Rejection Confessions

Wind blasts create a thousand dancing veils composed of snowflakes swirling across the landscape. Its hurling and howling makes every moment more dramatic, banging the cedars against the house, whipping leafless trees, their branches flailing as though spindly arms begging to be rescued from its assaults. The wind's soulful voice moans like a Gregorian chant,  and corresponds with my despondency. However this despondency is the door through which I pass to take shelter in the room of Reflection. 

 

Rejection feels like that wind too, sharp and merciless, reminding me of my insignificance in relation to the planet and the billions of people living on this earth. Rejection, like the wind, can be hazardous, undermining determination, it's cold fingers tightening around my throat, threatening to freeze the flow of my words, to stiffen my hand with cramps, to muffle my voice with snowbanks. I may be familiar with the paralyzing effects of rejection yet I am not used to it, eventhough it has followed me all my life. No rejection is worse than that of being rejected by  family. After that, all other rejections seem exponentially less injurious and lacerating. Still, they feel uncomfortable, and they make me question if my reasons for writing are good ones, and reassess my ability and talent. Like the wind, uncertainty and doubts whirl around me, making me lose my footing, obscuring the path to my destination.

 

Rejections come in various guises, or are wrapped in a different arrangements of words or gestures or negligences. The most recent from a literary magazine, didn’t actually send out a rejection letter, and instead emailed a list of those that were accepted for that issue. Among those selected I noticed that none appeared to be over 35, for one. Their selection did not give evidence of the full cultural spectrum that makes up Canada and I wonder if my life is being written out of my country’s literary and social history  because of my cultural heritage, my age, my gender, my social status. Am I considered politically and socially irrelevant and therefore deserve to be overlooked and excluded? In his book, On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche says that "The standard method of destroying writers is casual indifference." Days like today, I find myself thinking, Oh to be attractive, photogenic, youthful, and have the right kind of name! On the heels of that rejection, came another days later. 

I visualize what rejection might look like; give it a shape, colour, texture, odour, sound. Its sounds like fingernails on a blackboard or the scrunching up of a piece of paper in preparation for the wastebasket; its colour and odour that of rotting compost filled with maggots; what it feels like - thousands of pins, possibly spikes, being driven into my flesh. Rejection has trailed me all my life, like a stalker set on vanquishing me. 

What is the lesson it's trying to teach me? 

 

Like so many other situations in life, I have learned that I must stand up to it and stare it in the face; to not be cowed by it; to challenge it and to not be silent about it; to be ready to defend myself if need be; to tell it, ‘you don’t scare me, you don’t intimidate me, and you won’t stop me.’ 

 

Rejection isn’t failure because the main difference is that it is evidence of one's effort to 'succeed'. Neither is failure defeat. Rejection doesn’t mean I am loser or that my writing isn’t worthy of being read. Rejection doesn’t mean readers don't want to read what I’ve written. Rejection doesn’t necessarily occur because of objective choices,  but is a by-product of a process of elimination, using various kinds of criteria, but not necessarily including  whether the writing is any good.

Rejection keeps me humble, reminding me that the world has not been waiting for me with baited breath, eventhough I rush enthusiastically to the blank page, curious and excited to see what it will reveal to me. That page is eager to soak up my words at least.  I practice using this humility as my ally, nurturing my creativity and my ideas. For many, humility doesn’t suit then; feels too belittling and damns them up. Rejection/humility hones me, whittles me to a fine point of focus from which the unique qualities of my writing might emerge. Why? Because to go on after rejection, I am not writing necessarily for anyone else’s approval, but I am writing what I need and have to write about. Rejection has kept me ever vigilant and mindful of my writing process, weighing and measuring my words carefully, much as one would do to maintain a healthy diet and keep one's body fit. Though rejection may keep me humble, I will not permit it to diminish me nor be an obstacle on my path.

 

I have developed various strategies to help take the sting out of rejection. One is by taking the notification and changing the wording and transforming it to a letter of acceptance and congratulations. Visualization is what they call this tactic. Athletes and musicians are just some of the people who use it to aid their success. Taking a moment to remember, cherish and feel gratitude for those submissions that have been successful or accepted or looking at my list of writing achievements also keeps me writing. But one of the most important strategies in my first aid kit is my writing group. We have kept each other going because of our admiration for each other as people and as writers. 

 

To date, I have had over thirty rejections in the course of about eighteen months. Half of them were 'invisible rejections' because the publisher or agent never acknowledged my submission (unless you think automated emails are acknowledgement) so that makes me thankful for those who took the time to respond in one way or another. Thirty is a small number compared to those of other writers who have shared their list.  Marche tells us that he kept track of all his rejections received in his twenties, until they reached the two thousand mark. In one week alone, he received seven.  I've got some catching up to do! Because of rejection, Gertrude Stein self-published her first book, Three Lives, British publishers objected to her use of the English language – her use of repetition - of words, phrases, sentences; of the social class and sexual desires (and repression) of the women she wrote about. According to Marche, "Jack London kept his letters of rejection impaled on a spindle, and eventually the pile rose to four feet, around six hundred rejections. Marcel Proust and Beatrix Potter had to self-publish. It took Agatha Christie five years to find her way into print." He goes on to say that ...."The Diary of Anne Frank was rejected fifteen times, A Wrinkle in Time, twenty six, Gone With the Wind thirty-eight." Whew! Impressive!

