Into the night!

We receive a very heavy volume of high-quality submissions. People who send work to The Shit Creek Review normally realise that there is much more chance that their submission will not be accepted than that it will. Quite obviously we editors are only going to select a small proportion of that which comes our way, and equally obviously we will make that selection based on our own preferences and our own best reasons. Grasping this concept is not, as they say, rocket science.

Every so often, though, someone who has not taken on board this basic idea submits work to us, then becomes enraged when we decline their submission. Bitter letters follow with remarks sent to your humble & obedient editor, the tone and tenor of which are often rather hurtful. Worse than the inevitable editorial tears such letters provoke is the time lost by yr humble & obedient in reading and sometimes replying to these baneful missives.

Occasionally, declined submitters storm off into the night and seek to blacken the already vile name of Shit Creek Review by posting hurtful comments around the internet about SCR and all who sail in her; this anger can take months, years or decades to play out, with the disappointed submitters registering under assumed names and misleading aliases on poetry forums and the like solely to vent their hatred of SCR and particularly of yr h'mble ob'd't.

So why am I telling you all this? Ah, now I remember: a plea for niceness and civility, Disgruntled Ones. For world peace and harmony and the Age of Aquarius. Peace and Love, not Pieces of Liver. Fluffy kittens and sunbeams and the Bluebird of Happiness. Sweetness and Light. Understanding. Those sorts of things.