Hungry Eye Submissions

"111"
-Last number on the list of submissions

I just finished going through the stack of submissions. Sorry John, it's not like American Idol at all. There's no making fun of the hopeless, no witty remarks, only a box beside the title of the piece where you check "no, yes, or maybe."

I didn't think to look at what my relative ratios were of each, but I can tell you that I went through one hundred and eleven submission in an hour and a half. There were many more poems than short stories, and I think the timing was about right. A couple of poems in a minute, a story in a minute, or a few if I liked it. In the interest of discretion, I'm not going to say much about them in any detail.

Two observations I will share, though:

• I judged the short stories more critically than the poetry. Of course, short stories are where I live, so it takes more to impress me.
• A lot of the writers wrote "short stories" that were barely (or not at all) disguised retellings of the author's life. Lots of therapy going on there.

Now, in about an hour, I'm off to the first Hungry Eye meeting where we'll start to talk about the selection process and expectations/standards for what will go into the magazine. I'm very curious to see how my standards compare to the others. The last time I was involved in selection for the magazine I was a kinder, gentler soul and fell mostly in the consensus of what others thought was a good piece or not. I think this go around may be different. We'll see.