Slush life

New York CITY, New York – After the first seven or so, breaking hearts gets easy.

It’s a tricky art, telling people where they went wrong in the nicest possible manner, yet without being too encouraging as to stir up more delusions, because another attempt will only, inevitably and viciously, lead to being shot down again.

I’ve started an internship at a men’s magazine here in New York, one known for its devotion to the sophisticating of the urban male in all forms esoteric and hedonistic, as well as its reverence for deeply intelligent and deeply cleavaged women. The magazine is also respected for a long literary tradition, having engendered such quotables from Truman Capote to David Sedaris. I back-doored my way into this venerable institution as a humble fiction intern.

This internship is fictive in more than one sense – the department exists rather sporadically, perhaps virtually, and my singular duty involves dealing with the unsolicited work people send in, stuff which unfortunately will never see the light of publication. These are stories that will never be made real, left instead to congeal in the slush pile, as it is affectionately called, like the murky greige snow on the city’s sidewalks – a literary dead end. Who am I to banish these would-be authors to the great dumpster of rejection, i.e., to break their hearts? An intern, that’s who.

Under the anonymous guise of my initials, I pen short missives to their sometimes-massive submissions; on smeared photocopied form letters that bluntly say, "thanks, but we don’t need you," I offer condolences, my petty pity. It might be easier to just unconscionably shrug them off, thereby reducing my work to mere envelope-stuffing. But knowing that the world works in cycles of reversal, I too, will receive a dreaded letter in the mail, one that I have already received many times before, so it would only earn me karmic currency to ease the suffering of others while I can.

Perhaps I’m projecting too much non-existent power in my terribly powerless position, but like they say, internships are what you make of them. And so I sit at a desk that’s not my own, with one ear on the listen for insider celebrity gossip, leafing through pages and pages from crates and crates of November – that is, four-month-old – slush. The magazine has been accepting short story submissions for as long as it can remember, and for reasons above me, it lost the habit of publishing anything unsolicited. Instead of ending the practice, however, which would understandably alienate and infuriate many loyal readers, the magazine (rather, its interns) still conscientiously reads every word sent in by aspiring writers from all over the country. Just in case, you know, something absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant emerges from the pile, a diamond in the slush.

Of course, brilliance is subjective. As the fact-checker who sits next to me made clear, "Hemingway could rise from the dead and send in a story under another name, and we would just call him a bad Hemingway."

Breaking hearts and watching the potboilers are all in a day of unpaid work. My first rejection letters were clumsy and unnatural, like trying to use chopsticks wearing gloves. In fact, I didn’t give any comments to this one story written by an Indian husband-and-wife team, about a mysterious death by a poisonous snake back in the old country. I just didn’t think you could take anything seriously that finishes with a sentence like, "It is because of the Cobra God’s retribution that Ravi is burning in hell!" unless it was in song, and it was Bollywood. I thought the story was a poor effort at ethnixploitation, but of course, I could never say that. They seemed like a nice couple.

Then I realized that silence can be the most cutting response, so I attempted to refine my critiques, moving on. Unfortunately, I have no background in short story criticism, and gasp – secretly never "got" short stories – I had always somewhat disliked them for being, well, too short. But the beginner’s learning curve kicked in and soon I was formulating pithy, if generic, statements that ranged from "Your story about the aging, dying couple was poignant" to "Your characterization of an abused woman was movingly sensitive, but the trite ending, which relied on reincarnation in the form of a kind, handsome neighbor, was a bit too mystical. Have you considered Harlequin Romance?"

Cobbling together a story is no small feat, and this is something the intern should always keep in mind. One guy wrote from a Texas prison, "Please excuse the many typos, but there is no word processing in my facility," he appealed in his cover letter. His story, which was about the vengeful murder of a wife-battering son-in-law, sounded like the signed confession the police would make you write upon arrest, and I told him so. Kindly, of course – I had no idea when he was getting out.

It’s actually more troubling when something really good comes across. When the writing is refreshingly new and unexpected, a Bizarro way of turning the world, and the humor is subtle, both light and dark like clouds smirking in the sky, and the effort, which you know must have been painstaking, is invisible in the flowing breath of words. When you feel pangs that such grace is not yours, but worse yet about the irony of the situation.

I still haven’t figured out what to say in these cases, but I know anyway that my cheap platitudes are by no means the death knell of one’s writing career. Some of them will come back to haunt the next intern: Persevering writers attach evidence from rejection letters of years past to wag a finger and accuse, "You said I was promising. You told me I should try again!"

Beyond my undeserved channeling of Simon Cowell, the slush pile is a great source for mining ideas and thoughts to mull upon. Reading upwards of 10 stories at a time turns my mind into slush, too, but some things will stick out in this palimpsest, like the one about an anti-capitalist who takes home Starbucks napkins to wipe his ass with, or how noticeably the pattern of language changes as it gets wrangled across borders, or the 700 different ways to describe a beautiful woman, or the fact that death is the most popular climax-bringer, plot-twister, story-concluder.

The point of an internship is to gain practical experience, but most people know that it’s usually glorified slave labor. Companies temptingly dangle "foot in the door" internships to college students who are told they won’t be able to get real jobs without at least several on their resumes. My particular indentureship is a bit different – but I kind of like the fact that it has little to do with the real world, or real work; that I can sit back and read and have a good chortle or be totally disgusted, just letting the miscellany of made-up life unfold before me frame by frame.

While I continue to craft the perfect rejection letter.