The Things They Leave Behind

Sometimes, the least appropriate stories you read are the ones that stay with you the longest. One of the most interesting things about the slushpile is that you can track current events via the subject matter of the writing we receive. As such, there’s been a noticeable uptick in writing influenced by the recession–stories about foreclosures and job losses, poems about poverty and the loss of hope and all manner of writing in between.

A great deal of this writing is clearly cathartic for its authors and the work is more about them than us. That’s fine. Writing is a very personal thing. Submitting that writing for publication, however, is far less so. Your work is going to be scrutinized and those stories in which you are emotionally invested as a writer will be thoroughly dissected by the editorial staff.

One story that continues to stick in my mind is a Thelma and Louise-esque tale about a couple who slowly then quickly lose everything and then make a drastic decision concerning their future. There were a number of reasons why this story wasn’t going to work for PANK.   When we discussed this story, the word really came up more than once because the story obviously didn’t fit or contradict our aesthetic in interesting ways.

Having said that, its been four or five weeks since I read that story and I still think about it all the time because I have to believe that something significant compelled that writer to write that story in this time. I wanted to acknowledge that.