Write Stuff Cafe

Blind submissions. I didn’t really think about that phrase too much when I was just a writing student occasionally submitting my work to different literary magazines. When I would submit, usually assignments that I had worked on in a class, I would simply delete my name from the the top of the page. Liz Garden was no longer on the page, but my words, my work, they were still there, which meant I was still there.

Reading blind submission after blind submission for Forge, where I don’t see any names of writers, just the writing, I have to admit I started to forget about the writers. I stopped seeing them. I found myself reading the tags: non fiction, over 3,000 words, flash. And that was how I was identifying the writing, and the writers.

Blind submissions started blinding me.

Then I had an interview with Sarah, the managing editor, and Yosh, the publisher. The first thing Sarah started talking about was working with a writer. Suddenly, I could see again. There was the writer! She talked about what happened after a submission was accepted. How much time she worked with a writer to help the writer get a piece ready to be published. She talked about seeing the potential in a piece, how sometimes the blind submission can become completely transformed by the time if gets to the publishing phase.

Now, I am reading blind submissions with fresh eyes. The writer’s identity has been removed temporarily, but the writer is still there, trying to make the reader see her.

The writer is there in the detailed sentence that you sometimes have to read twice to appreciate.

The writer is there in the simple final line that makes you breath in and take a minute.

The writer is there in the familiar dialogue that causes you to laugh out loud sitting in silence at the kitchen table.

Sometimes you have to really look closely, but the writer is always there.