Earlier this week (Monday, February 6), Mark Leahy outlined the first half or so of the reading process for submissions. But, before we start reading, the submissions have to get here…

If you click over to our submission guidelines, you’ll see they’re pretty typical: cover letter, SASE, stamps, postmarks, etc. You send us a submission, and months later, you get a response. Slow. Painstaking. But effective.

In the past couple of years, journals all over have seen a steep increase in the number of emailed submissions and queries about emailed submissions landing in their inboxes. There’s been discussions on the CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses) listserv about whether to accept email submissions. Some journals, such as Kenyon Review, have gone completely digital, but many, especially the smaller journals like Sycamore Review, have chosen to remain essentially paper operations.

There are lots of reasons why people want to send emailed submissions. People who send from non-US locations might want to avoid the annoyance of International Reply Coupons. Other writer’s argue that the whole sending-out process gets expensive and un-environmental, especially with the price of a #10 envelope going up to $0.39. Some writers just don’t like the wait time associated with sending out submissions, and hope that by emailing their submissions they’ll speed up the decision-making process. Finally, some writers just want literary journals to join the technology revolution.

I get this. Seriously. I really do. I’m the one who has to personally take the IRC SASEs to the post office, since Purdue’s campus mail won’t deal with them. I’m the one who cringes at the piles of paper I take to the recycling every week. I’d wave the flag for the technology revolution any day.

But, to quote past editor Sean Conrey, “We just can’t open that can of worms.” Our production staff is the size of the head of a pin. We work on an eensy-weensy budget, with volunteer staff, a dusty production office with not-quite-Stegasaurus computers, and schedules as full as [insert simile here]. I’m not complaining, but the fact is, that email submissions are more work than they’re worth.

The submissions would still be printed out (adding to printing costs and driving up overhead) so that the editorial assistants and genre editors could read them. (I know we could email them around to each other, but do we really want to read poetry on the computer? It’s not like we’re The Iowa Review Web or Born Magazine here, with the kind of awesome hypertext and animation that needs to be viewed on the web. In terms of medium, we’re traditionalists: ink on paper all the way, baby.)

Additionally, there’s something about having to actually print out submissions, write a cover letter, get stamps, and go to mailboxes that weeds out the dilettantes. With emailed submissions, every high school student whose creative writing teacher praises him would be sending submissions. (I’ve seen this happen, the hordes of emails not hardly worth reading…But I’m not knocking high school students, creative writing teachers, or you in any way.) You can’t just walk onto American Idol—they have a screening process. Similarly, you can’t just write your way into Sycamore Review—there’s a built-in screening process called “submitting” that allowing emailed submissions takes away.

Eventually, probably, we’ll be taking emailed submissions. But we’re not right now. So, when you get the brief response to your email with 50-page-story attachment in a format I can’t open, please don’t get mad.