We need a new name for the "slush pile"

It's time to acknowledge submissions for what they are: the source that keeps renewing our collective literary life

I remember the first acceptance I ever received from a literary magazine. I had submitted an off-kilter short story to elimae, an online venue with a simple format: wide margins, serif typeface, a simple table of contents running down the middle of the page. elimae (whose name was short for “electronic literary magazine”) published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that was short and matter-of-fact in its artful strangeness.

The submission process, too, was simple: I emailed the editor with my submission in the body of an email. The editor wrote back declining the initial submission, but requesting more because he had liked my writing. I responded with several flash fictions I had recently written. Within a week of my initial submission, he had accepted three of the flash fictions for the next month’s issue. I was thrilled: that first acceptance arrived like a welcome banner to the literary world, a way of saying I might really belong here.

Photo by Midnite Gallery on Unsplash

The editor happened to be Brandon Hobson, whose Where the Dead Sit Talking was later a finalist for the National Book Award, but at the time we were just two writers without books communicating over the transom. It was 2011. My piece went up the following month. It meant so much to me. I had never seen my creative writing in print, even online, before. Brandon said he liked my writing and I could send him more anytime. It hit me in the heart. Somebody out there believed in what I was writing.

That’s the simple magic of the so-called “slush pile.” Having the opportunity to submit to elimae, and then seeing my writing published there, felt like a sign to keep going. For most writers, our first publication is a foundational event. That first publication almost always comes through the slush pile.

Complicating this magic, however, is the term “slush pile” itself. The term itself dates back to at least the 1950s, according to Jane Hu at The Awl. Originating with the physical stacks of manuscripts publishers had to sort through, “slush pile” describes the unsolicited submissions that literary magazines and presses receive from writers. The problem is, it describes them with a particular dismissiveness. Its negative connotation has not faded: consider, for example, Jean Hannah Edelstein’s 2007 article “The shocking truth about the slush pile” in The Guardian, which supposedly bared the slush pile as a container of mostly terrible writing. More recently, the significantly more thoughtful “On the Tyranny of Slush Piles” was published by Samsun Knight in The Millions. Knight describes the difficulty of differentiating and selecting writing to publish when many submission calls end up with hundreds or even thousands of responses. Given this flood of submissions, identifying which pieces to read closely is a task that editors often don’t have the resources to do.

Many editors will recognize these difficulties. I recognize them myself: when I was an editor at Denver Quarterly, I regularly read tens of submissions that showed a simple unfamiliarity with the journal. Although we were an innovative and language-focused publication, straightforward realist stories and memoirs tended to outnumber the submissions that were right for us. Many writers didn’t know much about our mission as a journal, and the large number of submissions made it difficult to identify the writers who were serious about submitting, specifically, to us.

Did I get frustrated by these submissions? Yes, sometimes. But I never wanted to make fun of these writers or decry their efforts. I didn’t even want to filter out those submissions that didn’t click with us—because there was magic in each submission, including the ones we didn’t accept. Every single person was telling their story in the way they needed to tell it. Even if they didn’t know that much about Denver Quarterly, they knew about their own experience, and I had to respect that.

I try to think of the so-called “slush pile” through this generous lens, and I think most editors do too. They wouldn’t invite submissions if they didn’t believe it was essential to consider work from any writer who chooses to share it. They know holding an open reading period might invite writing they don’t want to publish. But they do it anyway. Offering up their time and attention is an expression of faith in writers.

Equally, writers engage in an act of faith by submitting. When they put their writing out there, they trust an editor they have never met. It’s so easy for the question of acceptance to feel like a value judgment on their writing. So the writer, too, is taking a risk. Both writer and editor tap into a shared feeling: the sense that it is safe to try something, to become vulnerable, to share our work with each other.

That’s why “slush pile” doesn’t work as a name. It’s mean-spirited, when the actual people involved are engaging in a reciprocal act. It’s dismissive, when the writers and editors on each end of the process are both just trying to connect on the basis of the writing that means the most to them.

The parts of our creative and publishing lives become what we call them. That’s why it’s time to stop calling submissions the “slush pile.”

It’s time, instead, to acknowledge submissions for what they are: the source that keeps renewing our creative lives.

For a replacement phrase, I would propose something beyond “submissions queue.” “Queue” is better than the metaphorical mix of ice and snow, but it draws up the image of a line of people holding manuscripts, waiting to be considered at a small window. It makes editors sound like customer service agents. The idea of submissions lining up feels a little too close to the “pile” for me.

Instead, I propose “wellspring.” Try it out. “Wellspring,” to me, evokes a welling up. The continual power of our creativity rises like water to the surface.

A wellspring, definitionally, is “a source of continual supply.” It is the root we all draw from. It is where we can always return and find something to sustain us. Sometimes, its flow might be overwhelming. That’s contained in the word too. But we take from the well only what we need to. We draw water when we’re thirsty.

Indeed, “wellspring” acknowledges the deep tie of our creative lives with the literary magazines and presses where we envision our writing being published. We are all made of water, which means the work of the wellspring is a shared one, not only of the flow itself but of those who draw and transport it.

It would mean something to all of us to use a word, like “wellspring,” that acknowledges this shared creative work. A positive term for submissions would create space for a more openly reciprocal relationship between writer and publisher. It would allow us to keep building a literary world in which we respect each other’s work, brought together by the words we use rather than separated by them.