(Nelson Algren seated grandly)
My old friend Mark West likes to tell the story of me bursting into his office one day when we were both young Assistant Professors at UNC-Charlotte. Waving a sheet of paper in front of his face, I shouted, “Look what I got from The New Yorker!” I handed the sheet to Mark and he read it, thinking naturally that it was an acceptance. Soon it dawned on him that it was not.
“Robin,” he said, as gently as he could. “You do realize don’t you, that they’re rejecting your story?”
“I know, I know,” I said impatiently. “But it was such a good rejection.”
Mark thought I’d lost my senses. Perhaps I had. I don’t expect non writers to understand the feeling of a good rejection, but for many writers, a good rejection is a form of encouragement in a profession that doesn’t give encouragement lightly. I don’t recall what the rejection said exactly, but it was undoubtedly a personal letter, not a form rejection, and I was being encouraged to send another story at a later date. That’s no small matter when it comes to The New Yorker, which receives many thousands of submissions a year. If they are asking you to submit again, they mean it. There’s no sense in wasting your time or theirs. To date, I have never published in The New Yorker, though I don’t send them stories regularly anymore as I don’t regularly write stories anymore. The last story I sent them, some months ago, I had to withdraw because it was accepted by the great literary magazine, Conjunctions, and was also a finalist for a prize from Narrative.com. When I withdrew the story from The New Yorker, the editor was kind and gracious, apologizing for taking so long with it (due understandably to their backlog) and hoping that I’d try again.
In fact, I will try again, and I think that this personalized note from the editor with whom I sometimes correspond, affected me much like that note that Mark once found so amusing. If we had offices near one another still, I likely would have burst in to tell him again of my good news.
Lately, I’ve been going through it again — some great rejections on my new novel. I mean, they’re really good. The most excellent rejections (are you laughing, Mark?) full of praise for my writing, for the story, for the moving depictions of the characters. They read almost like acceptances but they’re not. I’ve been around long enough to know that there are forces outside of my control (and often outside of the editors’ control) that affect their decisions. But I fully believe that the novel can reach a wide audience, and that it just needs to find the right home. A bit like a stray animal at the shelter. They often turn out to be the best, no?
It’s an equal measure of hope, stubbornness and delusions of grandeur that sustain me as a writer. Perhaps delusion tops the list. Without helpful delusion, I might have given up long ago. Maybe.
In the early 1980s, I submitted a short story to the first iteration of a contest that offered a good deal of money at the time ($5000): The Nelson Algren Award, which was administered by Chicago Magazine and later, The Chicago Tribune. I was in my early twenties, fresh out of grad school and with no job prospects in the immediate future. I didn’t win, but I received a nice rejection. The editor who wrote to me said I was one of 17 finalists for the award, and that they had received well over 2000 submissions. The winner was Louise Erdrich, whose story helped catapult her to fame, and was an excerpt from her first novel, The Beet Queen. I’ve always loved her work and I thought that the judges had had made a good choice.
On the basis of this good rejection, and one other from Playboy Magazine (then headquartered in Chicago), I decided to move to Chicago. Delusional, I know. I had lunch with the editor who had kindly rejected me at Playboy and the editor who had kindly rejected me at Chicago Magazine. Soon after, I was offered a position as a kind of mail clerk within editorial at Playboy (which I took and which helped sustain me for the next two years; the best part about it was that my boss allowed me to write my stories on the job) and I was soon writing reviews and stories for Chicago Magazine, including a cover story on the Illinois State Fair. David Foster Wallace later wrote a better essay than mine on the same fair, which hurts more than any rejection I’ve ever received.
The editor at Chicago Magazine invited me to the awards ceremony that Fall for the Nelson Algren Award. At the reception, I met one of the legendary judges, Studs Terkel, who told me that Kay Boyle, another judge, had loved my story. Kay Boyle had read my story! Studs Terkel remembered me! Again, this was something sustaining. I can run for miles on a little praise.
Thirteen years later, long after I had moved from Chicago, I submitted another short story to The Nelson Algren Award (by this time, it had moved to the Tribune). I had submitted several times, not every year, but perhaps every other year. This time, I won.
The Tribune flew me to Chicago, and at the banquet, I was congratulated by two of the judges, Richard Russo and Rosellen Brown. The third judge, George Plimpton, couldn’t attend. Years later, I met him while teaching at the Southampton Writers’ Conference, and I thanked him for choosing my story. He looked at me blankly. Clearly, he had no memory whatsoever of me or my story. “Well, I hope it worked out for you,” he said. The poet Billy Collins was on the faculty as well and I told him of my disappointing encounter with Plimpton, which he found hilarious. We both agreed that Plimpton had probably not even read the story. Billy’s laughter made me think of it as funny, too. For the rest of the conference, he gently taunted me, “I hope it worked out for you.”
But in the days before that, when I was still under the delusion that George Plimpton had read and liked my story, I was floating for at least a year or two. On the day a reporter from the Tribune called to get my reaction, I was so shocked and delighted that I couldn’t think of anything to tell him other than that I was “shocked and delighted.”
“Really?” he asked, clearly shocked and not delighted by my cliched response.
He followed up by asking if this was my first time submitting to the award. I told him the story above and how I had probably submitted to the award no fewer than eight times in the intervening years.
“And you didn’t give up writing?” he asked. What kind of question was that?
It was my turn to be shocked and not delighted. The idea was absurd to me that I would give up writing because I hadn’t won a contest that thousands of other people had entered. Anyone who would give up under such circumstances is perhaps the truly delusional one. After all, I had received a good rejection that first time, and so many other good things had sprung from that rejection, not the least of which was the sense, no matter how unhinged, that my time would someday come.