Banana Leaves, Submission Anxiety & a Plastic Chair

"Maybe my writing voice isn’t something I have to earn..."

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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Sometimes I think the submit button on Submittable is a wormhole to an unfinishable version of myself. Click it, and suddenly I’m eight different people: the one who rereads the bio fifty times, the one who changes “Dear Editors” to “To Whom it May Concern” then back again, the one who wonders if my commas are too confident. I sit there, legs sweating against the plastic chair, cicak making weird throat noises on the wall, and I start convincing myself that maybe the story I’m sending isn’t really ready, maybe I’m not ready, maybe no one reads stories about dead goats in East Java anyway. But I click send, eventually, like someone pushing a message in a bottle down a flooded drain and hoping it comes out somewhere magical.

Let me tell you a thing. If you’ve never written a cover letter while a two-year-old is screaming because he put his cracker in the electric fan, maybe you haven’t lived the kind of writer life I’m living. I’m in Malang, Indonesia. The walls are peeling. My desk is a bamboo stool stacked with old university books. My “office” is a corner of the house between the refrigerator and the laundry bucket. My only luxury is this wobbly blue chair that once belonged to my cousin and smells like instant noodles if you sit on it too long.

Yet every Thursday, or Sunday, or whenever my brain sparks, I sit here trying to figure out where to send my weird fiction. I don’t have an MFA. I barely have time to write. But I have the drive, the deep, unreasonable hunger to see my words appear on a website that isn’t mine. To know some stranger, somewhere, maybe in New Hampshire or Nebraska, reads about my character who talks to his lost cat and thinks, “Hey, that’s kinda cool.”

The first time I submitted, I thought I did something criminal. I’d spent weeks reading through Entropic Moon Quarterly or something like that. The submission fee was $4. I converted it to rupiah and hesitated. That’s like two plates of bakso in my neighborhood. I didn’t know if this was smart or wasteful or delusional. My wife looked at me like, “You okay?” and I said, “I’m just sending a story to America.” She blinked. “You’re what??”

She thought I was applying for a job. I had to explain that no, this was for a short story about a haunted vending machine that only appears at midnight. She said, “Do they pay you?” I said, “Maybe exposure.” She rolled her eyes so hard I felt the air move.

But I sent it. That story never got accepted. But in the rejection letter—my first ever!—the editor wrote, “There’s something alive here.” That line lives rent-free in my brain to this day. I printed it out. Taped it to the wall. Right above a picture of me and my kid wearing matching Cars movie t-shirts.

I started building a weird system. I downloaded Excel sheets from submission tracking blogs. I made a folder on my laptop: “SUBS – 2023 – FINGERS CROSSED.” I used color codes. Green for accepted. Yellow for under review. Red for dead. The red grew the fastest.

I also started noticing how little lit mag culture makes sense here in Indonesia. Like, how do you tell your friends you got published in Cosmic Blimp Digest and not feel like you’re making it up? No one around me knows what these journals are. There’s no bookstore here with a lit mag shelf. Sometimes I’d get an acceptance and I’d show it to my mother-in-law. She’d say, “So... it’s a blog?”

I got so anxious I started doing something odd: I’d read the Masthead of every journal. Not just the stories. The bios. I wanted to know who the editors were. I’d wonder—do they like fried tofu? Do they also hate their middle paragraphs? Are they real?

Once, I found a journal whose editor lived in Thailand. I got excited. Closer to home! I sent a story. It bounced back. Their email had shut down. The journal was a ghost ship. And still, weirdly, I kept looking—for other journals, for signs of life.

I’ve submitted to over 70 journals now. Rejections come in faster than electricity bills. But every so often, someone says yes. Someone who doesn’t know me at all reads something about an unlucky boy on a motorbike in Java and says, “Let’s publish this.” That “yes” still makes me tear up.

The biggest twist in all this? Submitting hasn’t made me a better writer. It’s made me a more honest one. I don’t write for approval anymore. I write because the world is odd, and stories are the only way I know how to hold it still long enough to understand even a little piece of it.

