We have to crack not one, not two, not three, but four coconuts at the temple of the Goddess of Good News.
(1) & (2): Two of our editors are headed for Iowa. Siddharth Dasgupta, our Visual Narratives editor, will be attending the Fall Residency at the International Writing Program 2025 at the University of Iowa. And Pervin Saket, currently on sabbatical, has been awarded the Obermann International Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She will be using this time to collaborate on an artists’ book on the Parsi community in India. We’re delighted, Siddharth & Pervin! And we’re not jealous at all.
(3) & (4): Harper Collins has just published ‘So That You Know’, a collection of poems from Mani Rao, our solar Translations (Poetry) editor. Spanning almost 40 years of sustained creative work, the volume is a celebration of a poet and her best work. Also delighted to announce that A. J. Thomas, whose translation of O. V. Vijayan’s Malayalam short-story ‘Parai’ (Rocks) appeared in Issue 57, has a new book out, ‘Once’, also from Harper Collins. It’s a translation of N. Mohanan’s Malayalam novel ‘Orrikul’ . Congratulations, Mani & A.J.!
In celebrating literary recognition, it is seductive to identify success with achievement. This leaves no role for failure other than to be a plot point in a life’s heroic journey. One cannot, we come to believe, fail and still have achieved something worthwhile. The English language would certainly have you think so. But as Wittgenstein cautioned us: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ Perhaps we should disregard the words of a failed schoolteacher, an atrocious speller who’d failed to even pass his high school’s written German exam. Alternatively, we could, as he did, strive for clarity in our concepts and not just good grades on life’s hamster wheels.
Towards this end, we offer three perspectives by the founders of The Osmosis Poetry Prize. We often hear counsels of consolation from our fellow writers. Editors tend to lie with the Sphinxes. Here we have three editors, themselves poets and fiction writers, describe for us, as honestly as they can, about their selection process for the prize.
Colophon: So You Got Rejected
YASHASVI VACHHANI, KUNJANA PARASHAR & KINJAL SETHIA
As proud as we were of launching The Osmosis Poetry Prize, we (Yashasvi, Kunjana, Kinjal) were also proud of our rejection letter. God knows we have collectively received so many of these, that when it was our turn to send one out for the prize, we empathised with the poets. And when TBLM invited us to write about the rejection mail, which has definitely turned some eyes, we again decided to take the path of honesty. Here we explain our reasons, the why and how of our understanding of the rejection letter. But first, here’s the letter we wrote to poets who did not win the first edition of The Osmosis Poetry Prize:
Dear Poet,
Thank you so much for submitting your work to the first iteration of The Osmosis Poetry Prize, 2025.
We regret to inform you that your submission was not chosen this time. Please bear in mind that we are poets too and are far too familiar with the difficult feelings that a rejection could bring up, especially for a packet of poems one has spent a considerable portion of their time & energy on.
In fact, if you have a couple of minutes, we would like to share some truths from our own writing lives:
At the beginning of this year, Yashasvi decided to start submitting actively again after a two year break. She is yet to get an acceptance. It has only been a series of rejections so far. Each one has hurt, some little, some a lot. They have led to sad days and sad weeks, but she has returned to the page and also written some of her best work (she thinks) this year. We are all in this together, friends :)
In 2019, the year when Kunjana actively started sending out work to literary magazines, her work got rejected over 87 times. The number was so overwhelming that she eventually had to stop keeping count to maintain her sanity.
Kinjal submitted 38 poetry & fiction pieces last year, of which 31 were rejected. What keeps her going is looking at each submission as a celebration in itself; that she wrote something, edited it and felt it was good enough to submit.
This is just to gently encourage you to keep trying & to keep sending out your work. We sincerely look forward to your submission next year.
Until then,
Yashasvi, Kunjana, Kinjal
Yashasvi Vachhani | Building a Community
Dear Reader/writer,
This was our rejection letter. But, for a bit, let’s go back to before. Before there were winners, before there was a rejection letter; let’s go to the very idea of the prize. When we thought of The Osmosis Poetry Prize, an annual prize that would award two winners, we wanted to create an opportunity for our peers, fellow poets. We wanted to strengthen the community. I was excited about the prospect of this new opportunity. I was already happy for the two poets who would win, but I immediately felt a sense of disappointment for all the people who would not get any good news.
I am no stranger to rejection. I have been on what one can call a spree this year. I have received all kinds of letters, from the curt one, the encouraging one, to the one that states facts (we received an overwhelming number of submissions this time, so we couldn’t accept yours). The encouraging one felt the nicest, but each stung in their own way.
