequent the publication.

And then yesterday I got the email that they accepted all four of the poems I sent them! The issue is coming out in June or July, I believe, and four pieces from my thesis will be included.

This is a little baffling to me, to be quite honest. I keep comparing the amount of time I spent in undergrad honing my fiction and nonfiction (it was years, basically the entirety of my undergraduate education), and even as I saw myself improving, I almost always had to submit each piece of work at least ten times before they found homes in literary journals. It was a good, but often defeating, process. I was vigilant in sending out my writing in undergrad. From 2016, the year my first piece was accepted, through to when I graduated in 2018, I had over twenty pieces accepted. The typical amount of pieces accepted for publication each year is anywhere from 1-5. My average per year was over 5.

But it took hundreds of submissions to get them there. I’m not exaggerating. Getting your work accepted by a publisher is grueling work. It’s as much work, if not more, than the actual writing itself. Each literary journal has different submission guidelines, and if you don’t meet those guidelines, your submission will be rejected unread. They do this because they receive so many submissions in each cycle that they really can’t read them all. This gives them the chance to weed out the writers who don’t take the time to read the submission guidelines. If you don’t read the guidelines, you won’t be taking the work they do seriously.

Moreover, not all literary journals have the same submission openings. Some open once a year. Some open once a season. Some open once a month. Some have rolling submissions, which means they never close and are always accepting new work. Some places require you to wait one submission cycle before submitting again. It really is just a wilderness of differences between each place, and the more popular/mainstream/prestigious the literary journal, the less likely it’ll be that you get accepted.

All of this I had to learn as I was submitting my writing. It was brutal. Because it’s already hard enough as a writer to believe in yourself, to give yourself the chance to have your work seen and accepted by a wider audience. But facing rejection upon rejection for the same pieces, even as you keep revising and editing them, takes a massive fucking toll on your willpower. It wears you down until you wonder if you’ll get anything published, ever. Just one story, let alone a manuscript.

I worked through all of that after four years of writing, of reading, of studying, of taking literally hours out of each day and digging into my creative work. I filled notebooks. In the four years of my undergraduate degree, I must have filled at least five notebooks with creative material, most of it fiction. I wrote two novels in that time, as well as multitudes of short stories and personal essays. I wrote some poetry, but it was mostly just for fun. I never revised the poems.

I only really started heavily working on my poetry last year. It’s been a little over one year. And in that time, my writing has grown, has changed, has shifted and transformed into something I hardly recognize. And I know that all work we do on our writing allows us to grow, so all the work I did on nonfiction has helped the poet in me grow stronger, too. The critical and research writing I did helped me to see my writing through more than just a creative lens. It’s just still baffling to me that after all those struggles with fiction and nonfiction, it seems now that I’ve really settled into the type of writing I was born to produce.

Four of my poems are being published. Before this, I thought that any poems of mine that were accepted for publication was just a fluke. Now, I’m starting to think it was fate leading me here all along.

I’ll be sharing more info on these publications as they come in.