Matt DiGangi, editor/owner of Thieves Jargon, has posted a few blogs dissing me. I’ll tell you why. A few months ago I found the Thieves Jargon web site. I wrote and asked him if I could submit. I figured there were many people who simply submitted without asking, and thought my way was the polite way. Error! Rather than respecting my method, he sniffed my query as a sign of weakness and immediately sized me up as a desperate punk. He told me I should explain to him why I thought I should be allowed to submit to Thieves Jargon. If this was too difficult he told me I could simply get a letter of recommendation from one of his published writers in order to be considered.
I wondered why, if DiGangi was so discriminating, his list of published authors was a mile long. I looked at the dizzying list and wondered where to start to get someone to vouch for me, to tell DiGangi that I was worthy of submitting to Thieves Jargon, worthy of getting rejected. Which of these esteemed authors could I write for a letter of recommendation? Serena Alibhai? Andy Riverbed? Olesya Mishechkina? P. H. Madore? Benjamin Morris? Kristin Ong Muslim? Amanda Walczesky? Anonymous? xTx? I was lost.
I went onto the Thieves Jargon messageboard, which apparently DiGangi invented all on his own, and I looked around. What I found was a mutual admiration society spiced through with a few city park psychos. I went on the board and started criticizing. We have been at odds ever since.
One of DiGangi's latest blogs is to send out an appeal to his readers to search for a publisher for a book of stories he has. He doesn't say who the author is. Maybe it’s DiGangi himself. Rather than going to Duotrope or some other resource and doing some real leg work, he'd rather just cast it out and wait for an admirer or frat brother to take the bait. This method is sure to work, of course, and has worked in the past.
What most bothers me is this: if a friend or a friend of a friend publishes you, can you really feel your work is powerful? Isn’t it the same as vanity publishing, except that you are paying in ass-kissing and self marketing instead of actual dollars? Isn’t the satisfaction of publication in direct proportion to the honesty and impartiality with which your work is judged?
I would rather someone publish me who doesn’t know me or any of my friends. Even better would be if a person publishes me who knows me and doesn’t like me. If a person hates my living guts, but publishes me anyway, well, that would be ideal.
This column will be published once every three weeks. The next edition will be available on October 14th.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2009).
