Emma,

I also suspect that the real reason for not accepting email is that it's too easy for people to submit everywhere, undiscriminatingly, with a few clicks. If you have to have the cost and bother of printing out your work, doing the SAE, posting and so on, it must filter out a few no-hopers.

I can't help wondering whether you are actually Gore Vidal in disguise. After all, didn't he say, "It's not enough to suceed. Others must fail." Or is that just a Pauliner thing?

Adele.




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Or should it be Paulina? Do tell.

Adele, I am a Paulina, but I'm also a member of WW, so I did of course mean 'no-hopers' in a warm and supportive way. I certainly wouldn't agree with Gore Vidal. At its best, St Paul's' view (the school, not the Patriarch) was that success is about being able to do the most interesting, exciting, fulfilling thing that you were designed to do, without looking over your shoulder at anyone else at all, because who cares what they think? Arrogant, certainly, but in some ways rather anti-competitive.

And being a Paulina, I'm mortally ashamed of my innacurate use of language, so I'll try to pin down what I really meant when I said 'no-hopers'. I think it's hard for us heavy-duty, serious, ambitious, writers on WW and in Masters courses and so on, to realise just how little sense a lot of people have of what their own work is like, and where it stands in relation to acknowledgedly good or published (not always the same thing) stuff. And those who are worst are the ones who least know it, as any teacher or wader through slush piles will tell you. I wouldn't say that they shouldn't write, or that their writing isn't important to them, and therefore has value. But of those, some have so little sense of what writing and publishing is about, that they put words onto a page, and think that the world will value it as they do. Those are the ones who would happily attach their entire novel to an email, and cc. it to every publisher in WAYB. Heaven help the trade and those of us who have reason to hope to be part of it, if it didn't cost £25-odd to print out and send a full MS by the traditional route.

Emma


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btw, have you run across the products of my alma mater in the past, to have such a view of us?

Emma, thanks for the clarification. Yes, I've met several Paulinas at Oxford and elsewhere. They were either very competitive and spoke highly of the school, or mentally battered and bruised and hated the place. Whilst academically outstanding, the school seems to have a terrible reputation for eating disorders, so wouldn't be top of the list for my daughter (if I had one).

Adele.

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Oh, and I've also heard that bullying is a big problem.

Don't remember bullying any more than anywhere else (less than many) but I do remember the eating disorders. Mind you, if you herd together 650 middle-class high-achieving teenage girls, you're probably asking for it: I don't know how much you could consider it the school's fault.

I have mixed feelings about it as a life experience - my two sisters and I all went there - but I'm aware that I use the education I got there every single day, especially in my writing, but in the rest of my life too. Put it this way: I have a daughter, and if I lived near enough, and she got in comfortably (not just scraping in), I'd still send her there.

Emma