The parakeet has a goiter
A rejection letter of note
The dreaded rejection letter is, more often than not, an entirely miserable experience for all concerned. To receive one is to instantly and all at once have one’s hopes dashed, confidence thinned, and mood dampened; to send the same is to knowingly rain misery down upon a stranger whose happiness will soon melt away thanks to a decision you had no choice but to make. Even worse than the rejection letter is the standard form rejection letter, a lifeless kick to the guts aimed en masse at a pool of unsuitables who are, it would seem, undeserving of a personal shove—a pre-printed shake of the head for one’s troubles. To find a standard form rejection letter of note, then, is quite a task, but not impossible, and here is the finest of examples, written and for many years sent by the late Brian Doyle in his capacity as editor of the University of Portland’s Portland Magazine.
Thank you for your lovely and thoughtful submission to the magazine, which we are afraid we are going to have to decline, for all sorts of reasons. The weather is dreary, our backs hurt, we have seen too many cats today and as you know cats are why God invented handguns, there is a sweet incoherence and self-absorption in your piece that we find alluring but we have published far too many of same in recent years mostly authored by the undersigned, did we mention the moist melancholy of the weather, our marriages are unkempt and disgruntled, our children surly and crammed to the gills with a sense of entitlement that you wonder how they will ever make their way in the world, we spent far too much money recently on silly graphic design and now must slash the storytelling budget, our insurance bills have gone up precipitously, the women’s basketball team has no rebounders, an aunt of ours needs a seventh new hip, the shimmer of hope that was the national zeitgeist looks to be nursing a whopper of a black eye, and someone left the toilet roll thing empty again, without the slightest consideration for who pays for things like that. And there were wet towels on the floor. And the parakeet has a goiter. And the dog barfed up crayons. Please feel free to send us anything you think would fit these pages, and thank you for considering our magazine for your work. It’s an honor.
—Editors
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Rejection letter reproduced with thanks to Brian Doyle at the University of Portland.
Delightful letter, but I have to ask, is this by the late Brian Doyle? (He once wrote wonderfully about writing to some 500 other Brian Doyles around the U.S., so maybe it is I who am wrong in thinking of the writer who died in 2017.)
As an academic, Shawn, rejection letters are not unknown to me. One of my textbook manuscripts, when being passed around to publisher's committee members, was singled out by a snarky reviewer as "three standard deviations worse than anything that sword wielding, opinionated person had ever seen." It stung. Today that manuscript has been published by Kenndall/Hunt Publishing and is required reading on many campuses. I liked the one you shared. It does the same job - without giving any advice to the author.