What's With the Crazy?

So it's been a strange month. As you know, we were scrambling throughout January to get No. 4 published, after the fall semester at our regular jobs and the holidays beat us up a bit. Of course, we can take being beat up by our jobs--they pay us for that.

It's getting beat up here at Freight Stories that confuses me. We've had two recent e-mail situations that caused us to raise an eyebrow. First, when Andrew let a submitter know we don't consider poetry, said submitter responded with not one but eight profane and violent e-mail replies, delivered to both of our inboxes over the course of an entire night. I'm hoping there were intoxicants involved, because the messages were scary and we're not that hard to find.

More recently, someone sent us a needlessly nasty e-mail, calling us "amateurs," admonishing us for not using a spell check, and pointing out that our 1/27 open submissions announcement was full of spelling errors, as was our web site. We made no call for open submissions in January. We were working feverishly on the issue on January 27. But because I'm a bit paranoid, I spent part of my morning spell-checking the pages of the site. There are no spelling errors. It's entirely possible that we made an editing slip in one of the stories in No. 4. It wouldn't be the first time that happened. But I trust, since we have a great working relationship with the writers we publish, that if there's a typo in your story, you'll tell us. Then we'll fix it immediately. Because even though we don't get paid, and we fund the entire Freight Stories operation out of our pockets and the kindness of donors, we are professionals in this role. We take our authors' work more seriously than our own, most days.

All this animosity raises a number of questions:

1. Where are these people coming from? We're listed on Duotrope, New Pages, and a few other sites where people look up magazines. But if you're sending us poetry, you haven't read either our issues or our submission guidelines. Since our entire operation is completely free to the reader, this is totally unacceptable. Certainly, as a younger writer with no money to be had anywhere, I was guilty of submitting to a journal I'd never read from time to time, particularly if that journal cost ten bucks and I was waiting tables sixty hours a week to get by. But to not even look at the web site of an online journal? Lazy. And the typo guy either thinks we're someone else or doesn't read/speak Standard American English. It's possible that things are misspelled if you expect the site to be in British or Australian dialect. But if you think that, you, too, didn't read the site.

2. What's up with the meanness? I just spent a few days in a hotel with 8,000 writers; they're good people, writers. We all know that writing requires a certain level of ego just to be able to face the empty page. But don't people involved in any way with literature recognize that it's a communal endeavor, that sending nasty and inaccurate e-mails to an editor is not, not, not good karma? And that it's not good business? If I was the mean-spirited amateur these folks seem to expect here, I would tell you their names and give you their e-mail addresses, and I would contact the many, many editors I know to do the same. I won't, because that's not the kind of business literary editors take part in.

3. Did I mention that we don't get paid for this? A few weeks ago, when we were finishing the issue, I had a bit of a breakdown, and had to ask Andrew when we'd get to the good part, where there's some joy involved in this laborious volunteer gig. It had been a while since we put out #3, we had gotten eight crazy, violent e-mails, and I was exhausted with work. Putting out the issue was joyful. It was also taxing in a way that nothing else I do is taxing, and was done purely for the joy of the end product. There is no other reward for this work.

So, dear readers, if you've got something to say about Freight Stories, we'd love to hear it. But if you're mean, violent, dismissive, or insulting, don't bother. We don't have time for that.