The Missouri Review blog has a post up about why current event submissions usually don’t make the cut for the journal. One of Evelyn Somers’s points:
There’s a point at which events, whether personal or public, enter what one might call “the writer’s domain.” That point doesn’t come instantly. Wordsworth said something like this when he spoke of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and it’s a commonplace that to write about an experience that’s too fresh can be disastrous because you lack the perspective/wisdom/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that sheds the necessary illumination on that experience. But when it comes to the public story, the headliner, there’s more to it. The hubbub has to die down first. We have to forget what the media told us. Historic tragedies can’t exactly become archetypes in the Jungian sense, but when they are stored in public memory for a while, they become more useful to the writer as fresh contexts that have lost most of the superficial silly-string originally clinging to them. This makes sense when one thinks about the great works of literature that address events in history. Typically they are written well after the fact, and they’re not in any way concerned with reporting or making sense. Often they manage to transcend even the far-reaching consequences of the largest events: wars, plagues and other tragedies that cause death on mass scales.
h/t Shelly Powers