Slush Town

An article on HTMLGIANT yesterday spoke to something that's been bothering me for a while. As someone who works with the slush pile and attends editorial meetings at a well known lit mag, it's frustrating to see the ratio of slush to solicited/lit agent pieces that make it into the magazine. Sadly, slush has a terribly slim chance at making it even beyond the first or second round of readers, let alone into the magazine--at least in my experience.

From the trenches of Slush Town, the outlook is bleak, and yea, it's discouraged me from submitting to many of the better known mags. It takes the stars aligning, some serious karma (and/or determined interns) and damn good writing to get a piece from the slush into the top editors' hands. But when one of those shows up in the magazine, it feels friggin' good. I suppose the point of a slush pile at this kind of high rep magazine is to give the little guys a chance to appear next to the big names... even if it's only once in a while.