Tuesday, November 28, 2006

VQR Takes Note

Chalk one up for the rejected writers! A friend just pointed me to this posting in the Virginia Quarterly Review's official blog, which acknowledges the journal's long turnaround times for submissions lately and promises action. In fact, they even went so far as to apologize to your humble blogger directly. Sez VQR:

".... I’m trying to imagine watching an Oscar-nominated actress portraying the author reaction of a rejected author. I’m guessing she doesn’t take it as well as David Keeling. (By the way, David and all submitters, we apologize for taking so long to respond. We’ve been buried in submissions ever since our National Magazine Award nominations in March. I’m pleased to report that we’ve hired additional readers, we’re enlisting new interns, and we’ve just started using a spiffy new submission database that we hope will help us streamline our process.)"

Well, the apology won't get VQR a better rating, but my hat's off to them for caring enough to make their submissions process more efficient. Just another reason why it's among the best big journals out there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny -- I just read this blog entry while taking a break from making some bug fixes and improvements to our submission-tracking database. One of the features that I've just finished gives Ted Genoways (our editor) the ability to find orphaned submissions -- submissions that have been languishing without any action for more than a few weeks, so that we can track them down and them back on track, rather than letting them slip through the cracks.

Courtesy of a quick SQL query on our submissions database, here are the top ten titles for poetry submissions:

Evolution
Missing
Love
The Heart
Luck
Exodus
Distance
End of Summer
Remember
Leaving

That probably won't help us get responses out faster, but I get a kick out of it. :)

David said...

Love it. My next poem will have to be titled something like, "Exodus: The Heart Remembers Love Leaving at the End of Summer."

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