Tip Jar--For your donations. PLEASE DON'T SUBMIT WORK HERE.

If you have a bit to spare.... We're all volunteers and every so often we use our own money to pay for odds and ends like postage to send a book to a review editor or copies of pieces to Best Americans.  You may think we're chutzpahdik to put out our virtual tip jar, since we ask you to pay a bit to submit in some categories. That helps cover our Submittable subscription. Otherwise we'd be drowning in envelopes, as in the old days. And we know how it's annoying to pay for what might turn out to be a rejection. Who told you to choose this life anyway? As Saroyan wrote:

Iowa said, “I just got in from Salinas. No work in the lettuce fields. Going north now, to Portland; …”

I wanted to tell him how it was with me: rejected story from Scribner’s, rejected essay from The Yale Review, no money for decent cigarettes, worn shoes, old shirts, but I was afraid to make something of my own troubles. A writer’s troubles are always boring, a bit unreal. People are apt to feel, Well, who asked you to write in the first place? A man must pretend not to be a writer. 

I said, “Good luck, north”… Fine boy, hope he isn’t dead, hope he hasn’t frozen, mighty cold these days.”