A Story from 10 Years Ago

The first literary magazine I ever read submissions for was The Fiddlehead. Based out of the University of New Brunswick, it’s the oldest Canadian literary magazine in circulation. It’s a well respected mixture of poetry, fiction and reviews. I enjoyed reading through the slush pile, looking for gems and passing them on to a more senior editor when I found them. The magazine had a practice of sending feedback to everyone who submits, so when I decided that a submission wasn’t going to move forward, I wrote a little note to the author on a slip of paper. (Those were the days when we sent our writing to magazines via snail mail.)    

I’ve had a couple of poems published in The Fiddlehead. I’ve also had some rejection letters from them for both poetry and fiction. This summer, I got another acceptance for a story I’ve been trying to place for 10 years.

In my creative writing Master’s program, I wrote a weird story about a middle-aged banker who goes on a cybersex chatroom. It’s set very obviously in the early 2010s, with allusions to politics of the time. There’s sexy talk about math. There are secret identities. I thought at first that “A Limit to Growth” might grow into a novel, but it reached a natural stopping point at short story length, with an ambiguous ending.   

I knew that I’d written a good story. But for the next decade, I failed to place it. It wasn’t even one of those stories that got encouraging feedback: “This was good work but not for us” or “We encourage you to submit something else.” It got crickets. 

The novel I wrote for my thesis, around the same time, had a similar result. More people liked it, but no one was looking for a bisexual coming-of-age story about a musical prodigy, with alternating timelines and a slower pace. “We only have a limited number of spots in our publishing program…”

Submitting your writing means getting rejected. Jane Yolen, legendary author from my childhood, tweets about her rejections all the time. You just have to keep baiting your hook until somebody bites.

I didn’t give up on “A Limit to Growth,” and I’m excited to see it find a home in The Fiddlehead’s 2021 summer fiction issue. I left my novel in a metaphorical drawer for a while, then resubmitted it to some new publishers this year and am delighted that it, too, has found a home. Chasing Harmony will be published by Read Furiously in 2022. 

So, those are my stories from 10 years ago. It took time, persistence, and changes in the marketplace for them to reach an audience, but I knew that there was something good in both of them. I believed in them, so I kept trying. Next time I write something I like, I’ll remember how long it took to place these pieces and keep at it. If you’ve written something you believe in, I encourage you to do the same. Better late than never!