Adventures in Literary Volunteering

You know how you sign up for a volunteer thing because your friend is doing it and you hope you don’t make a fool of yourself trying something new? Well, despite previous volunteer disasters of doing too much because other volunteers failed to show up, and ‘super easy’ positions that proved to be anything but, I dived headfirst into volunteering for the Santa Barbara Literary Journal.

My task was to read entries from writers from all over the place. A lot of entries.

After reading a few, I started noticing if the writer had bothered to read our submission guidelines. Some entries were laughably off-target to our submission guidelines. Ditch. Some had spelling, grammatical, and contextual errors that made my eyes cross. Ditch. Some were too gory. Seriously, dude, we didn’t ask for blood and viscera. Ditch. Someone sent us a novel. Really? I started thinking fifteen noes in, “Am I being too picky?” And, “Will we find enough stories that will work for this volume?”

Then a funny thing happened. I read a story that stirred something inside of me. A flutter of creativity. I hadn’t been writing regularly. I’d done the usual: I put “Write” in the daily appointment book and frowned at day's end when I hadn’t. Something changed. I started writing again. I even submitted a couple of polished stories to some literary journals. These stories were living (dying?) on my hard drive.

Back to the submissions. I found stories to say yes to. Granted, my yes wasn’t the only vote, as we at SB Litjo believe in using different viewpointed readers. I suppose after that grammatically improvisational sentence, you’re wondering if I can, in fact, A) write, or B) properly evaluate a submission. All I can say is, I have a point of view.

Communicating about stand-out pieces with the other readers and our Editor turned out to be a wonderful, warm experience. Watching a story that moved me to tears make the cut, made me giddy. And you know, a bit of giddy silliness is a good thing. Another story that made me go what (??) at the end, and bow in respect, also made the issue. I watched the issue come together, each story a rung in the ladder of literary juiciness. At the top of the ladder, I looked them all over and saw a world of creativity, shared doubts, hope, and places in between.

Reading all the differing voices, seeing how people deal with adversity, attraction, despair, and joy, and how their writing style imbues the simplest actions with grace, tolerance, and change, I’ve been lit like a candle. That candle continues to burn, and I’ve been writing regularly ever since. And hey, one of my short stories just got accepted into a philosophy journal for next year.

Thanks, SBLitjo, your volunteer position gave me more than I bargained for. I’ll be back for the next issue.