Editor Roundtable: How Are Bigoted Literary Submissions Handled?
As writers, words are our ammunition, sentences our weapons, and stories the war we wage for our thoughts and ideals. We’re activist minded and opinionated. For the most part, the literary community seems hitched by a certain glue that encourages us to use the best of our imagination to fight inequalities and enact positive change. Comradery is clear, so I asked around, wanting to know how editors deal with the outliers to common objectives, and those whose works hedge on behavior that threaten basic human rights.
– Matt Broderick, Assistant Editor, TRR
How does your journal combat submissions with overt racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, etc? Do these writers receive a standard rejection? Or, does this behavior warrant a personal note? Are there any circumstances in which you would consider offering a platform for this work?
Cassie Hayes, Managing Editor, Arkana
For the most part, work with overt racism, sexism, homophobia, or violence will receive a standard form rejection from us. At Arkana, our mission is to give a platform for historically marginalized voices, so it would be irresponsible for us to promote bigoted or prejudiced thought. At the same time, we want well-written work, and sometimes well-written work has unlikable characters who are well-crafted enough to illuminate their own issues and the issues of the society around them.
So in that case, we might publish something with an overtly racist, sexist, or homophobic character (or characters) if we believe the work as a whole does not promote that thought but instead probes society’s and humanity’s complexities. I’m thinking of some of Flannery O’Connor’s bigoted characters who she uses to show the ridiculousness and horrors of racism and the sensibilities of the Old and New South.
In the case of violence, we want it to be believable and necessary to the work. Not gratuitous. Not there for its own sake or for shock value. Like with us deciding to publish something with racist, sexist, or homophobic characters, us deciding to publish something with overt violence is a rare instance and must be handled with caution—we would have to carefully consider whether promoting a work with that content would be easily misconstrued as promoting the content itself. Sometimes the work is worth the risk—when the issues it brings up are important to be illuminated and discussed—but most of the time we’d rather publish work that brings more beauty and love into the world than more hatred. But it’s a case-by-case decision, one that must be handled with care.
Jim Hicks, Executive Editor, The Massachusetts Review
An intriguing and difficult question to address and certainly one that needs discussion, given the world today. We actually rarely, if ever, receive work with overt racism, sexism, or homophobia. On good days, I imagine that our nearly sixty-year history of fighting against such tendencies in our culture might have something to do with this. Certainly people who know us know our politics, and they must realize that reactionary and regressive cultural tendencies won’t find a home with us.
The more difficult issue is when violence appears in work that addresses these same issues, but does so in ways that engage the forces that underlie them. We believe that it isn’t possible to oppose without engaging, even if representation can too easily slip into providing a platform for that which it opposes. When does a rape scene, or a lynching, voyeuristically indulge rather than critically expose? Yet turning away from violence without exposing and critiquing its very deep roots would simply allow it to persist.
Most recently, I can think of at least a couple of stories where violence against women was a story’s principal subject. In both cases, we first began by sharing the story with an even wider range of editors than usual — most, but not all, of them female. After our discussion concluded that the works were even more important because they addressed and laid bare the rape culture that surrounds us, we decided to go ahead. From that point, it became a question of editing, and working closely with the authors to make sure that the stories were clear and coherent in their critiques.
A recent essay from Maaza Mengiste, part of our special issue celebrating Chinua Achebe forty years after his “Image of Africa” essay appeared in MR, took on an even more troubling aspect of this issue. Achebe argued, as you will recall, that great art could never be racist, and therefore Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was simply not great art. Maaza, though valuing the great master’s words, worries that violence — including even the most horrific videos of ISIS or other extremist factions — can’t fully be understood if we simply dismiss its aesthetic power entirely. That great art is itself capable of great violence is certainly a possibility that keeps me up at night.
Lucie Shelly, Senior Editor, Electric Literature
Typically, we get about 1,000 submissions in an open period—which is open for between one and two weeks—so unfortunately we can't personalize every rejection that we send. Moreover, it's unlikely that we would go out of our way to ask a writer to remove a racist passage so that we can publish it—the problem isn't that there's a moment of racism, sexism, or homophobia coming through in their work, it's that the principles and outlook of the individual don't align with the voices we wish to represent. Not publishing the work of racists, sexists and homophobes is a sure way of not amplifying those voices.
Suzi Garcia, Poetry Editor, Noemi Press
Noemi is a press, not a journal, but we do face submissions with these issues for our contest. It’s rare that we get this type of submission because there are so many people on our staff that are queer, POC, disabled, etc (often fitting more than one of those categories). When we do get one, it usually is because of misogynistic ignorance, etc. Those don’t make it past our first readers, so they just get a form rejection. I think if we ever got one that was actively threatening, we’d handle it differently, including stripping it of its anonymity and blocking that writer from our system, but luckily we haven’t faced that yet. I cannot see why we would ever need or want to offer a platform to messages that are threats, such as homophobic or racist discourse, particularly when there is such amazing writing that fights those ideas.
