Backing In (A Futile Attempt to Write a Hermit Crab Essay; I Think My Butt’s Too Big)

"I would rather be spanked than slapped.”

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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A poet waxing prosaically on a writer’s blog says she never has more than three poems at a time waiting in the audition rooms of literary journals. I admire her restraint, and am chastised by it. At all times I seem to have dozens of irons in what mostly turn out to be cold fires. She sends out scouts, I send out infantry. She is like a fly fisherwoman, while I throw dynamite into the pond. She treats her poems like jewels; my essays are stones in a catapult.

“Maybe you’re too forward,” cautions the hermit crab. “I always back in.”

“Good advice,” I say. “Besides, I would rather be spanked than slapped.”

I have chosen a set of empty shells gathered from websites where literary journals are feigning interest in my unseen essays. The experience has taught me that I must be a masochist, as the rejection rate for lit mag publishing is about 95%. There is an excellent chance I will get spanked at each attempt to back in.

Hermit Crab Shell #1 “seeks to publish the best voices from the independent literary community. We are also interested in authentic and original memoir.”

I have written about my experience with tyrants in Spain, Morocco, and Greece in the 1970s. I wrote about gypsies, machine guns, kif dens, revolution, and true love. I know it will be a movie, but not until after I’m dead.

Oh crap, I just got a rejection for the essay, “We Are Thrown Out of Spain.” Must have been too unoriginal.

Hermit Crab Shell #2: “a print magazine of wide-ranging nonfiction forms, dares you to push in new directions. Theme: Rivals and Players. Do we play the game, or does the game play us?”

I go to my bin of unpublished essays, looking for something that, with some twists and turns (butt-wiggling), might fit the empty shell. With few exceptions, I don’t write to theme. It has to fit something already written. I settle on the story of a time when I was destitute and went to work as a shill for a couple of scoundrels who ran an auction house. My moral compass only had the strength to show me where I was headed, none to alter course.

The editors decided the game played me and I had to shop it elsewhere.

Hermit Crab Shell #3 “Publishing company will consider poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and photography for 2 upcoming themed anthologies. Theme 1: Fast food. Theme 2: Bar life.”

It is the bar life theme that interests me, even though I am now too old to frequent them. Instead, I infrequent them, and am always home by ten. I go to Newfoundland every summer, where bars are central to social life, and full of good stories. It is where Newfoundlanders are at their ribald best, women as well as men. My story is ribald. It has been rejected four times. I had hoped a flask of Screech, Newfoundland’s rum, might help, but the Submittable slot is too narrow. And part of me doesn’t want it to get published, as I may never be able to return to the town where the story happened.

This is a dilemma for the nonfiction writer: truth can be the enemy.

Hermit Crab Shell #4: “a daily online literary and culture magazine seeks original essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, creative criticism, and reviews…for the sane and insane alike.”

I send them an essay I had originally written for a writer’s blog that has published me before. The blog rejected it. I’m pretty sure it scared them, as everything revolves around a prostate biopsy. The essay is hilarious, gross, surreal, and poignant. But ultimately it is about inspiration, and how the writer must adapt as she or he ages.

Shell #4 also rejects it, commenting on how much they enjoyed reading it, but “would never publish anything like this.”

Hermit Crab Shell #5 “seeking poetry, streams-of-consciousness, flash fiction, nonfiction, and art on what it means to be and/or interact with women and/or girls. All genders welcome to submit.”

I’m male, 82, and have written about a young girl I met in Labrador. The market is small for old men writing about young girls. She is a remarkable human being. We both have old souls, hers precocious, mine weary. This is the first time I have submitted the little essay. I figure to be dead by the time it is published, and she will have more enemies than friends. Old souls are delightful when young, and their wisdom is cherished in age. But in between, they are annoying know-it-alls.

I never heard back from the editors, and am afraid to ask why.

Hermit Crab Shell #6: “a cross-disciplinary review of innovative ideas in any genre or medium…as long as [the idea] clearly conveys some sort of original theory, to indulge in unorthodox thought.”

I submit my most beloved—and rejected—essay, but then I have sent it out twice as much as any other. It has issues. It is sex-crazed, drug-infused, and deeply religious, what you would expect from a spiritual person resigned to life and death in a universe determined by the interplay of physical laws and chaos.

Eureka! It has been accepted.

But within six months that adventurous journal has crashed and burned.

Now I must reconsider the restraint of the poet who inspired these crabby musings. She knows how dangerous a submission or acceptance can be for either the writer or editor. So I will content myself with believing that the rejections – more than 600 in the ten years I have been submitting, or about one a week – were all done in self-defense.

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