Diary of a Mad Editor

Simultaneous submissions — writers see them as a necessity, allowing them to navigate the often hostile environs of periodical publishing but, for editors, they can be a pain in the ass. It’s true that I openingly read simultaneous submissions. I accept simultaneous submissions not because I find the practice of simultaneously submitting material acceptable, but because I can do nothing to stop the practice or enforce a prohibition against it. When a simultaneous submission turns into a simultaneous acceptance, it can cause headaches for at least one publisher and forces an author to make a necessary, albeit calculated, withdrawal.

Just this morning the second contributor in less than a week has withdrawn a piece from the forthcoming issue of 13thWR. As the poet informed me in his email, the poem had been accepted elsewhere. This was news to me, because at the time he had submitted it, I was not informed that it was a simultaneous submission. The other publication — a university sponsored print journal — evidentally had strong feelings about using previously published material. For my part, since I was only accepting first electronic rights and was planning to have the issue online within a couple of weeks or so (much sooner than the print journal would publish it), I had no problem using the man’s poem and told him so. As I was already in the process of putting the issue together, it was just more convenient for me to go ahead with it. The author had other ideas and insisted that the poem be withdrawn. Oh, he was polite about it, sure, and in all fairness to him, he did contact the other publication before getting back to me. However, in emphasizing that the other publisher is a “university print journal,” he is also telling me something about what he thinks of my publication. Why was he so quick to withdraw the poem from me? Why was the other publisher’s prohibitions more weighty than my generous acceptance?

Here’s my problem: I now have an extra hole to fill in an issue that was slated to be published in short order. This means a delay of several days or, perhaps, weeks. From my vantage point, unless the other publisher was also planning to feature the poet on an online version of their journal, the editors had no legal basis for prohibiting the poet from offering first electronic rights to me. The poem had yet to be published in the other journal and would not likely be published for months. So, that being the case, I am left puzzling over the author’s decision. If, at the end of the day, the acceptance by the other publication was his goal and he knew before hand the other publisher’s policies — why did he bother submitting to me? Afterall, his work wasn’t being offered to me in good faith.

At this point, I am considering prohibiting simultaneous submissions. I may not be able to stop them, but at least prospective contributors will know where I stand on this issue.

For the past few days, we have been inundated with this lame news story about James Frey and the alleged embellishments found in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Quite frankly, I’m tired of it. The so-called respectable journalists are running this non-story into the ground. And wait — what is this? Now, there is a class action lawsuit pending against Frey and his publisher for “consumer fraud.” You’ve got to be kidding me. As I stated previously, memoir isn’t journalism. Hell, journalism isn’t even journalism anymore. And what if Frey is a liar? The people who bought his book were entertained, were they not? Is the book any less entertaining if it is fiction? If it’s fair to sue Frey, then is it too late for me to sue David Foster Wallace for Infinite Jest and the guy who wrote Bridges of Madison County?

“Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death.” – Samuel Butler

It seems to me that The Smoking Gun’s recent outing of author James Frey, whose memoir, A Million Little Pieces was one of the most successful books published in the last year, is much ado about nothing.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t judge the literary merits of Frey’s writing. However, I do think that the notion that Frey has fabricated parts of his memoir is hardly newsworthy. Despite the media spin on this story, memoir is not journalism — it is a form of creative nonfiction. Memory is not an empirical record of our lives. As such, a memoir isn’t necessarily a complete factual record of a person’s experience. If a memoir is well done is can embody the essential truth of one’s life, answering certain questions and rendering the emotional landscape of our past. Does it really matter whether or not Frey was the hardened criminal he presented himself to be in his book if that is the way he saw himself at the time? Is the story any less “true”? At worst, the book should have been marketed as a novel. So get over it Smoking Gun. Frey isn’t a con artist; he’s just a writer.