My Rejection Letter Had a Typo Too
They declined my 'poens', and somehow that made us even.
On a gray Tuesday in February, The Harrow Review, a magazine I had revered for a decade, informed me that they were unable to accept my "poens" at this time. Not my poems. My poens.
I want to walk you through the seven stages of receiving that letter, because I experienced all of them standing in my hallway in one sock.
First, the drop. Every writer knows it: the envelope is thin, your name is spelled correctly, and your stomach relocates to your knees before your brain has read a word. This was rejection number forty-three. I know the number precisely because I keep a spreadsheet, which my brother calls "a museum of no" and I call accounting.
Second, the ritual reading. Dear Writer. Thank you for the opportunity. Not a fit for us. We wish you luck placing your poens elsewhere.
Third, the double take... Poens.
Fourth, indignation, and this one had real heat. This magazine had declined me in nine words once. This magazine, whose submission guidelines demanded flawless formatting, twelve point serif, and, I quote, "meticulous attention to craft," could not spell the one word their entire enterprise depended on. They had rejected my meticulous attention to craft with a typo.
It felt like being failed on a driving test by an examiner who then reversed into a hedge.
Fifth, I stood in the hallway and laughed until the dog left the room.
Sixth, I photographed the letter and sent it to my brother, who replied within a minute: "To be fair, they never said THEIR craft."
Seventh, and this is the stage nobody warns you about, I felt something loosen in my chest that had been bolted shut for years. Because for a decade I had imagined the people behind those letters as a tribunal. Marble desks. Infallible taste. A long table of judges who had weighed my soul in grams and found it wanting. And a tribunal does not write "poens." A tired human being writes "poens." At some terrible hour, in some under-heated office or over-heated kitchen, a person with a cursor and a backlog had typed my no with the same fallible fingers I use to type my hoping.
So I did something I had never done in forty-three rejections.
I wrote back.
Not to argue. There is no dignity there, and editors keep a special mental shelf for people who appeal their verdicts. I wrote three sentences: "Thank you for considering my poens. I will send my noems elsewhere, and I hope your Febuary improves. Warmly, and with meticulous attention to craft."
I did not expect a reply... Submission portals are wells; you drop things in and count the silence. But nine days later an actual email arrived from an actual name, Marianne, senior reader, and it began: "I have printed your note and taped it above my desk, where it is currently outperforming most of what I read this month."
She confessed everything. The magazine ran on two paid staff and a rotation of volunteers. She read submissions between eleven at night and one in the morning, after her shift at a job that had nothing to do with literature, because twenty years ago a magazine had said yes to her once and she was still paying it forward.
The night she typed my rejection she had read sixty-four submissions. "Somewhere around number fifty," she wrote, "spelling becomes a suggestion."
And then she did the thing that changed how I write, which no acceptance had ever done.
She told me why.
Unpaid, unprompted, at some new terrible hour, she went back into their system, found my poems, and gave me one paragraph of the truth: the first two were competent and forgettable, but the third one, the one about my father's coat still hanging in the hallway, had made her stop scrolling, and then the final stanza had arrived and "reassured everyone that everything was fine, including you, and I did not believe you, and I was disappointed in the poem for lying."
I sat with that sentence for a long time.
She was right... I had written eleven honest lines and then panicked and installed a fire exit. The last stanza tidied the grief, folded it, thanked it for coming. I had done it because an honest ending frightened me, and I had told myself it was "restraint." That same week I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and between Marianne and the essay I felt like a man being handed the same eviction notice by two different landlords.
So I cut the fire exit. The poem now ends with the coat still in the hallway and nobody pretending to be fine, and the first time I read the revision aloud, alone in my kitchen, my own voice cracked on the last line... which is generally how you know.
I posted the new version on a community wall for poets, along with the story of the typo, and the responses became my favorite thread I have ever been part of. It turns out everyone has one. A poet in Leeds was once rejected with someone else's name. A woman in Pune received a rejection for a story she had never written, addressed to a man named Dennis, and has spent years wondering how Dennis's story ended.
A teenager wrote that he had been too scared to submit anywhere because editors seemed like gods, and forty strangers piled in to tell him about poens and Dennis and Febuary until the marble tribunal dissolved into what it actually is: tired people, reading with their whole hearts, misspelling things.
Every rejection I have ever received was typed by a tired human being who also wanted, once, to be read.
The teenager submitted somewhere the next month. He got rejected. He posted the letter like a trophy, and we celebrated it like one, because it was proof he had stopped asking permission to try. Watching that felt like watching someone step through a door I had spent ten years believing was a wall. If that is not a new beginning, I do not know what qualifies.
As for the coat poem: eight months later I sent it back to The Harrow Review, revised, honest, exit sealed. You already know where this is going, but I promise I did not... and I stood in the same hallway, in what I believe was the same single sock, holding a thin envelope.
They took it.
And the acceptance letter, I swear this on my spreadsheet, said they were "pleased to accpet" it.
I have both letters framed above my desk now, the poens and the accpet, hung side by side like a before and after photo in which nothing visibly changed except everything. Visitors assume the frames are ironic. They are not. They are the two most instructive documents I own. One taught me that the gatekeepers are human. The other taught me that the gate was never locked, only heavy, and that tired human hands were on the other side, pushing too.
Marianne and I still write to each other, once a season or so. Last month she sent me a photograph of her desk: the backlog, the cold coffee, my ancient three-sentence note still taped above her monitor, curling at the edges like a leaf. Underneath it she has added a sticky note in her own handwriting, a motto for the whole enterprise, hers and mine and Dennis's and everyone's.
It says: "Keep going. Spelling optional."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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