I’m left with a poor impression of Fence and its editor by trying to make hay of this nasty spat. Doubt that was her intent.

I have only rejection letters from Fence, and I’m tempted not to submit again. When I worked on a literary journal, I tried to avoid pissing matches of this nature…just restate that the copy was sent to NJ. Period. I don’t think anyone can win….

Yeah, the contributer wasn’t nice, but damn, that editor sucks. If she’d sent an extra copy of the magazine to the address in New York upon recepit of the first letter, the spat wouldn’t have happened at all.

Sounds like the editor was in a bad mood - One more sentence from her could have cooled this off: something along the lines of, “A copy was sent to NJ; I will resend a copy to your NY address.” Responding to a question with another question doesn’t leave the asker feeling satisfied.

The contributor could have just asked more questions instead of taking to personal attacks. Wow. Just wow. Maybe neither of them is civil in the first place.

I guess that makes this devolution of correspondence look tame by comparison.

That editor never ONCE made clear that she was sending a copy there. She just asked if the person used to live there. There seemed to be no response back saying “okay, confirming that I am sending a copy to xxx NJ” and she actually never even said “yes we do provide contributor copies.” It was like a bizarre one-sided conversation where half of her responses were in her head and then she got mad because the person didn’t hear her.

Granted, the contributor was a bit of a douche, too, but I can see where the frustration of a non-responsive response came in.