#12: my life in rejections
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one horror, one boredom, and one glory. This is the twelfth one.
Boredom. There are three types of responses you can get when you submit a piece of creative writing to a press: a form rejection (“Thank you for your submission. We received 1,500 submissions, and were overwhelmed by the wonderful work that’s out there. Unfortunately, …”); a form rejection with some feedback (“Thank you for your submission. Although we did not ultimately choose your manuscript for publication, we were impressed by its…” or "Your manuscript was/is a finalist/honorable mention/semifinalist” or “Your manuscript came extremely close.”); and an acceptance (“Congratulations!”).
I’m not sure how to count how many books I’ve written. It’s hard to figure out because a few of them are poetry books that overlap and bleed into one another; they’re semi-revisions of one another. Three is a conservative estimate. There’s the book of poems I wrote before, during, and after I got my MFA at George Mason, about 2007-2010, that I’ve pretty much given up on; another one I wrote during the years after that, before and during Ph.D. school, 2011-2016 ish, called Why I Love Country Music; and one that consists of a long poem, An Age of Prudence, that I wrote in 2011. The first one, the one I’ve given up on, has come closest to being published; over the several years I submitted it to presses and poetry prizes, I got many rejections with feedback. Although I think they’re better than the first one, the two newer ones have gotten almost entirely form rejections. I’ve submitted these three books to literally hundreds of presses and prizes. Then there’s my expansion and revision of my dissertation, which is my magnum opus—it’s called ISABEL: My Life in American Fictions, and it’s a multigenre memoir about reading. This, too, hasn’t come anywhere close to being published. In the three years I’ve been submitting it, I’ve received two rejections with very positive feedback, but the rest have been form rejections. My other unpublished book is Midwinter Day, based on Bernadette Mayer’s book of the same title. Mayer’s book is an “epic” written on the shortest day of the year in December 22, 1978 (today is its 41st anniversary!). I wanted to see if you could really write a book in a day or if she was lying, so I recreated the experiment and wrote a book on the shortest day of the year in 2017: December 21. What I wrote turned out to be a lot shorter than Bernadette’s, so to beef it up, I wrote a long, fragmented essay about the original book, and also about being a woman and a poet—that’s the first half of the book. I’ve submitted Midwinter Day to a couple dozen presses, but I haven’t gotten any positive comments on it at all.
I have a new plan for ISABEL lately. I think maybe it’s unpublishable because it’s such a weird combination of essays, poetry, and other forms I made up, so I'll take all the essays from it and put them together in a new book with other literary essays I’ve written, and I'll try to get that published. Then I’ll take the poems from ISABEL and put those together with the best poems from my unpublished poetry books. When I’m done, I’ll have two more books to submit to presses and prizes.
I can’t believe I actually got a book published. I almost forget it’s possible.
Horror. When I turned 35, I panicked about getting a book published. I had written so much, and tried so hard—tried so many different things! When I was a child, a teenager, in college, afterward, I didn’t dream of having a certain career, or of getting married or anything like that: I just wanted to publish a book. For about 30 years, this was all I ever had hoped for myself, and, in a certain way of looking at things, all I ever had tried to do. I had made many choices, like choosing schools, quitting jobs, pursuing my Ph.D., moving, based entirely on how much I thought those things would lead me to get a book published. Friends, colleagues, professors, writing center people, and others have read my unpublished books and offered advice over the years. This wasn’t working. I hired an editor to help me revise ISABEL, which I thought had the best chance (although now I think it’s the least likely to be published in its current form). At the time, I thought a university press might publish ISABEL if I could make it more coherent, less fragmented. I was extremely anxious as I was working with the editor. I was thinking, I could have done so many other things with my life, and instead I’ve had this one goal, not particularly difficult to accomplish, that I’ve pursued above all else, and I’ve been totally unsuccessful with it. While I was working with this editor, I was finishing The Walmart Book of the Dead, which I wrote quickly and submitted to maybe five or six presses—and one of those presses, Vine Leaves Press, accepted it. Now, I don’t feel the same panicked need to have my other books published, but I don’t know why this book was published so easily and the others have been rejected for years and years. Walmart is probably the most cohesive book I’ve written, though I think the Salem Witch Trials novella I’m writing now is close. Oh, maybe not, who knows?
Glory. The first time I ever submitted any piece of creative writing for publication was in my second year of Michigan’s MFA program, in 2005; I submitted four poems to several different literary journals, the “best” ones, like Ploughshares, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Iowa Review. I didn’t read any of these journals or anything like that, God no; I just knew they were the best because everyone at Michigan said they were the most prestigious. My poems were rejected from all of them—form rejections, no feedback. This didn’t phase me in the slightest. I loved the poems I sent to those fancy lit journals. At Michigan, renowned poets and writers came to do workshops all the time. I remember a very small workshop with Alice Notley, her and maybe three students including me, where I workshopped a three-page poem called “Dinosaur Poem” about…well, it’s kind of hard to explain what it was about, but I thought it was the most beautiful poem I had ever written. It began in the time of the dinosaurs, imagining dinosaur feelings and social lives, and ended with the gift of a watch from one person to another. “Why did you write this? Where do see you it winding up? The New Yorker?” Alice Notley said, in a way I perceived as somewhat trolling. “Yes,” I answered solemnly. I had written it to justify the ways of God to man, like Milton in Paradise Lost. The New Yorker would have to be crazy to pass up “Dinosaur Poem,” although it did.
For ten years or so, from about 2006-2016, I submitted poems to hundreds of journals a year, and they were almost always rejected with no feedback. Now, I don’t submit as much. Since getting my Ph.D., I have my submissions of scholarship to worry about, which are a whole other thing. And lately, most of my publications of creative writing come from being solicited—which is when an editor writes to you and asks you to send them something. My poems or stories or essays have been published in most of the fancy journals I first submitted to when I was at Michigan. Not because I’m awesome; I know it’s just because I just kept writing and submitting. It’s fun to be published in those journals, but there are so many other journals and presses and ways of being published that I didn’t know about back then. Still, I can draw a strong through-line from The New Yorker’s rejection of “Dinosaur Poem” to now. Just last month, The New Yorker form-rejected several of my poems. I still think it was crazy of them to pass up “Dinosaur Poem,” and I wish they had published it, because I can’t find it anywhere. I’m not proud of my writing, but I’m not embarrassed by it—it’s just my writing. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to feel annoyed or upset by my writing being rejected. Even when a journal or editor solicits my writing, they often end up rejecting it. But every time I see a response from a literary journal or press in my inbox, I assume it’s an acceptance, although it almost never is. I wish I could bring this unflappable optimism and self-confidence to other areas of my life, but it’s entirely restricted to submissions of creative writing.
Next month, I’ll think I’ll tell you about submitting scholarship.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: My favorite literary journal is Conjunctions. It’s one of the journals I’ve submitted to most (they always reject my writing for the print version, but sometimes accept it for online). I especially love the essays it publishes, which are fragmented and rigorous at the same time—my favorite kind of essay.
Unrecommended: Nothing; happy holidays and thank you for reading my newsletter!