bad metaphor

I submitted a story to the Kiosk, one of a few student literary magazines on campus. It has a fairly good reputation, though some of the people in my writer’s group have grumbled about the nepotistic tendency of Kiosk editors to consistently accept work from their friends. I’ve made it in before without knowing anyone on staff, so I thought I’d try it again. The boy is usually a good gauge of the readability/terribleness of my stories, and he had a positive reaction to the story I wrote, so I had high hopes of getting in – coupled with the fact that, last semester, they’d only received six fiction submissions. I didn’t have time to have one of my writing professors to look at it, which is what I’d hoped to do, but I figured it would be all right.

I still hadn’t heard back from them, when one of the Kiosk people came by my poetry class to announce two things – first, that there are staff positions available for next year, and second, that the reading would be the following night. Hey, how’s that for a roundabout rejection? It wasn’t a huge surprise, but still, it would have been nice. Temporarily quashing the slight sting, I wrote down the info to apply for the fiction editor position. At the interview, which was pretty informal (being a student-run zine), the guy was very nice and told me that the job was fairly simple – “we don’t get very many submissions; you’ll just have to pick which ones are good enough to make it in and that’s that.” Whee, ouch.

I flipped through the copy he’d given me of this semester’s zine, just out of morbid curiosity to see if I knew anybody who’d made it in. Under poetry: a girl the boy used to room with, who pretty much is in the Kiosk every semester, and a boy in my poetry class. I was relieved to find out that at least it was one of the fairly talented people in my class, and not that one guy. He’s the one that inevitably haunts any workshop class – he talks all the time, writes at a sixth-grade level and has a poet-laureate ego. At least he’s not in it! – some dignity saved. Then I flipped to the fiction entries, to see who’d made it.

No one I recognized. One of the stories was kind of like what I’d written, a bit more polished (undoubtedly why it was chosen), except it was damned difficult to read due to the artistic choice that for some godforsaken reason, the design people had undertaken. Every other page of the article was upside down. In 8 point font. I liked what I read of it, which wasn’t much before my eyes started to bleed and dribble from my sockets. Yeesh. Oh, and these are the same people that chose to put light gray text on a dark gray background on their website. Style over functionality, yay!

Then I looked at the other two stories. The third story that made it – one that the Kiosk people felt was superior in quality and content to mine – was titled, “How to Snort Coke Off Your Buddy’s Ass (and not let things get awkward).” Oh. I skimmed it quickly, and it wasn’t a trick title. I’m sure it was well-written, and all, but…uh…yeah. I guess I need to come up with snazzier titles.

I’ll not give up, though. I’ll commence my takeover of this magazine and, should the invasion be successful, institute a new regime of readability (800-pt font, black text on white, how do you like them apples suckers?), literary work not necessarily involving drug trips or alcohol, and puppies. That is, if I don’t get rejected first.

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