To create is to be rejected. That’s the way it is and that is how it always will be. It is the scourge of creatives; it is the bane of the writer’s life, specifically, who receives rejections almost on a daily basis. It is also the writer’s greatest teacher.
Like every good writer, I keep tabs on my submissions. I started by hand and when things got out of hand, I shifted the data into an excel spreadsheet which, though lifeless, does help me immensely. I didn’t start this online tab until, let’s see, February 5, 2023 when I submitted to a local journal, Surge: The Lowcountry Climate Magazine. My non-fiction piece, Wadmalaw Longing Song was accepted for publication, and that initial surge (no pun intended) of electricity that the acceptance gave me made me think, even though I had been out of my MFA for two years and had only submitted to a smattering of magazines, that maybe I really could write and maybe I should get my butt down to business to achieve the dream I had always had since I’d first learned to put letters to paper.
And, since then, I have documented 146 submissions, 23 of which are still in limbo, sporting that haunting “in-progress” button on Submittable. This also means that, besides my three – three – acceptances, 120 of those are rejections. Compared to most, that’s nothing. And the only reason that number isn’t higher is that I go through phases where I submit nothing at all, needing a break from the bureaucracy of it and, well, the fees.
And so, if we remove those 23 in-progress submissions (which all, statistically, will be rejections), I have a current acceptance rate of about 2.5%.
Thus, I am no stranger to rejection. These days, I hardly register those “We’re sorry to inform you…” emails. They are filed into a specific folder on my email account, are documented on my spreadsheet, and are duly forgotten. But, sometimes, I get something really good.
There are “good rejections,” a term that my friends and I joke about. What other profession can have “good” and “bad” rejections? For example, I have received rejections that are personalized, sincerely hoping that I’ll submit other work because xyz story or poem was not quite there, but my work was, nonetheless, high on their radar. There are also those that inform you that you made it to the final rounds of a competition or that they are simply intrigued by your writing style.
And then there are some that actually make me laugh out loud. Rejections that make an impact.
I submitted a poem as a bit of a Hail Mary to an academic journal that, every now and then, publishes creative work. I will not name that journal because it is a respectable one that publishes great work, specifically in the field of folklore (about which I am very passionate).
And so I submitted a poem of mine about selkies, a specific folkloric creature with which I am a bit obsessed. Both of my current novels have, you could say, elements of the selkie, and this poem was written from the perspective of the traditional selkie woman. Quite in the vein of their other creative works, I assure you.
What I received back was a rejection, of course, but also a rubric. I had forgotten that academic journals sent out rubrics…it’s been a few years since my undergraduate days when I was forced to submit my capstone paper to a journal (yikes). So I was tickled to have one sent to me. And even more tickled to have it say this:
“[The poem] might evoke emotional tension but the questions, the half-dialogue and thinly veiled pretence irritated me.”
Moving down the rubric, I then read:
“I found [the narrator’s] silly denial (the ‘chokehold’ bit in particular) quite unpleasant rather than someone I could sympathise with.”
If this isn’t the greatest rejection one could receive, I don’t know what is.
To have my piece, a poem entitled “Selkie Song,” labeled not only as “irritating” but “quite unpleasant” is perhaps the greatest compliment. It is a compliment because that is exactly what I was meaning to achieve in the poem. It is not a nice poem, it is not a comfortable one. It is a poem about domestic abuse in regards to the selkie legend and it is about the horrific ways in which society smiles upon women loving their abusers and – well, if you read it for yourself, you can clearly see what it is about. If I’ve learned one thing from my many workshop classes, it’s that you should never explain the “why” of what you wrote. You won’t be able to hover over your reader’s shoulder as they read your work, so let the writing do the talking.
Perhaps my poem really is bad, and maybe it makes no sense, and maybe it falls flat in what it is trying to achieve. But as to that last bit, I can’t help but think that’s not the case. It angered someone, I mean really got them riled under their skin. I don’t think my writing has ever riled anyone, and so to have someone quite literally be irritated with my work was joy.
It was also the moment I realized that writing, though a solitary act, was not a solitary art. Patti Smith, one of my many muses and inspirations, said this over and again in her writing.
“Writing is not some quiet, closet act.”
But at the same time, and with the same fervor, she writes, in M Train,
“I wrote to give myself something to read.”
Writing is this insane, masochistic ledge between writing exactly what it is that you want to read and writing for others to read. It is writing because you – and others – can’t find this exact work anywhere on bookstore shelves because only you could write it (and you haven’t, because you keep putting it off by finding better things to do). And at the same time, writers – all artists, I think – have an innate need to share their work, as every story, every poem, every word is a dialogue with the world at large. And so, it is not some “quiet, closet act.” It will always involve others and involving others involves opinion and opinion involves friction.
But you have to write anyway, because you were born to do it. If I did not write, I would be a husk of a human. I would not know where to put my thoughts or my love. I would wander aimlessly through a reality that I could not make sense of because I did not have the very thing with which to make it make sense. Does that make sense?
Anyway, that’s my rumination on rejection: enjoy it. Every rejection makes you stronger. Not numb. Just less pervious (but not impervious). Rejection, too, can show you exactly what you’re doing wrong. It, too, shows you what you’re doing right.
Either way, you must do it in the first place.
So, here it is.
Selkie Song
Miss what, home? You think I’m blind to enjoy this life, that resistance is futile? That I have resistance at all? The loving is good, I mean real good, and what would I want with a wad of skin, anyhow, when I have the ripple of my husband’s arms and a view of paradise and soon the stirring within me?
What would I want with my tritoned father and the shoals of my mother and the ability to flail in the water of a midnight moon? Because he loves me and it is good to be praised and every woman wants what I have. I know the feminists lie when they say they don’t want a chokehold. I know my husband means well when he takes that love too far.
When he apologizes, he means God, and when asked if I miss it, I ask what, algae for a pillow? Deep darkness and a cold climate? What do you know of the sea except atop it? What do you know except absolute extraction?
Oh, and now you’re on about my history. What of it? When the children ask, I’ll tell them to make their own. And when I see my sisters on the rock? No, I won’t hear them, not through the glass, not when I’m eating clams from china tureens.
Why are you asking all this? Don’t you see they envy me? Don’t you see their covetousness? Don’t you know they said not to do it? And why not: mine’s different. Came up on me under a sky of stars and was all salt and muscle, and –
The tears of loathing in my sister’s eyes! They flail and they whine and – in mine, you say?
