Have made some slight tweaks to the design of this page today, shifting from the WVU-theme colors and summer-day background of when I moved to Morgantown 18 months ago to more of a wintry mix. The days here are gray and soggy, teetering on the verge of snow but only veering into it on the twilight in which I snapped the picture above. The residents are huddled and bundled, except when throngs of the young spill out onto the weekend-night streets to form lines and impromptu parties. Then, of course, they reveal as much skin as possible to whatever elements may descend. Skinny legs redden and knock in the damp chill, but refuse to take cover. Visible breath pours out from chattering teeth, elated, giddy, anticipatory.
I have been in bars lately, studying the crowds, standing both apart and within. We celebrate in the longest nights that follow the shortest days to ward off the sense of dread and doom that accompanies this much darkness, that is well established. Even those of us who consider ourselves denizens of the night, whose habitat is after-hours, pushing towards dawn. There is much that has finally been finished, a new cohort newly triumphant in the wake of their first semester. Papers are dispatched, classes dispensed, grade sheets checked twice and banished to the mental north pole. I myself have been dragging my feet on the final paper, but still, as ever in academics, feel immune to the stress and hand-wringing. My only senior in the program says she’s too old to care, but I care now more than ever, or at least since I was ten. It’s still not enough to really worry.
If there’s been a negative impact of this program, the MFA at WVU, on my writing and creativity, it’s been felt here on this blog. The blog was always my place for immediacy, for intimacy, for the chaff and reverberation of reality. But suddenly this program has anointed all that which I once considered chaff to the place of primacy. Now navel-gazing, truth-telling, and introspection are my business, my trade, the primary aim of my creative efforts. And with journal publication as the goal, suddenly every wispy thought or reflection has potentially grown into An Essay. This would be less problematic if journals did not consider personal blogs to be Publication. But most of them do, relegating anything once considered at this URL to the permanent purgatory of the unpublishable. There are a handful of exceptions, which have helped give some of my Uber stories first displayed here a second life, but the limits of those exceptions have waved a giant yellow flag on most of my thoughts. Now when I have a flash of feeling or thought that would normally result in a post, I ruminate on it for days, mining it for essay material, afraid to waste it on the mere blog.
Has this chilling effect stifled my creativity overall? It feels like it must have. The push to elevate every thought into something profound and transcendent, worthy of the ever-escalating quality of journals from which I seek approval, creates a self-consciousness that is alien to this blog’s typical offerings. Divorcing self-reflection from self-consciousness is perhaps my specialty, at least relative to most other Americans in this era. And it’s probably a strength that has helped me succeed as an official Creative Nonfiction writer. A disbelief in privacy gets mistaken for bravery all the time. And see, I look at that insight just now and think “Gosh, that may be really good, that turn of phrase. Should I delete this post and save that line for an essay? Would a journal really Google that phrase and track down this post and reject an essay over it?”
I’ve enjoyed a massive amount of rejection lately, but it seems the only ticket to success. Just as the secret to being liked is indifference to others’ opinions, the road to acceptance is paved with embracing rejection continually. In the last 15 months, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive 18 acceptances, 14 of which have been published already with one more to come any day and three soon thereafter. My acceptance rate bobs between 6-7%, meaning I get about 15 rejections for every acceptance, so I’ve had over 270 rejections. And some of these acceptances are hardly from top-line places; one publisher already folded since and another has gone dark without an official announcement. Of course, some of them are at places that those in the business have heard of, and even some outside of it have heard of Pleiades. They’ll be publishing my political essay “The Summer of ’46” sometime in the next month or so.
My editor at Pleiades, Clinton Crockett Peters, recently wrote a great piece on rejection, in which he admitted that his rejection ratio is 19:1, making my 15:1 look triumphant. Of course, he is trying harder places on average. But the dude went to Iowa, has a book published by a university press, and is still batting 5%. I’ve been trying to perfect a joke with my peers in which I invoke the old adage that in baseball, you’re considered successful if you fail seven out of ten times. In writing, success looks like failing nineteen out of twenty times. Maybe more. And indeed, the willingness to fail so much and so hard, as Clint (Can I call him that? It’s how he signed his e-mails!) notes in the essay, is baked in to the succeeding. I don’t know if anyone would say that striking out is what teaches a batter how to hit a home-run. But it seems deeply true that getting rejections teaches writers how to get published.
Of course, the rejection rate being cranked up past eleven is also crazy-making. Because you know what else gets rejected a lot? Bad writing. With a ratio that intimidating, there are few ways to tell if your pieces are horrendous or just going through the regular and necessary process on the way to a printing. A couple of my most prestigious publications since I got to West Virginia have come after lesser places summarily and quickly said no. And sometimes one gets nibbles, the little personal rejections with either encouragement or actual notes of feedback that light up like LEDs toward the exit on a plane, showing a possible way to the goal. But nothing truly bad is going to invoke such a thing – it’s more an indication of what isn’t horrendous than what needs to be given up entirely.
Unlike Clint’s somewhat optimistic conclusion in the essay, though, I don’t see rejection as sustenance. I see acceptance as sustenance that helps me weather the continual storm of rejection, that helps me ignore it. They are the fruits of summer, put away and preserved for the long winter of indifference. I have always been good at this, putting up self-affirming bulwarks to stave off later demoralization. It’s arguably how I survived this situation, albeit unhealthily and through great peril. It’s how winning the North American Debate Championship in 2001 made me largely immune to later debate shortcomings, a phenomenon I couldn’t understand not helping the Rutgers TOTY team nearly two decades later. There’s a reason that people say, after winning things, that “no one can ever take this away.” It’s true. Every accomplishment is banked for all-time, a shield to hold up in the face of adversity, a steely umbrella to raise in the bluster of freezing rain.
And thus, as the gloom descends on this hard-drinking mountain town, as the droplets batter the pane like so many three-line e-mails, I realize I don’t want to neglect this blog. In many ways, it’s the tool that brought me here, the venue that made me realize nonfiction could be something more than the equivalent of angsty high-school poetry (cathartic and self-serving, but ultimately meaningless). It’s the place that made so many friends say this should be my calling, what I’m really trying to do with the written word. I need it, need this public treadmill on which to exercise. I don’t want it to just become a repository for publication notices and esoteric graphs on politics or unemployment. I want it to say something, meaningful and true. I want it to say something to you.
I will venture out into the gray-washed day, hoping for snow, accepting the rain. I will remember the right umbrella and the right jacket, or not, and suffer or enjoy the resulting consequences. In any event, I will feel the winter as it envelops me, revel in that long-established human trait of loving winter because one has proof against it (thank you Richard Adams). I will step in too deep a puddle and feel the water spill over, soaking my sock. And then the game will be this: where do I put my attention? Do I focus on my soggy foot, feeling the skin recoil and prune against the frigid water? Or do I dwell on the warmth in my head, the warmth in my heart, the persistence of my spirit against the inconveniences of the season? That is our struggle, both trivial and significant.
I wish you dry socks and the best of attentions.
