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    At My Desk On A Saturday Night
    At My Desk On A Saturday Night
    At My Desk On A Saturday Night
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    At My Desk On A Saturday Night

    By Samuel Vargo

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    About this ebook

    One of the things I've learned by writing and submitting poems, stories, creative nonfiction and even journalism articles is how to handle rejection. If you write and want what you're writing published, it will be rejected. Maybe not most of it, but much of it will be sent back - usually accompanied by a polite form letter. Sometimes the editors of literary magazines and small presses invite a writer to submit again, but other rejections aren't as cheery and no such an invitation is given to submit again.

    Believe it or not, most of what lies in this collection met with some nice comments by literary magazine editors, but little caveats like: "The work you're sending really doesn't fit with our magazines' aesthetic" or, "Although we think this poetry has promise and another press will surely grab much of it up and absolutely adore it, it's not the kind of work we publish." And they invite me to submit again in the future, and I oftentimes do. And a little note is thrown back my way in a month or two that reads something like, "We like what we see here and would like to see more of your work in the future. Unfortunately, none of the poetry you've sent made the final cut for Issue #5. Keep writing and keep trying. - The Editors".

    Rejection form emails are a lot like fortune cookies. They tend to be hopeful, if not full of promise, but they really don't say much. At one time I tried to read into them but never do these days. At best, they're syrupy and sickening, at their worst, they are dreadfully snarky.

    But most are positive, albeit unsung and obscure. Editors of literary magazines are brokers of poems, stories, and other literary work. Their mission is not to critique or give writing improvement advice, although some lit mags these days will offer a bit of such painful rhetoric for a small fee, or sometimes, just if you ask them to give you a bit of advice. But most editors don't want to get into such a quandary, which oftentimes turns into a quagmire of ugly emails being passed back and forth. Who needs it, these poor editors just want to find some really good lit for their next issue. So most feel that keeping rejections noteless and even a bit aloof is a good way to get away from an Internet barroom brawl with a very outraged writer. Normally, such misfits give up the ghost on writing poetry and fiction and get into the martial arts, ballroom dancing, or stand-up comedy. There is actually a bit of money in these other avocations, by the way. . . .

    I've never opened a fortune cookie that read "You're going to be run over by a bus this afternoon" and I've never received a canned rejection from a literary magazine that reads: "Bug off, loser. Quit sending us your stupid poems. Get a life and give up on writing. You have no talent and you'd be better suited to getting a job in a textile mill."

    Anyhow, this collection of poetry might not be an earth-shattering poetic achievement, but as a collection, taken as a composite whole, I think it's a strong work. The poems and flash pieces that have been previously published have their publishing credits listed after the poems. There are two quirky short stories included, too, off-the-beaten-track short stories, about middle-length. They're both literary and entertaining. I wrote both of these in the past year or so; and the poetry and shorter prose, well, most of it has been lying dormant in old Submittable and email files for a long time now, in sort of "literary cold-case status".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSamuel Vargo
    Release dateJul 10, 2017
    ISBN9781370225880
    At My Desk On A Saturday Night
    Author

    Samuel Vargo

    Samuel Vargo writes on a freelance basis for a few liberal, online, national magazines that headline daily. He also writes for a few comedy and satire magazines with international readerships that headline daily. Vargo has written poetry and short stories for print and online literary magazines, university journals and a few commercial magazines. He worked most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter and taught as an adjunct English professor for about a decade at a number of community colleges, state colleges, and state universities. He has a BA in Political Science and an MA in English (both degrees were awarded by Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA). These days, Vargo doesn't write much poetry, but instead, concentrates on writing detective mystery novels under the pseudonym Stanley Gladden. His two latest works are "Woodside" and "Welcome to the Horror Show". Vargo was a curator and editor for a string of eight commercial online magazines for almost a year, but a few years ago, he gave this up to work on his own writing pursuits. Vargo was the fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years. A book-length collection of Vargo's short stories, titled "Electric Onion Head and the Rotating Cyclops of the Month", was published by Literary Road and had a web presence for seven years from 2007-.2014.

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      Book preview

      At My Desk On A Saturday Night - Samuel Vargo

      At My Desk on a Saturday Night

      - A Collection of Poetry and Prose

      By Samuel Vargo

      Copyright 2017 by Samuel Vargo. All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be copied, duplicated, or borrowed in any way without the consent of the author and owner of this work.

      ******

      At My Desk on a Saturday Night is dedicated to my cousin, Betty Spellman Peters Soni, one of the most wonderful people I have ever known.

