I’m not sure I agree that this is a good point. Journals are not folding because of a lack of submissions. Not remotely. It’s because of a lack of subscribers or other source of funding. I too read for a literary journal (Ploughshares) and we get many submissions from writers who clearly know nothing about the journal other than that it exists. There are far better ways to support journals than submitting to them.

I vote to send the snarky replies to the authors.

But what feels unfair to me is the want to advertise the coolness of your editorial staff through their cruel putdowns — in a way, it’s an implicit gesture saying, “We’re so good that even our PUTDOWNS are worth more than what these poor bastards write.” I mean: you publish (in one form or another) the witty barbs….so in your eyes, those barbs — in their cruelty, in their hyperbole — have a kind of merit that these writers do not. And maybe the one-liners are better written than the stories you read — it is still a strange practice to celebrate the work of your editorial staff triumphing over, say, literary mediocrity.

Anyway, I don’t want to belabor this any more than I already have. It just seems unnecessarily mean spirited and self-aggrandizing for no purpose beyond a celebration of self.

To Rob’s point, there is a big difference between the New Yorker printing — and implicitly mocking — bad turns of phrase from newspapers and VQR explicitly mocking its contributors. For one, newspaper writing is public. It is the product of professionals who are then judged by that product. And the New Yorker has no relationship with those papers and does not owe them anything or depend upon them for anything. It certainly doesn’t exist because of them.

The writing of contributors, on the other hand, is not public and the judgment you render ought (I think) to be confidential. This is out of respect for contributors, who take the time to send you their writing, and this is out of respect for VQR as an institution. You depend on contributors for your livelihood. Why do you think it’s cool to publicly mock them? Or perhaps you think it’s only okay to mock the ones who really, really suck. I think it’s bad form. Mock one, you mock them all. And you make yourselves look really petty.

(That you then printed positive comments completely misses the point, by the way. Of course readers say awful things about awful writing and great things about great writing. That goes without saying. That’s their job. But it doesn’t “even the scales” and somehow make right the fact that you ridiculed your contributors on your blog.)

Another point, Waldo: Mike was not saying (if I read him correctly) that there is no bad writing. To the contrary, he was saying that it serves no purpose for VQR to publicly mock the bad writing it receives and rejects. By doing so, it is mocking the very impulse to write and submit.

I suppose I come off as a little earnest and humorless here. But I’ve been an editor for a long time, and I take seriously the responsibility that editors have to their writers, even to the ones they don’t print. This blog post was hardly a cardinal sin, but Waldo, you don’t seem willing to acknowledge that anything might possibly be amiss here. That’s what I find so interesting.