The Slush Pile

I was thirty-five when I came to Cornell, having at long last finished my undergrad degree, after a young adulthood misspent (or well-spent, depending on how you look at it) playing music and being generally dissolute. I was what they call in the biz “a late bloomer,” and I was serious about making up for lost time and becoming published as widely and well as I possibly could. Unlike many people who attend MFAs and dip their toes cautiously in the publishing pool, I approached it like the problem kid at a pool party doing the cannonball. I wanted in.

The problem was, people did not want me. I had submitted comprehensively at that point, and had one lucky publication under my belt—the respectable, stolid Mid-American Review—but I wasn’t having any other success. This was, incidentally, in 2011, before Submittable became industry standard and during a transitional era when you often still had to laboriously print off a paper submission and cover letter, put them in an envelope, put stamps on the envelope and send it off. Getting rejected felt approximately as bad back then as it does now, but the process of getting something read in order to get rejected was much more of a pain in the ass.

When I arrived at Cornell, one of the things everyone mentioned was that I would love the first-year job. First-years, at Cornell, work for EPOCH, a venerable literary magazine that has been publishing since 1947, including notables like Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates. When I worked there, it was still run by long-time beloved editor Michael Koch, who died earlier this year, and whose passing occasioned the memories of working at EPOCH that led to this essay. Michael was a quiet, irascible, inscrutable, and hilarious presence, a true mensch whose habit of buying soup for his student-editors was deeply charming and probably, for some first-years, sustaining. EPOCH was molded in Michael’s modest yet exacting image—he simply wanted to publish the best stories available, and that was our charge as we read through the slush pile.

That was the whole job: reading the slush pile. EPOCH, at Michael’s typically luddite insistence, remained resolutely offline, and so it was a slush pile in the classic sense of the phrase: a pile of submissions that towered in a tray in the corner, constantly threatening to overtake the office if not for the sedulous efforts of the first-years, who sat there reading, occasionally spilling soup on the pages. Submission guidelines required stories to be sent in manila envelopes, and when you finished reading one, you would write a short, admittedly sometimes snarky evaluation on the envelope, although usually just a few words leading to either NO or YES and occasionally MAYBE. Michael required that every submission be read at least twice—a submission had to get two NOs to be placed in the Pass file. A YES, however, meant that the story in question would be read by most of the other first-years, who would add their own YESes and NOs and comment in granular detail. We all took reading the slush pile submissions extremely seriously, treating them with the consideration we hoped our work was receiving elsewhere, and I remember many long, earnest debates about this or that story’s merit. If a piece garnered a lot of YESes, it was kicked up to Michael, who had final say. He was loathe to overturn a heavily YESed story, although he would sometimes veto the student-editors on the basis of some unforgivable aesthetic sin—one noteworthy example being a submission that featured two (2) episodes of the main character vomiting.

The years I spent at Cornell were formative in the best, untritest sense of the word. The workshops were rigorous and challenging, the coursework offered writers the privilege of studying with some of the most renowned literary theorists in the world like Jonathan Culler, and from the second year through the fourth year, I earned my stipend by teaching, an invaluable opportunity that prepared me for my present job as a writing professor. That said, none of these experiences came close to offering the practical education I received that first year, going through the slush pile.

That education came in the form of reading NO after NO after NO after NO relieved by the very occasional YES—in seeing the mistakes so many people make and experiencing, in turn, the almost revelatory shock of a person not making these mistakes. I should note that many manuscripts were NOable after a page or two, simply due to rampant grammatical errors and bad sentences and general amateurism, and there wasn’t much of a lesson to draw from this, besides admiring people’s ambition and nerve, and understanding the basic need to write well and proofread. But in the realm of competence, the biggest mistake was being boring. So many authors put so much effort into their writing, into impeccable craft and sentences and style, in the service of stories that were so dreadfully dull. It almost seemed these authors forgot that a human would be reading their submission on the other end, a human with limited time and attention span, who needed to be, on some level, entertained. I don’t mean that I was craving space battles or the Knights Templar, but it seemed so often that in striving to achieve something of literary merit, people would neglect to achieve something of readable merit. The YESes, regardless of genre or subject or style, all managed somehow to argue for the value of their own existence, for their need to be read, by the end of the first page, if not first paragraph, if not first sentence. They all had a peculiar quality of aliveness, an alchemy in the language and point-of-view and subject matter. I resist a lot of cliches at hand here—my hair did not stand up on my neck and I did not feel in someone else’s grip. But I did feel alert. The sudden sense of being confronted with another person’s unique intelligence and aesthetic apparatus—that was a feeling you had from the get-go with a YES.

There was, during my tenure, a certain author who submitted stories to Epoch constantly, whom we all dreaded reading (this person may still be submitting constantly, for all I know). The reason for the readers’ dread was not that this author couldn’t write—quite the opposite, actually, their prose was smart and meticulously sculpted. For this reason, the stultifying nature of the stories was even more painful. These pieces were so carefully crafted, so earnest, so good, and so boring. They just sat there, like a gorgeous cherry vintage car with no engine, and it was always painful saying NO, knowing the amount of care had been put into them. The author, affirming this pain, began sending cover letters that expressed a certain amount of incredulity at our not having taken one of their submissions yet. Couldn’t we see the quality? Couldn’t we sense the time and effort they’d expended? Unfortunately, we could.

This was all so instructive. I learned that year that in my own pursuit of quality, I couldn’t settle for competence. To get pulled from slush piles, your submission has to do something, has to be different, has to claim the reader’s attention and keep it for ten to twenty to three hundred pages. And to be clear, no matter how far you get in publishing, you still remain in slush piles, just slush piles with different names and different company—agented slush piles, slush piles for awards and fellowships, and so on. Everything, in the end, is a slush pile.