My Year in Rejections

Years ago, I read Amy Poehler’s memoir and one of its sentences jumped off the page at me: “It doesn't matter how much you get; you are left wanting more. Success is filled with MSG.”

This has always been so true of me. I metabolize wins quickly – the high soon fades, the glow diminishes, then the yearning returns. It’s been true in every part of my life.

Failure, on the other hand, sticks with me. It stings me, dogs me, and disrupts my sleep. I have a mental rolodex of my life’s defeats – the casual criticisms, the callous remarks, the opportunities I didn’t get – that I flick through regularly. Mostly, they’re minor rather than monumental, but they don’t feel that way.

So it feels out of character, masochistic even, for me to court failure. Nevertheless, that’s what I spent this year doing.

This spring, at the urging of one of my writing instructors, I joined a Facebook group called Binders Full of Rejects. Inspired by a 2016 Lit Hub article extolling the virtues of aiming for 100 article rejections a year – the theory is that, simply by submitting widely enough to rack up 100 nos, you’re bound to get a few yesses too – many of its members openly pursue this goal.

There’s a beautiful, support-group-esque camaraderie among the ‘rejectarinos:’ women not only post their results – “Currently on 97 … so close,” “Still idling at 96,” and my personal favorite, “On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me … my 100th rejection in a pear tree!” – but also share copies of their tiered rejections from literary journals, form rejections from fellowships, and the curt ‘thanks for thinking of us but we aren’t interested’ rejections so typical of the querying process.

After a few weeks of lurking and idly liking others’ extremely humble-brags, I caught the rejection bug too. In May, I started tracking my stats:

Total submissions: 144

Total acceptances: 10 (eight published or soon-to-be-published, two I had to decline because they’d already been accepted elsewhere)

 Total rejections: 31 

So what’s the giant disparity between the 144 submissions I’ve made and the 41 responses I’ve gotten, you may be wondering? Those are the dozens and dozens of places that ghosted me - leaving submissions unanswered until I gave up on the essay or published it elsewhere.

 After a lifetime of trying to insulate myself from rejection – I cling so strongly to my strong suits that I despise recreational sports and loathe playing any game I’m unlikely to win, for example – all of these writing failures and ambiguous non-responses still smart. But it wasn’t the ‘never had a shot’ swings that hurt the most – it was the near-misses. A notable one: on October 1st, I got this rejection from The Atlantic on an essay I wrote about miscarrying during a California road trip:

 Justine,

I've just read the essay, which is really wonderful. It speaks to me personally -- as a mother, as someone who's had a miscarriage--albeit a much earlier one--as a Californian who knows and misses those places and roads. But even leaving aside those personal toeholds, it's simply a very effective piece of writing: poignant, emotive, acutely observed, also graceful not at all heavy-handed.

Unfortunately, however, the magazine is not looking for personal essays of this sort at the moment. I'm truly sorry that's the case, and I wish you the very best of luck finding a worthy home for this. I know that wherever it winds up, readers will really connect with it.

I laughed grateful tears, cried “damn why couldn’t it have been a yes?” ones, then posted it to the group. “Oh wow, that’s a fantastic rejections,” someone replied immediately. “I’m sure your essay will find a home.”

Ever the pessimist, I didn’t think it would. But on October 2nd, Slate accepted and published it. It was my biggest win this year, but not because Slate is arguably the most prestigious of the ten publications to say yes to me this year, or even because the resulting piece was the most personal story I’ve published. It was my biggest win because it gave me the confidence to keep going. Submitting into an often-silent void hasn’t gotten easy, but it has gotten easier. And, this year, that’s something.