Having worked as a journal editor in one capacity or another since 2000, I truly believe that good work eventually finds a home. There are about seven hundred regularly publishing literary journals in America, which is an astonishing number. I can certainly argue with three dozen aspects of our country’s culture, but the robustness of our literary journal ecosystem is not one of them. Often when my coeditors and I have rejected a poem we were long on the fence about, I’ve ended up encountering said poem in another journal just a few months down the road. The poem was really good; it just wasn’t right for us at that time. It was soon picked up elsewhere. (And on many occasions, it should go without saying, I’ve quickly regretted rejecting the poem.) At the end of the day, journal editors are trying to make excellent issues; they’re not trying to catch absolutely everything. We’re fallible, the work of evaluation is highly subjective, and allowing ourselves to stress out about missing a piece of writing here or there could be stultifying or even paralyzing. But if a writer is persistent, over time original and exciting work does get noticed. If I didn’t believe that, and if I didn’t see it happen repeatedly for (yikes!) a quarter century—if I didn’t understand all literary journals ultimately to be pulling together toward the future of literature—I’m not sure I could have done this work for as long as I have.
—Wayne Miller, editor, Copper Nickel