CALYX Notices

Tags

editorial feedback, Open Submissions 2015, poetry and prose

Quick update from the editor’s side of CALYX:

It’s the New Year, and a lot of notices have gone out today to those who have submitted to CALYX over the last three months.

To those whose submissions are currently being held: Thank you for your patience as we assemble our collectives. We should start final discussions in the next two weeks, and those meetings will extend into March. If your piece is held and you don’t receive feedback by the end of April, please contact us at editor@calyxpress.org.

To those whose submissions were declined: I’m very sorry that we no longer provide personal feedback for every submission, but it is a privilege to get to read the varied, fascinating, and beautiful work that gets sent in every year. Thank you for submitting to CALYX.

To those who have not received notification: We do try to assign submissions in the order in which we receive them, but our readers read at different speeds and some submissions require a tie-breaking third reader. We should have preliminary responses for everyone by the beginning of February.

Thank you again to everyone who submitted to CALYX this year. Happy 2016, and may you all have another excellent year of courageous creativity!

– Brenna

 

CALYX Holds

Tags

holds, notices, open submission, revise and resubmit

Our readers are just racing along through the current submissions this period, and we are already finding a lot of material that we want to send to the Editorial Collective for further discussion. I’m sending out preliminary notices a little early this year, so here are some things to consider if you receive a “held” message.

Once a held submission is discussed (any time between January and April), you may receive any of the following responses: Revise and Resubmit, Conditional Acceptance, Acceptance, and Decline. Here’s how to unpack that:

• If you receive feedback that encourages you to “revise and resubmit” a piece, it is because the editors believe that small or substantial changes would make it a good fit for CALYX, but that it isn’t right for CALYX in its current form. If you do choose to revise and resubmit, please take the suggestions seriously. If the suggested revisions are ignored, our editors will likely not select it again.

• If you were held a previous year, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be held again. The decision process is a fluid, organic thing, which can be frustrating. If you received a “revise and resubmit” notice last year, efforts will be made to consider it in light of the changes that have been made.

• If you receive a notice that declines your submission but encourages you to submit again, please note that such a suggestion is quite sincere. Anyone held for the final round has been positively considered by at least two readers, and even if you weren’t selected this round, we find your work compelling.

• If you receive a conditional acceptance, there will be small changes required before we publish your piece. If you choose not to make those changes, you may withdraw the piece at any time.

• If you receive an acceptance, please take note that we accept material for two issues during this period. The work accepted for this round will be published over two volumes (29:3 and 30:1) in 2017.

• If you’re a poet, we may not be holding all of your poems. We allow up to six poems per submission, so it’s possible that we’ll hold and discuss as few as one or as many as all of them. If you’d like confirmation of which poems are held, you can always email me at editor@calyxpress.org.

This is just the first waves of notices, so remember to keep submitting! We’re open until December 31, and we’ll be reading and responding steadily through March.

CALYX Open Submission Timeline

Tags

feedback, guidelines, open submissions, poetry, prose, timeline

CALYX is currently accepting poetry and prose through December 31. Our readers have already started on the initial submissions, so now seems like a good time to lay out the timeline for this submission period and what the writers can look forward to. Full guidelines can be found calyxpress.org/submission.html, but here’s what you can expect once you’ve submitted:

Now – December 31: Send us up to 6 poems or a 5,000-word max story (fiction or nonfiction). Simultaneous submissions are fine, but we don’t accept previously published work. You are free to submit in both the poetry and prose categories. We have a lot of people who accidentally submit under “Book Reviews,” so make sure that you choose the appropriate genre when you submit so that we can file them accordingly!

December 1 – January 31: Every single submission we receive is read by at least two of our amazing volunteer readers. Our readers are experienced editors, writers, and teachers. If a submission is approved by two readers, it’s held for final discussion with the Editorial Collective. All submissions (held or not) will receive a notice around this time regarding the status of their material. Unfortunately, we cannot give personalized feedback for everyone who submits, but all submissions are read with great care and attention to detail.

January 1 – March 31: Our Editorial Collective meets once a week to discuss the poems and stories that are held by the readers. While we don’t do a “majority rules” approach, the collective does have to generally agree that a piece should be included in the journal. Please be assured that there is both exhaustive discussion and compelling debate, and it’s quite a thing to see sometimes. Even pieces we haven’t accepted have been championed, dissected, and read aloud. Every submission discussed by the collective receives personal feedback. If your piece is held and you don’t receive a feedback message by April 30, PM me at editor@calyxpress.org.

All material chosen this period will be published in Vols. 29-3 and 30-1, which will be released in 2017. Happy writing, everyone!

Why It Takes Us So Damn Long to Get Back to You

Tags

journal, reading period, submission

Brenna Crotty

CALYX’s General Submission period opens next Thursday, October 1st, and runs until December 31st. I love this time of year because I get to read beautiful, brilliant poetry and prose for four months straight.

But I recognize that for the women who submit, this can be an extremely frustrating time. After all, if you submit in October, hearing back from us in February (or March, or August) seems like an excessively long time to wait. I understand this feeling. Heck, every time I submit something, I suddenly embody Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh,” checking my email obsessively. So now seems like a great time to explain what the hell we’re doing during the submission period, and why it takes us so damn long to get back to you.

I’m going to lead you down the dark, labyrinthine method of material selection, but the short answer is that we’re still a paper publication in a digital world, and a studious one at that. Having a full-color art section and a gorgeous cover are the benefits; long wait times are the drawback. Also, we do the proofing stage for like ten years, seriously, it takes forever.

The first thing that happens to any submission at CALYX is assignment to a reader. If you open any of our journals to the masthead and look at the “Editorial Assistants,” you’ll see a list of wonderfully talented, brilliant women. Two of those readers (or three if the first two don’t agree) have to read each submission and agree to hold it before it can go to our Editorial Collective.

The Editorial Collective is a volunteer group that meets in person after normal business hours, starting in January. We actually have two collectives: one for poetry, one for prose. Some of the editors sit on both collectives; all of them have read with us at least two years before they join. The held submissions are discussed by the collectives in batches for two hours once a week, every week, for three months straight. And good gravy, these editors can debate. They’re all teachers, writers, and editors, and they have a range of opinions that are all worth listening to. Each editor gets a vote, and while we try to follow a “majority rules” mindset, the truth is that we like to make sure everyone is (mostly) satisfied with the result before a submission is accepted or rejected.

By now we’re through March. Didn’t that go by fast? But now we’ve gotten to my favorite part. As the Editorial Coordinator, it’s my job to take notes during the meetings and assemble it all into something coherent. Everyone who has a submission discussed by the collective receives feedback on what the editors liked and what they thought needed work. (The feedback can occasionally be conflicting. I once had to send an author the following confusing suggestion: “One editor recommends you cut the fruit imagery; another editor would like to see more fruit imagery. Do with that what you will.”) This is a good reminder: our editors aren’t united in their literary preferences.

If you are accepted in CALYX, it’s another wait as we divide material between two issues of the journal, paginate it, copyedit it, and proof it. This takes…some time. (The submissions we accept this round will be published in Vol. 29-3 and 30-1, 2017!) The result, though, is a bold, colorful journal that has forty years of history behind it. I rather think it’s worth it.

So yes, it’s a long process. But I hope this brief overview has convinced you that it’s not just me sitting in the darkened CALYX offices with a bottle of gin and an audio recording of Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, not answering your emails satisfactorily. There are a lot of people volunteering their time and creative power here at CALYX, and they are giving every submission the attention it deserves.

Happy writing, everyone! I hope to read and share your work this fall (and winter, and spring…)