I am in possession of a relic, a piece of lesbian herstory. Going through decades’ worth of papers, I came across a rejection letter I got from the now-defunct Naiad Press, a pioneer in lesbian literature.  It was for a novel I’d written and the rejection was well founded. That novel–my first–had no business being published. What can I say? I was young, inexperience, naive, and very hopeful.

Furthermore, the letter shows that even then in 1992, they were cutting back on the number of titles they were publishing each year:

“…we are accepting NO unsolicited manuscripts at all and rejecting almost 90% of all queries.

Currently the NAID PRESS is publishing 24 new books each year…concentrating on our large group of repeating authors which is leaving an increasingly smaller number of slots open for new work…new authors.”

Nothing has changed.

The best part is that it was typewritten–on an actual typewriter–and signed by Barbara Grier, founder of Naiad. I find myself unable to part with it. Would you?