Sometimes, after sending out a piece, I go outside and sit near the banana leaves waving behind our fence. I hear the mosque call, the dog barking, the neighbor yelling at his chicken, and I just feel okay. Not famous. Not even good. Just… okay. Like someone who tried. Like someone who clicked send.

One night I stayed up til 2:37 a.m. refreshing my inbox like some kind of possessed squirrel—full of jittery, restless energy, jumping around in my head with no idea where to go. My wife had gone to bed hours before. My kid was snoring with one sock off. And there I was, staring at my laptop with dry eyes and a weird pain behind my shoulder. I’d just sent a story to three journals—two I admired, one I’d never heard of but liked their font. My head buzzed. I opened YouTube, watched an old Blink-182 video, closed it, opened Submittable again. Nothing.

I started thinking, what if I just... stopped submitting? What if I wrote stories and kept them in a folder titled “too weird to live”? I could read them to my son when he’s older. Or never read them to anyone. I could hide them like those people who build tiny ships in bottles and put them in drawers. I mean, who would care?

But here’s the kicker. The next day, I got an acceptance. The story was about a guy who finds a cursed guitar string in his dad’s war trunk and it makes him dream in static. I wrote it in a haze of sleep deprivation and instant noodles. I almost didn’t send it anywhere. But this tiny journal—based in Ohio or Iowa, I can’t remember which—they said yes. The editor said she read it twice and it “lingered.” That word. Lingered. That kept me going for months.

So yeah, the results are random. Totally random. But here’s what isn’t: the process. Over time, it became something sacred. Not sacred like church or ceremony, but sacred like... brushing your teeth. A daily act that says, “Hey, I still believe in what I’m doing, even if no one else does today.”

One trick I made up—okay, not really a trick, more like a survival move—I call it The No-Expectations Submit Day. Once a month, I pick five journals at random. Don’t overthink. Don’t even reread. Just polish quick, format neat, and send. It’s like sending out little paper boats. You don’t stand around waiting for them. You walk away. You live.

Also, I started to celebrate rejections. Not all of them. Some still sting like papercuts in your heart. But the ones with personal notes? Or the ones that feel like “almost”? I screenshot them. Put them in a folder called “Nice No.” I read them when I feel like deleting everything.

And yeah, I still get imposter syndrome. Hard. It’s like a squirrel in my brain wearing boots. But now, I know other people feel this too. Writers with MFAs. Writers with book deals. Writers who live in Brooklyn and have tote bags. That helped.

Here in Malang, my writing world is small. But it’s also weird and alive and mine. I once wrote a flash piece about a man who opens a barber shop for ghosts. It got published in a zine I found by accident while googling “weirdest literary journals.” That gave me so much joy. And made me realize, maybe my writing voice isn’t something I have to earn. Maybe it’s already here.

Another twist: I started helping friends submit. Friends who write poems but feel too shy. Friends who think their stories are “too local” or “not lit-mag worthy.” I say, “Send it anyway.” I show them my spreadsheet. We sit on plastic stools and eat fried bananas while uploading Word docs.

Sometimes, that’s what writing becomes. Not glory. Not awards. Just a reason to connect. A reason to be a little brave together.

And hey, if you’re reading this and wondering whether to submit to that journal—that one sitting in your bookmarks since June? I say do it. Don’t wait for perfect. Don’t wait for peace and quiet and a beautiful desk. Use the desk you have. Or the floor. Or a banana leaf if you must.

Because in the end, submitting is a kind of faith. Not in editors. Not in the system. In yourself. In the tiny voice that says, “This might matter to someone, someday.”

I’m still sitting in the same plastic chair. It’s still squeaky. Still slightly cursed—like it remembers every deadline panic and sleepless draft I’ve dumped into it. But now, it holds a little more hope. Not because I’ve “made it.” But because I didn’t stop.

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