Rambling Editor: No One Warned Me About the Hate Mail
As an editor, I've always reveled in the relationship I've had with my readers and contributors. For the past seven years, it's been overwhelmingly positive, to the point where I sometimes wonder if you aren't sending your letters off to the wrong person. The encouragement and support I receive is downright humbling.
So when the past year saw a dramatic increase in hate mail, I felt a little Twilight Zone-ish. There was the writer who sent a long, semi-coherent letter to me insulting my editorial capabilities and decisions and then asking me to promote his (vastly superior, he implied) journal on HDM. Or the writer I rejected because the poem was both too clichéd for HDM and previously published online—she asked me to "write me something when you know what you're talking about? and maybe increase you're [sic] vocabulary. Thanks." Or my favorite: the one who promised to single-handedly purge the world of free-verse journals within five years after I rejected his formal poem.
I'm not, to be sure, losing any sleep over the thought of free verse disappearing from the planet. If it does, someone please wake me up. But I did want to know why HDM was suddenly a target of so much anger. I made some adjustments to rejection letters, thinking I was not being tactful enough in them (no one warns you when you start, but editors have to be part diplomat and part therapist). Eventually, I sat down with the site statistics and figured out the increase in hate mail corresponded to a general increase in readership and submissions.
Although the hate mail sticks out—it tends to, you know—I combed through my email box and discovered the supportive and encouraging letters were also on the rise. I am not, after all, a demon-spawned editor; HDM was (and is) simply in the middle of a growth spurt. (You know where the contact form is if you feel the need to point out I am, actually, a demon-spawned editor.)
As happened in 2002, when I had to decide whether to keep the journal going or quietly close it down, the past year has been one long debate about where I should go with HDM. This time, the choice was between keeping everything the same or looking for ways to expand what we were doing.
As we head into our eighth year (what? already?), I'm proud to say HDM continues to grow and improve, in large part due to the continued support of our readers and contributors, whose support overwhelms me until I feel like there's not enough I can do in return. And so Bob Bradshaw, Jennifer Kuhn, and Nicole Rollender have joined on as readers, and changes to our reading process mean we're now reading submissions blind. Justin Taylor has joined on as Review Editor, and you can see the fantastic impact he's making in our review section—not only are the number and scope of the reviews increasing, but we're now featuring articles and interviews as well. You may be surprised by the appearance of the Totem Project—we aren't really known for special features—but the plan is for this to be the first of a series of challenges for our readers. The poetry, of course, is as good as it always is.