Philip Elliot, Editor-in-Chief/Fiction Editor, Into the Void
The only submission category I look at in its entirety is that of short stories, as the other editors read theirs, but, perhaps surprisingly, it is not very often that I come across a story that is overtly offensive. It's rare to come across overt racism, homophobia, and violence, but I find that sexism and occasionally even overt misogyny rears their ugly heads more frequently than one might think (or maybe exactly as frequently as one might think in this new post-#metoo society). The bulk of these stories are sexist in either their lack of female characters or the limited roles of the female characters, generally as love objects to male characters, and often sexual objectified. Prevalent too is the lack of nuance in descriptions of female characters' appearances and their characterizations in general. Of course, these are short stories by men I am referring to. We read blind submissions but it can be easy to guess the gender of the writer when female characters are being written or omitted in such a way. The male gaze is an obvious one. And it is not lost on me that I am a man commenting on this; as editor-in-chief, and as a cis, straight white male, I try to be as aware of my privilege as I can be.
Sometimes personal notes are included in rejections. I think many male writers would like to write in a less sexist way and educating them a little bit can be a good first step. But we get a lot of submissions and more often than not I will simply bulk reject stories. There are circumstances in which I would consider publishing work that may at first seem offensive, but that wouldn't be offensive in actuality. We live in a time of extreme sensitivity and have to be careful not to dilute the power of art. Art comments on society, the ugliness and the beauty. Art is visceral and unflinching. Art is a reflection of ourselves. Every editor can't reject pieces just because something rubs them the wrong way--what pieces would be left? Ultimately it's a very nuanced, complex process of evaluating a piece of art and the artist's intentions. All we can do is be mindful of our privilege, try to avoid overt, harmful offence and cultural or other appropriation, and champion the art we feel in our hearts is raw and true.
RW Spryszak, Managing Editor, Thrice Fiction
I don't use it, like most others who will answer this. And I think, after 20+ issues, the purveyors of such wouldn't want to send that kind of thing to Thrice Fiction. When we send out invitations to submit we make sure to send them to so-called "minority" associations and groups to let them know we will use and have used voices from everywhere not usually seen in the more quotidian white-dominated literary magazine world. So, with writers from Africa and South Asia on our roster, I don't think a Nazi would feel quite at home here.
I've sent a standard rejection to the mere handful I've seen on my submit list, because people who write that kind of stuff don't deserve an extra minute of my time and, also, I am not their nanny and, with 400+ submissions that must be read in a month I don't have the time to be somebody's conscience.
Where I get in trouble with people is in the idea that there are no unusable words. A different yet related issue. Think of one of "those words" and you can be sure they are somewhere in our indexed stories. Some people want purity. I don't believe in "unusable words," but I do believe in context. Context seems to be a difficult concept to grasp, especially among those with an absolutist bent on this kind of issue. But most people don't consider, when they go around like the word police, that what they are doing might be seen as censorship. "Censorship is what people of the OTHER political persuasion do. Not me because my intentions are good."
There are more than just a few ways to be authoritarian.
Stephanie Katz, Editor-in-Chief, 805 Lit + Art
When reading subs, we differentiate between a piece with a sexist character and an overall sexist piece. In a story we published, “The Mannequin Game,” by Kent Kosack, the narrator calls his ex-wife some crass names in his head, but he never says anything bad about her to their young daughter. It’s clear to the reader that he’s an unreliable narrator when it comes to his ex, and he’s not running around calling all women nasty names. He’s uncouth and bitter, but he has more layers to him, and his interactions with his daughter show his desperate desire to be a good father.
Our biggest problem isn’t overtly sexist submissions, but rather submissions that are very “describe yourself like a male author would.” Women are one-dimensional, described by their attractiveness or lack-there-of, and sex is shoehorned into the story with no purpose. We get a lot of these, and we send a decline letter with no invitation to submit again. Unfortunately, I don’t think writers will ever realize they’re pieces are cringe-worthy even if 100 journals said so, and sending a personal note could provoke a writer to complain about us to our parent organization.
Jason Teal, Publisher & Editor, Heavy Feather Review
At Heavy Feather Review, we have set up a space for literature which addresses these struggles in a capitalist system, #NoMorePresidents, recently changed from the somewhat limited #NotMyPresident, encouraging writers from marginalized groups to appear on the front page of our website with work that exalts or demonstrates values in direct contrast to these toxic cultural precedents. I hope the brief section description and featured writing would encourage most shitbirds from submitting, but outside of this process, this is why I have my trusted editors dezireé a. brown, Hayli M. Cox, Hillary Leftwich, Kailey Alyssa, and William Lessard to help me suss out healthy writing, if I smell something pungent, so to speak.
Of course, I’ve read and received trolling responses to this category many times but I haven’t taken time to engage them beyond a typical rejection. And no, we wouldn’t ever give such violent writing a platform, in any circumstance. I haven’t the energy or time to tell racists &c they’re writing terrible literature. Our writers deal with rejection daily, and you only get a personal note if I want to pursue working with you. Plus, electronic communications can get messy—beyond publishing good writing what is the point? What do I owe overtly bigoted writers besides the song of rejection?
A lot of our work addresses these issues not out of an aesthetic response or fascination with racist &c ideologies but as a symptom of change. Characters and speakers in poems are not satisfied to exist in cooperation with systemic hate. I would not consciously spread hate for the sake of content. My journal has a higher calling than representing what passes as “free speech” instead of abuse. I’ve seen the argument waged in order to protect transphobia and racism very recently, and it’s disheartening that our community would propagate (anti-)intellectuals of this stripe.
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