Honesty

It bothers me when people do not say what they mean. Seriously, when a person says one thing and means something else, it doesn't matter what either is, suddenly the person loses credibility and respect in my eyes. This loss is only increased if one proves in other ways he or she is not thorough or consistent in their dealings with me. What has spurred this? Oh, blogosphere, what indeed.
I received an email today from the magazine publishing my work, asking me to look at the proof and check for errors before sending it to print. They went on to explain that their team had fixed grammar errors, punctuation weirdness, and in some cases, made drastic changes to a poet's work, but they would revert back to the originals upon request. I reviewed my work and WHOA. They changed the verb tenses in the beginning of Interdit, added the word "seemed" in some lines, as though the observations the speaker is making were figments of her imagination. Furthermore, in SOLD, they ADDED AN ENTIRE LINE about the house, calling it "our old house", I guess for those readers who couldn't put those pieces together...whatever. So I emailed them back, politely stating that while their revisions made nice pieces, they were not my voice, nor were they in line with the meaning of the poems, and requested they revert my work back to the originals they had accepted in the first place. Not an hour later I received a reply, stating that they were impressed with my talent, what with me not being in the creative writing program, and they would change the works back, but could they please fix the grammar and capitalization errors?

EXCUSE ME. I proofread the College's Course Catalogue at work and never have I gotten a comma splice question wrong on chompchomp.com, EVER. Furthermore, if they were going to change the poems anyway, they shouldn't have given me the option to restore my work. If they wanted revision, they should have asked me instead of letting student editors alter my work to fit their idea of what the poem should have said. They actually changed the phrase "I imagine it was simultaneous" to "I imagine it seemed simultaneous" and thought that was just fixing up some grammatical issues. Clearly, they did not want my poems the way they are, so why didn't they say so? They made no indication of revision in the acceptance letter!

I allowed them to make their grammar fixes, but asked to see these revisions before the magazine goes to press. This time, I hope they do what they said they would, and do not keep pushing for something else.