Getting a rejection letter stings. What's wrong with my writing? What's wrong with ME? Then the p&t anxiety kicks in. Oh no, was I working on this for the last eight months for nothing? More than anything, though, that sting stems from a desire to not be working in a vacuum. To be working on something generative, something of interest and use to a readership, something that's in conversation with other things and other people.
Most of the publishing I've done has been somewhat specialized (open admissions learning, rhetorics of social class), so I've placed articles with journals whose readership is likewise specialized. I got a rejection letter today from one of the Big Journals in rhet/comp. Actually, an e-mail from the editor outlining some suggested ways to make a major shift in the essay's organization and focus, and urging a resubmit. But it wasn't just a "revise and resubmit"--it was more like a "change things big time and then try again!"
So I'm not sure whether to return to more familiar pastures (I'm proud of the work and think I can place it elsewhere), or embark on major revisions and try to reach a larger audience. I like that the field has niches, sub-genres, etc, etc., but I'm also mindful of the value of articulating implications that go beyond niche.
Oh, and I'm also eager to start several big summer projects, at least one of which would have to wait if I re-visit said article in global ways. I'm wondering how others have approached choices like this.
9 comments:
What's it about?
The article theorizes a working-class poetics-cum-rhetoric, using as its main grounding a chapbook my great-grandfather, a farmer, published during the Depression. Using Burke, I look at how he performs class as a contradictory identification and non-identification with power.
The vexing thing: the letter was extremely positive and supportive, but suggested that the argument needs grounding in something larger than a text that readers may not recognize as having aesthetic appeal, suggesting less analysis of the artifact and more synthesis of other working-class poets.
I'm not opposed to bouncing voices off one another in the piece, but I hesitate to lose focus on the primary text, because I'm trying to outline a practice for making use of local, even familial, voices. And the critique about aesthetics strikes me as problematic...and beside the point.
Why not send it elsewhere? It sounds like trying to revise for this particular journal might not be worth the effort in that it will take time away from other projects and will also move this article away from what you set out to do.
Oh, yikes. I hate those letters. You're right that it's so hard to know what to do next and what would be worth our limited time.
It sounds interesting.
If you feel comfortable about it (after some distance while it was out) then resend it somewhere else. If the response is the same, then you know the reviewers are probably on to something.
Could be the case of the reviewer's interests/methods clashing with your own. I've had that experience many times.
Thanks all around for the tips. Yeah, sending it somewhere else makes sense. Jeff: not sure about the reviewer's and my interests clashing or not. I've had the sense before that reviewers had a different vision of what fell within a particular journal's scope. "Our readers expect x, y, and z." That kind of thing, often posited in a way that limits what/why/how work in rhetoric might do.
Slightly late to the party and all. But better late than never?
Definitely search out different avenues, Bill. It seems to me that you have a real handle on what you want to convey and if it doesn't work for that journal, it certainly ought to work for another.
Dear Bill,
It could be that you should send it out to an unacademic journal. Having read a recent article in the Guardian. UK, I think your efforts would be good for a wider audience who needs to hear what you have to say about working class writing.
Luisa
Chelsie: Thanks for the kind words-I'm re-prepping the manuscript this very afternoon! If they decline, I'll think about big revisions. Luisa: Good thought, but I even worry about *academic* publications that are somewhat afield of the p&t committee's familiarity (like a piece I have forthcoming in 'Community College Journal of Research and Practice'--peer-reviewed and everything, but it's an interdisciplinary/higher ed studies venue and I wonder if it's going to seem second class).
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