Finding the Right Editor

(it ain't easy)

I lost track of how many editors rejected my first collection of short stories in the late 80s, but it was definitely discouraging to get disparaging comments that included “I don’t much like your metaphors and such.”

I was an American pioneer writing about children of Holocaust survivors back before that was a well-covered and discussed topic in fiction, and also got lots of rejections for my lit mag submissions, some of of it feeling borderline hostile: “I don’t understand what this story is about” was a memorable one.

Well, in 1989, I hit the jackpot with the celebrated St. Martin’s Press editor Michael Denneny. He not only called me one evening to offer me a contract, but devoted over half a year to helping me edit and re-shape the book, sometimes in person.

I’ve thought about his hands-on approach and those years getting established during the pandemic (and since) while writing and submitting personal essays and short stories. Just because you read a sample issue of a lit mag and think you’d fit right in doesn’t mean the readers or editors will feel the same way. As a writer friend once joked: “Finding the right editor is as hard as finding the right partner.” Then he paused. “No, harder.”

It feels true. Essays of mine that have been multiply rejected with no notes or notes that seem to show no understanding of the work or even suggest writing something completely different—they’ve been snapped up by editors who thank me for submitting, love the work, and praise me as a writer. Do I like the praise after all these years of publishing? Absolutely. Not because it gratifies my ego but because it means I’ve connected with someone who is simpatico, someone who gets me. Which is one of the reasons I started writing in the first place—back in second grade when my first little story was about an alien landing on Earth and going back home because he wasn’t happy here.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery and has published over sixty personal essays since the height of the pandemic in a wide range of lit mags and journals including The Smart Set, Literary Traveler and The Gay & Lesbian Review. He has seen his fiction and nonfiction appear on university syllabi and published in fifteen languages.

Image by Niek Verlaan from Pixabay