Search This Blog

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Modern Rejection

Fitting to run this rejection on a Sunday. What you get when you send an essay to the Modern Love Column of the Sunday New York Times is the following rejection: "Dear Writer, Rejected: I'm afraid we can't use your essay in Modern Love, but we appreciate the opportunity to consider it. The volume of unsolicited submissions we receive prevents us from responding personally to each writer, but please know all essays are read and considered, and in fact we discover many of the essays for the column among these submissions. Thank you for your interest and best of luck. --Modern Love editors"

I've gotten this rejection three times. How about you?

Read an interesting response to Modern Love from someone whose ex wrote about her in the column at The Black Table.

2 comments:

x said...

I loved the article from The Black Table. I had a similar thing happen to me decades ago. The one who does the writing gets the chance to define the reality, smarmy and self-serving as it is likely to be. Readers just need to always keep in mind that if you would ever hear the story from the other's perspective, it would be like hearing about two completely different relationships, with two completely different people. This happens to me all the time as a therapist. It's amazing how convincing each side can be.

Anonymous said...

Never submitted. There was a time, however, when that type of article was all I wrote, until I saw how meaningless and inflamed my writing was, and my epiphanies were more like shrugs and hardly the self-affirmations such a column requires.