      Index

      Foreward

      Let’s go to Ike’s Café

      Lost Stories in Real Time

      Welcome to the end of the road

      Secrets of a Guarded Woman

      Lunch break

      Haunted House

      At My Desk on a Saturday Night

      Reading the Obit of an Old Newspaperman

      The pariah smells the petrichor

      Black Ice

      Just inside the only lit window on Sullivan Street

      Spring comes after a long winter drought

      A November Walk

      - that thing about going blind, well it’s just an old wives tale

      A salute to the dead of night

      A Wild Child’s Ode to Snakes & Such

      Cupid’s arrow is long and sharp (a short story/fiction)

      Jack, the Jack Russell Terrier, is DEAD! (a short story/fiction)

      Lapis Lazuli wetness under a scorching yellow sun

      A hawk eclipses the sun

      A foot closer to being processed for Food Stamps

      Drifting Off to Engines Droning in the Distance

      There's a ghost in this house:

      After a midterm test, fall session

      An Early Morning in a Small-Town Love Affair

      Shagbark Hickory trees line the hollow

      The Pecking Order

      Love Poet

      Some Say, Etc., Etc.:

      Books, books and more books:

      Another Name at yet another Nondescript Poetry Reading

      Breaking Up is Easy to do 

      8 a.m. at Huron Avenue and 34th Street:

      Gone Crazy on Stephen King & James Patterson

      A ritual in minimalism and essay form

      The Cynic

      Crazy Charlie's off his medication

      Outmatched

      The Economy of Numbers

      The Adder of Addiction

      A Day in Paradise

      Deep vaulted forever: An ode to old cowboy movies

      Element

      Saint Agnes was cute, but so is a tall can of gasoline and a half book of matches

      Stark Scandal Seen from a Bus, Jacksonville Florida:

      Foreward

      At My Desk on a Saturday Night wasn’t written on a Saturday night. Let’s get that straight right away. Actually, it was poetry laying around in rejected emails I have been sending out to literary publishers for about 15, 20, or even 25 years now. All sorts of emails just lying dormant in my email account. Some of it, also, was taken from active, withdrawn, and rejected submissions I made with my Submittable account and there are some poems I wrote just for this book.

      But primarily, it is a collection of long-dormant work. Most of the poetry that appears in At My Desk on a Saturday Night was rejected with caveats like, Although we really like what we see here, we’ve decided to use other poetry by other poets. Or something like, Don’t take this as a disparagement of your work, but we are rejecting this submission because your work simply doesn’t fit into the aesthetic of our poetry journal. Or sometimes they’ll send something like, We like what we see here but we’ll have to pass on this submission. Try us again when we begin putting our next issue together in three months.

      Many of these publishers of literature invite me to submit again, saying they want to see more work from me. And I submit again, and 99 of 100 times it is rejecte. The title poem of this collectiosays a lot about my problem, too. I’m old enough to be the parent, perhaps even the grandparent, of many of the young poets getting published in literary magazines today and young people tend to like to publish work that they can relate to – I can’t blame them, when it was our time to bask in the sun, we did the same thing. Actually, most of the poetry written in this collection was penned by a poet who was then, 10, 15, or 20 years younger than the guy who is now putting together this collection. So it wasn’t written by the old me, but a much younger me, way back when. . .

      There is a lot of really good poetry online and much of it is free. Many of the literary magazines online, and there are hundreds these days, have deep and wide archives of poems, flash fiction, longer fiction, creative nonfiction, and even hybrid forms of literature that cannot really be pigeonholed into a certain category. Call up a directory of literary magazines and see for yourself. You can spend days, weeks, even months, weeding and reading through the archives of some of the fine online journals publishing today.

      Some days I spend quite a bit of time reading the work of others. To become a better writer, this is a necessity, and even for accomplished writers, those who want to stay on top of their game read others’ work. And truthfully, most of what I read online is quite good in these little literary offerings that dot the peripherals of cyberspace. It’s very competitive these days even to get a little 21-line poem accepted into a literary magazine. Not to mention, a lot of work goes into publishing and producing an online journal. Most of these online and print journals are staffed by a younger set of writers, fresh out of college, many with M.F.A.’s and a few even with Ph.D.’s, who want to keep the writing craft alive and well.

      I laud them.

      In the days of texting, sexting, and screaming profanities into YouTube videos to make some harebrained political point, it’s refreshing and wonderful to know that the world’s young intellectual community is keeping its proverbial thumb in the dike of this insidious insanity and ignorance.

      Oh, I still get an occasional story or poem accepted and published by online and print journals, even though I’m going to turn 59 in early winter. It beats losing all my dough at the slot machines in the casino around the corner and at least, if nothing else, hacking away at these stories and poems keeps me occupied and out of trouble. Although many journals, particularly those using the Submittable submissions engine, charge reading fees, which are nominal, really, like only two or three bucks a shot, I never pay these fees. There are still a lot of great mags and online literary offerings that offer free submissions via submissions engines like Submittable or even through plain old ordinary emails. I’ve made

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