A Cross-Generational Lesson in the Joy of Rejection

Another rejection letter came today. I have been getting them daily. Via email, they are one or two sentences at most. “Thank you for your submission, but…” And “Good luck placing it elsewhere.”  I don’t think they mean that facetiously.

I have been collecting rejection letters on two books, an essay, and a short story for almost a year. Despite having published novels and stories and nonfiction in respected literary journals, I no longer have an agent. The current submissions are all my own.

Each rejection, even when I expect it—and I always expect it—is like the disappointed voice of my high school gym teacher, “Come on, Diana.” Each time I open my email and read, “thank you for your submission,” I feel a tight band squeeze my chest. I want to hunch my shoulders and duck my head as if I could deflect the blow.

In snail mail a week ago I received two loose-leaf notebooks. My sister excavated them from the mess that had been our father’s home office. He was a hoarder of a sort, a disorganized and distracted lawyer, and after he retired he kept old client files as well as newspaper articles, bills, letters, receipts, Rotary Club newsletters, and pages of unfinished poetry. He was not the only poet in the family.

The notebooks hold a collection of my grandfather’s poetry. Sidney Woolf Wagman fled Russia for New York City in 1911 at the age of seventeen. He was ethnically Jewish, from a large, poor family, and a proud young believer in worker’s rights who quickly got a low-paying job and became a member of the Wobblies. Soon, he was active in the Communist Party, card-carrying and well known enough that in the 1950’s, my father—out of law school paid for by the GI Bill—couldn’t get a government job because his parents were known Communists.

My father wrote romantic poetry about the women in his life, real or imagined. It’s clever, but not good. He sacrificed much for the glib turn of phrase. My grandfather, on the other hand, wrote political poetry, urging the reader to unionize, revolt, fight the capitalist overlords. It is strident and mostly rhyming: “First we fight/then unite” making use of the phrases and the names of the people of the day. “Hoover returned from Nazi Land/and dances to the Fuehrer’s wand.” The collection is written in English on notebook paper in his meticulous handwriting. English was his second language, but the punctuation and spelling are surprisingly correct and the rhymes occasionally sophisticated.

What is most fascinating to me in these notebooks is that interspersed with the poems are my grandfather’s rejection letters. He submitted multiple times to The Daily Worker and The New Masses. Always rejected. There is a letter asking him to join The Labor Poets of America. They said no to the poem he submitted, but offered him a poetry class. He was prolific and determined, but not successful. As far as I know, he never published a single line.

I showed the notebooks to my son—also a writer, but a successful working journalist—and pointed out the rejection letters and he joked, “Like grandfather, like granddaughter.” I laughed, but not really.

I have diagnosed myself with a genuine malady, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. For the sufferer, the smallest rejection can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. If a friend turns down my invitation for a drink or a text goes unanswered or even if a stranger gives me the finger in the car it can ruin my whole day. I mull and ruminate. Two polite lines saying “no thanks” can make me question why I was chosen last for volleyball, why David Thomas wouldn’t go out with me, why I didn’t get the assistant editor job at that magazine, why I live in Los Angeles, eventually my marriage and my whole life. Every time.

I know the stories of unexpected triumph and succeeding against all odds. It doesn’t matter that Harry Potter was rejected twelve times before it was published by Bloomsbury and became a best seller or that people are always telling me the story of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. They skip over the part about him dying by suicide and remind me how his mother worked tirelessly to sell his book and the Pulitzer he won—no help to him at that point. I don’t plan to kill myself and even so, my mom’s been dead a long time.

It’s been a tough year for many reasons. Being rejected as a writer seems paltry compared to the total rejection of Democracy. Surprisingly, the arrival of my grandfather’s poems—and his rejection letters—post-election have been an inspiration. First of all, times weren’t great when he came to this country. He lived in a New York City tenement and struggled to work and be accepted. But he wrote to change the world and he kept at it, right up until his early death. Second, he saved those rejection letters and saving them told me he knew he had tried and he was proud of his attempts.

A submission is an act of hope. It’s positive, it could even be thought of as joyful. Here is my work, or my job application, or my invitation, or even my vote. I am putting myself on the line because I think I’m worth it. I believe in myself. Before the no, there is an almost magical sense of yes.

My grandfather obviously knew that nothing would happen with his poetry if he kept it in that proverbial bottom drawer. He knew his only hope of making a difference with his art was to send it out. Thanks to his notebooks, I have a new resolve. This morning I sent my work to two new places (including this essay to this place) and I felt a lift, an excitement at the possibility that this time it will be accepted. I write to be read. Someone is reading my work, even if they’re answering with a rejection letter.