Rejecting Rejection

Today, I haven’t done much in the way of productive thinking. Productive thought denoting, in my mind, the stuff of creative process – imagining scenes, telling myself bits of story. What I have been doing is my job, which I do not think of as my work. I’ve been writing and revising training documents for a giant pharmaceuticals company, for which they pay me enough money to significantly contribute to my and my husband’s financial cares and entertainment whims. Earphones in and music in my head, I have been getting along pretty well for a day at work. The trick is not to think about any one thing for very long, especially the fact that it is 1:03PM and you can’t leave your desk until 4:30PM.

I got a rejection email from Poetry Magazine the other day. I hadn’t realized that, until I’d received the email, I’d been partially hopeful the powers that be at Poetry Mag would accept my poem and publish it among the other, much more prolific, poets within its pages. This was a foolhardy scrap to leave wandering around in my mind unchecked, because I was definitely more disappointed when I read their (very polite) rejection than I had expected.

Rejection letters/emails can’t mean anything to a writer or any kind of artist. I think, for a couple of days, I let the rejection from Poetry Magazine get me down about my work, and that can destroy you as an artist. Think about it. If you want to be a published writer you must send your writing in to be judged by whatever editors or authorities are in charge, and you will most definitely be rejected – at some point, if not most points. You can’t care. You have to be the end-all on your own work and you have to believe it’s worth something. If you don’t believe that, you have to stop creating because if your work isn’t worth something to you, it is never going to mean anything to anyone else. (Well, it will mean something to your mom.)

I was browsing the Writer’s Almanac for today, and read about the author Barbara Pym, who would have celebrated her 97th birthday today if she hadn’t have died in 1980. She started out looking to publish her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, but it was rejected by a couple publishers. After some time, in 1950, she managed to get it published, and five more novels after that. In 1963, however, she sent her publisher a novel she had just written, which her publisher rejected, claiming that her style of writing was outdated. Then, 16 years later when it seamed the only one besides her who believed in her work was the poet Phillip Larkin:

“In the January 21, 1977 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writers and scholars were asked to nominate the "most underrated writer of the century." Pym was the only living writer who got two nominations — one from Larkin and one from biographer and scholar Lord David Cecil. And suddenly, she was famous. In the next three years, she published two novels, she was the subject of a BBC program, and Quartet in Autumn (1977), which had been rejected the year before, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Her early novels came back into print, she was published in the United States, and her work was translated into many other languages. But she had cancer, and she died just three years later in 1980.” (Writer’s Almanac)

As I read this section, I smiled to myself and chuckled under my breath at the computer screen. Barbara Pym pretty much got famous after that Times Literary Supplement edition not because her work had changed or gotten better, but because some respected and no-doubt-respectable author-personages said her writing was good. Thankfully for her and for her readers, she never let rejection stop her from creating and believing in her work.

I for one have never read any of Barbara Pym’s books, but I may pick one up in the future. She’s on “the list” (which, by the way, is dauntingly long, especially given my slow reading pace).

This post will end, for no particular reason, with a silly picture of our greyhound, Nicksie, who has a precious little ribbon tied around her head. My little girl!