After a short break, we are back!
And what a break it was. Some authors have apparently been very upset because we sometimes cannot process submissions for months. That’s true, but it’s also true that both editors work more than full time to keep the magazine running in their spare time. While I completely understand that for the authors who submit their work, it’s their whole life, it’s really just one entry in a sea of wonderful and original work. I had to learn this the hard way when I sent out my own poems and short stories and received many rejections before I was accepted. Sometimes the editors like it. But sometimes they don’t. The reasons may vary, but almost always have to do with the editor’s personal taste.
Coming to terms with this was probably one of the most difficult skills I had to master and took me many years to learn. Only in the last two years have I achieved the balance that allows me to accept rejections without taking them personally. That’s a challenge, because when you create something, you strip yourself naked, metaphorically speaking. And then you go public completely naked, only to be condemned by a complete stranger: ‘Not good enough Or ‘Not for us’ But like a masochist, you keep going until someone says ‘yes’.
On another, unrelated topic, I believe we are living in difficult times, times that are uncertain and volatile. Have there ever been other times?
I tell my young students, who are plagued by existential fears, that I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War and the constant threat of global nuclear war. And then came the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. I tell them that their grandparents were born during the Korean War, were young during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. In my country, they experienced the Soviet invasion in 1968. Global health crises also emerge at regular intervals, although the question is when, not if, they will materialise. And let’s not forget the environmental problems that have been with mankind since the dawn of time, since man first decided to utilise the landscape to his advantage.
However, when you are a teenager, your entire life experience is limited and therefore all the horrible things happening around us that we know about thanks to the constant supply of news – thank you, the age of information or disinformation, as the case may be – appear to be unique.
My brain is young. My body and my life experience, reflected in the growing number of wrinkles on my face, tell me a different story. We, humans, have always been like this – reckless and unteachable. This makes it all the more important to ensure that people’s voices are heard. Silence is the worst kind of offence.