So, when the time came to frame our own, the question we faced was: how could we make this sting less? How could we help ease the pain that was bound to show up? We didn’t want poets to feel alone and isolated in their rejection and shame, because the truth is they are not alone. We are all literally in the same place at different points. Today we might get an acceptance and tomorrow a rejection. If we all sat in a circle, it would be a rather large and illustrious circle. We would be among artists like Sylvia Plath, A K Ramanujan, Maya Angelou and others.
If we think about it, winning or losing in relation to the arts seems a bit bizarre. The form is very personal and the results are always subjective. There is no way to have one winner. There is only a winner because we said there would be. There is meaning only because we as a collective decided that it has a meaning.
If we go back to Derrida, in his theory of deconstruction, he says there is only meaning, where we assign it. That meaning is always shifting, moving, changing. So, what if we could say that a rejection note is not a rejection at all. What if we say it is an invitation. A rite of passage. A shortcut to a seat in the brilliant circle.
This might be a more idealistic view of the world. But I believe that art is beyond comparison. It is a personal journey. The path of art shapes us. It contours our minds, creates little ripples in our hearts, defines the way we live this ‘one wild and precious life’. Then how can that be evaluated?
If I remove the idea of winning and losing from the prize, then what is the prize? Perhaps it is an opportunity. A reason to come back to the page in a world filled with distractions. A motive to finish the work and polish it. Perhaps if we look at it like that, there will be no rejection. There will only be a task checked off a list and then we return to the page, where we all belong, to our words, to each other, to those who walked the path before us.
Kunjana Parashar | On Being a Good Ancestor
Here’s my long-winded reasoning behind why I chose to share my experience with rejection:
By virtue of being an entity on this planet, your life is connected to other entities: friends, birds, plants, domestic help, strangers on the internet & at bus stops & in trains, vegetable vendors, electricians, acquaintances, relatives, chosen family, milkman, post office officials, & so on. We are always exchanging units of our lives with someone else, either directly or unknowingly. It is easy to lose direction in such a vast sea of people, in all their opinions, in their brand of ethics. In such a scenario, how does one remain steadfast, rooted? What does one remain anchored in?
My solution to reorient myself to something deeper & more permanent than the presence or absence of people & their whims or personal philosophies, is to strengthen my own ideas. For instance, I like to think about what kind of an ancestor I would like to be. I find it a useful question to ask of myself. It makes me think about legacy and death and what we leave behind. It helps put things into perspective. And since we are connected to everyone else and our behaviour & ideas may have an impact on them, it matters what we do, what we find important, how we think, how we show up, it matters how we do things.
I, for one, like to show up in whatever honesty I can muster. I like sharing things: poems, quotes, music, whatever I have learned, memes, animal facts, and so on. If someone else benefits from it, then that is a consequence I am happy to live with. The ancestor in me feels satisfied. It feels like I have done a good job of being here, of spending my time on earth. In other words, I like being useful. I like contributing something of value to others. If I have resources, I like sharing them.
Sometimes I get sour though. Sometimes I don’t want to do it. Sometimes I think perhaps I am being foolish. I don’t owe anything to anyone, I begin to think. I will hoard information too, I think. I will not share my experiences, nobody cares, don’t fritter away your ‘secrets’, always do things in the dark, don’t tell anyone anything, never show your ‘weaknesses’, never admit your failures in public, always act out of power, so on and so forth.
And then the ancestor in me grows small and sad, and frankly, disturbed. I don’t feel good. Something feels off, out of joint. And then I understand that I cannot act against myself. It sickens me to do so. And I must return, over and over, to the idea of what kind of ancestor I would like to be. And then slowly, I try to wash the pettiness away. Become good again. And clean. And open. And so, become well again. And if keeping myself well helps someone else become well, good.
So if sharing that I got rejected over 87 times by literary magazines in the year 2019 makes someone feel less isolated, more connected, more accepted, more at ease, then good. I am doing something right. I don’t care what it says about the quality of my writing, about how hard I tried, how much I applied myself, and so on. I do not care about the optics of it. For me, it is natural to share these things. I do not see it as a failure. Rejections are only facts for me now. They are not proof of how well I write or don’t, whether I am good or not. As long as I am working on my craft, reading poems, practicing things, putting in some hours of work, and stopping to rest, I know I will be fine.
Kinjal Sethia | Chin up, please!
On Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being, I heard Rick Rubin suggest that ideas have an existence of their own and they don’t belong to the person who executes them into being. He went on to say that that’s why it is necessary to work on an idea when it comes to you, because if you don’t, the idea will go to someone else; it is in a hurry to be executed. While this was a warning against procrastination, it also helped me depersonalize ideas.
If something I write is rejected by a magazine, it tells me two things. One, I need to work on my craft to be better equipped for the execution of the idea. But also, that it is the idea that is rejected.
I started submitting poetry and fiction pieces in 2021. Earlier I used to submit sporadically, and began submitting more methodically and regularly since last year when I submitted 38 fiction and poetry pieces, of which 31 were rejected. One of the things I have realised is that rejections don’t hurt me as much when I am submitting more often. It translates into two things. One, I have to write more, edit more to submit more. And secondly, it takes the pressure off from a single submission.
I interpret the sadness tied into rejection as ‘I wrote this, and it got rejected.’ The ‘I’ is the entity getting hurt. But if you read it as ‘It was one of the things I wrote, and it got rejected’, it hurts less. For a vain occupation like writing, it also assuages the ego and writer-identity, as ‘I am a writer, and I will write many more things.’ It helps not to bind the writer-identity with one packet of poems or one short story.
Some may be uncomfortable with recognising writing as a vain activity. But it is only the dissatisfied ‘I’ that attempts writing or any other form of creativity. It is this vulnerable ‘I’ that is hurt at receiving a rejection. Perhaps it is the karate training from my childhood, but like any muscle building, the ‘I’ needs to do chin-ups, to go on writing.
The idea may come to me because I am hungry for it, or because I might feel equipped to execute it. But the idea is not the ‘I’. The ‘I’ is so many other things- relationships, skills, responsibilities. Most importantly for a writer, I feel the ‘I’ is a vessel, and developing craft is like expanding the insides of the vessel to hold more ideas, to have the tools to execute them. A rejection letter is just an idea thrown back into the churn. The ‘I’ of the writer can then decide to hold the idea again or move on to better ideas. But most importantly, to have the confidence to keep the vessel on a rotating wheel, keep churning out more writing.
The ego of the ‘I’ is also blunted after a rejection if you are a part of a community of writers. Any magazine or contest is always sending out more rejections than acceptances. When you are rejected, you are automatically added to a larger community of writers. Writing in itself is such a lonely occupation. Rejections help me feel camaraderie with others.
While this might seem like I am white-washing the sorrow or self-doubt that comes with a rejection letter, it is better to look at it through this naïve lens; than to stop writing. To stop writing, I feel, is the real defeat of the writer-identity.
——
YASHASVI VACHHANI is a poet, editor, and educator. She facilitates creative writing and reading programmes for children across ages. Her work has been featured in SWWIM Miami, Of Brave Hearts and Dry Tongues, and Singapore Unbound. Currently, a poetry editor at TBLM, she’s founder of the “slightly strange, thoda absurd, very desi literary magazine”, Tiffinbox Review.
KUNJANA PARASHAR is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her manuscript They Gather Around Me, the Animals, selected by Diane Seuss, has won the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award. She has received the Toto Funds the Arts award and the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize. She is currently the Managing Editor (Poetry) at TBLM.
KINJAL SETHIA is a writer based in Pune. Her work has been published in nether Quarterly, Gulmohar Quarterly, In Parentheses, Bangalore Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Marrow Magazine, Singapore Unbound, Out of Print among other places. She is a Fiction Editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine since 2021. She is the recipient of The Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship for 2025.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Banner image: Honoré Daumier. The Three Judges (1858-1860). 363 x 538 cms (142 3/4 x 211 3/4 in.). Watercolor and brush and black gouache, with charcoal, heightened with gray gouache, over touches of graphite, on ivory laid paper. Art Institute of Chicago. Image courtesy: WikiArt.
Daumier worked in many genres of art, but today, perhaps he’s most remembered for his caricatures. He had a great sense of humour, in particular, the ironic kind necessitated by a life which has had to endure much neglect and poverty. He used his prodigious talent wisely; that is, to make fun of super-annoying people, viz. the rich, the righteous, and the pompous. Doubtless, he would’ve employed his gifts to lampoon TBLM’s editors, and doubtless, we would’ve published his work.
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"We are all literally in the same place at different points." Therefore, there is no need to think of art in terms of getting to some place.
Our inner life can remain sedate and tranquil amidst the formations that evolve slowly, silently and noisily.
Good piece.
Loved all three, thank you for this