I'm Published!
The Nuances of Genre & Publishing...OR My journey to publishing... and not publishing...
I was published this January. Finally! For the first time since 2016. It had been eight years…almost nine, since I first began submitting work into the world. Eight years of rejections, a couple honorable mentions, one award…but no publications. (Besides a writing craft essay I co-wrote with my friend for an assignment last year…but since that was for school, I’m giving that half-credit.)
Honestly, I’m pretty sure my publication in 2016 isn’t considered a legitimate publication anymore. (Though, what does legitimate even mean these days?)
2016—I was eighteen, I’d dyed my hair a deep burgundy color that shone violet-red in the sun, and it was hot. Typical of August in Wisconsin, though I welcomed every soft breeze off Lake Michigan like a laugh after a poorly timed joke. I was getting ready to move to college and had submitted a short story, an excerpt from my novel in progress “A Dance of Shadows,” (at the time titled Dancing in the Realm of Shadows, which was terribly long and not that good), and a poem that I had written in my high school creative writing class. And everything I submitted to The Quill was accepted. Rare, for someone so new to the world of publishing and submitting work. It helped that the literary magazine was small. So small, in fact, it no longer exists, dead and buried in the phantom literary graveyard. Headstone reading: The Quill. R.I.P (2015- 2018).
My payment? Ten copies of the physical journal, “The Quill” calligraphed beautifully across the top. I was ecstatic! And I got to do a reading of my work at Art Street, an annual arts festival in Green Bay, WI with booths selling art and stages for artists and performers. Little white folding chairs were set up like chess pieces beneath the stage, my family and some scattered strangers looking up at me with cheers as I read the stories and poem I’d published into the mic, nerves swelling in my arms as I held open my physical copy, my printed words, hoping the microphone wouldn’t give feedback, that I wouldn’t stumble, that I’d stay steady on the stool, and that people would like it.
My first publication and public reading came and went in one eventful summer afternoon, cementing me finally as a “published” writer, something I’d wanted since the meager age of seven.
The next year, however, The Quill rebranded and decided they’d only publish Green Bay students (perhaps leading to their eventual end), and then, when they got their website up and running, I saw they’d misprinted my stories, publishing one twice under two different titles, instead of the two individual stories they had published in the printed version. I was never a Green Bay student, having gone to school in a Milwaukee suburb two hours away, and now, in college, I wasn’t eligible anyways. Immediately, I felt stripped of my credentials of “published.” I was not a published author, just a teenager who’d published in a teenager lit mag with no audience. It was like a school newspaper. Or the yearbook. The Quill, in 2016, had twenty-eight followers on Facebook. It still does.
And it leaves me with a question I haven’t been able to answer: Once a literary magazine died…did your published words die with it?
It’s like that tree saying: If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it really fall? If I published, but no one is currently around to read it, was it really published? (Granted, some people DID read it, but that’s beside the point.)
I still have those physical copies. I still have the misprinted uploads on the internet. I still have the photo of me, freshly eighteen, holding up my copy of the Quill with a big grin, mere weeks before starting college. In this light, the publication is immortal, imbedded in my memory and my journey as a writer. It doesn’t matter how many people read it…and I’m not sure I’d want my eighteen-year-old stories read now anyways. But what I do know is this: that summer, I felt published. I held my printed words in my hands. And it meant something to me.
As time passed, it meant less. Perhaps this was because of the later rejections, or imposter syndrome (which I often suffer from), or because of the misprint, or maybe because my style of writing had changed exponentially since that summer. As an undergraduate, I never referred to myself as a published writer, just as a writer. Even after I added The Quill back to my CV with the hope that’d help me get into a good graduate program, I never referred to myself that way. It wasn’t because The Quill was dead, though that could be a part of it; it was because I didn’t want to jinx it. I wasn’t submitting very often. And when I did, it was a no go. Even now I don’t submit my work very often, typically I’ll send out a few pieces every six months or so…not enough to warrant the chance of a yes…but enough to ensure that I’m doing something…even if it’s a no. I know I need to submit more… submitting is half the game of publishing, after all.
So now…I finally have a new piece on the internet…a short story I wrote last year as a part of my research on gothic antisemitism in literature. It’s a dark story, about the persecution of Jews during the Black Plague, based on real accounts between 1347 and 1350. So real, in fact, that my story was initially misprinted in the Creative Nonfiction category of the magazine, Black Horse Review. (It has now moved over to fiction, but I still find the fact that it was in CNF for a month incredibly fun). That probably warrants a whole other substack article about the similarities and differences between creative nonfiction and historical fiction, but I’ll leave it here. BHR, according to the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp.org), averages 64 visitors a month, over twice as many as The Quill’s FB following, so I already feel like I’m moving up in the literary world. One publication down, (hopefully) many more to come. :)
Congratulations!!!
How wonderful. What a great accomplishment, Haley.