I’m curious whether anyone can describe the ups and downs of working as an editor at a literary journal. What are the pains? Are 90 percent of the submitted pieces horrible, or is it really hard to decide?
I was a poetry editor on a literary journal long ago and it was a lot of fun for about a year. I’d say 95% of the submissions were terrible and we all fought like six year olds about which of the remaining 5% to include. Certainly, YMMV.
More than 90% are horrible, unless you have a pre-screener, which I did a couple of times.
This was in poetry.
Sometimes, it was hard to figure out if something was hitting right (or wrong) because of my own idiosyncratic reading or because it was actually good, but more often it was very easy to separate the good from the bad, and then it became a matter of separating the very very good from the not quite as good.
From my experiences with the slush pile, I’d say 97% is utterly unpublishable, 2% is readable but boring, and 1% had good potential.
Could any of you three give a rough picture of what a poem from the bad pile might be? Like, are we talking teenage angst, trite love poems, etc?
Something with tildes in the title. 
I’m formalism-friendly, so I would tend to get hammered with super-trite rhymes, appalling sonnets or villanelles, or ballad meter. Just shoot me.
Capitalized nouns like Darkness, emphasis on emotions and abstractions and often pathos, idiosyncratic spacing and lineation that seemed to serve no real purpose, boring diary entries, etc.
Most of my experience is with short fiction. For me, there were three basic types of bad (often overlapping, not counting competent but boring):
- Unreadable, incoherent crap
- The window into a very disturbed mind (not interesting, just crazy)
- A sort of nonsensical dullness that never went anywhere but took itself seriously (the author had nothing to say and no idea how to say it)
Ah, you’ve been reading my oeuvre!
As somebody who has read your oeuvre, I just want to take the opportunity to say that if I were an editor of a literary journal, I’d publish your work in every issue.
What a lovely thing to say, pepper. Thank you.