So there is a shift in the way I view my rejection list, and it is a list I am now proud of because I see it is a measure of my trying, of my efforts to put my writing out there. It takes courage and strength to do that again and again without it damaging your creativity and disturbing your equanimity. I have come to understand that I am not any worse, or better than many writers; that I am equally deserving of publication; that publishers select authors who fit a certain trending profile, and/or who fulfill their politically- and/or socially-correct interests and agenda. I have come not to take it personally.

Rejection at first blast, deconstructs me, much in the same way that winter suppresses life, stripping it of leaves and burying evidence of plants and flowers, driving animals into hibernation.  In the act of writing (and of creativity), a reconsidering, a remembering and recalling of life lessons arises. Through this process, rejection reconstructs me with resoluteness. And like the natural occurrence of the seasons, spring follows winter, and within me too, a rebirth occurs, followed by a resurrection.  

Melissa Williams  #stephenmarche Stephen Marche #rejection #reflection #renaissaince #rebirth #exclusion #gertrudestein #jacklondon #gonewiththewind #thediaryofannefrank #resoluteness #simasharifa #susanangel #karindoucette

The Clearing

When I read my journals from thirty or more years ago, I've mentioned many times that I wanted so much to be a writer. That longing resided in my fingers while they twitched, words rushing through them like the blood in their veins, words that otherwise, would have remained trapped and invisible.  Words that my mouth and voice could not utter. My hands grasped at the pen and the notebook in those infrequent pauses when I could find time alone to write. I looked forward to those solitary moments when I could retreat into the quiet, my thoughts and feelings rising above the din, as I watched the pen scrambling across the page as though some other being had taken possession of my pen, revealing itself to me. Those blank pages were sometimes the only friendly place I could find, a safe zone, where I knew I would not be maligned or  misunderstood. I cannot say how I would have survived without writing given the challenges that were set the day I was born, and I am not being over-dramatic when I say that. So often during my young adulthood, like many people, I found myself doing jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do, nor were particularly edifying. Post secondary education was not an option for awhile, because all I could manage was just scraping together enough money for food and rent, which sometimes seemed impossible. Still, I was idealistic. I believed that one could make one's dreams come true, if one worked hard enough, if one persisted and at times, insisted. But also if one had the right intentions. Consequently I went on to art college (putting myself in great debt), and had decided that I'd become a tapestry weaver. Carole King's song and album, Tapestry, like the Pied Piper, led me to that path. Prior to graduation from the program, I was told that I could not make a living from it. Huh? why hadn't they told me that before? Yet, I did everything in my power to make that happen, and, when, as they had predicted, I couldn't make a consistent living with tapestry weaving, I went to the University of Guelph to get my B.A. , and then to the University of Toronto to obtain my teacher's certificate, put myself in even greater debt which took me a few decades to recover from. Immediately after graduating, I started teaching high school: Art, English, French and Photography. I lasted five years. The changes happening in the education system among other factors, including my introverted nature, created too much stress for me.  I was not the only one crushed by the pressures and demands. Surveys done by teacher unions at the time said that 50% of graduates from teacher's college would only last five years. Luckily for me, I found a well-paid part-time job teaching weaving to adults that permitted me to continue my practice as an artist and artisan, creating handwoven fashion accessories to sell at various shows in Toronto, such as the One of a Kind, Cabbagetown and the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, but also to continue making tapestries and textile art which I exhibited around the world. Some of these tapestries were featured in books, such as the one published by Phaidon Press, Tapestry, by Barty Phillips and Micala Sidore's The Art is the Cloth which you can purchase here. 

The only place I wrote daily for decades was in my journal, and I have columns of journals to prove it, never thinking that what I wrote was worthy of being read. As my confidence and self esteem grew, slowly, tentatively, the courage to write for an audience emerged. I started with a few blogs, mostly about weaving and my art/craft events, then, for about ten years, I wrote about other weavers for the Ontario Handweavers and Spinners, based on interviews and visits to each of their studios, when possible. When I was no longer teaching, in 2016,  I began taking Creative Writing courses at the University of Toronto, including with Kim Echlin, Ibi Kaslik, Danila Botha, and David Layton.  In 2020, I completed the Humber School for Writers program with Camilla Gibb as my mentor, over which time, I wrote my first (and still unpublished) novel. In May 2022 I obtained my Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing and Critical Thinking from the University of Gloucestershire, in the UK during which time I worked on my second novel.  

And so began the long, obstacle strewn writing journey, the slow revealing of things I'd been too afraid to share, and too afraid to say, too busy trying to survive to find out, too ashamed to acknowledge and too much in denial to accept. Along the way, many people made me feel so small,  less than them, and I'm sure there will be those who will continue to do so. And yet I thank them,  because in the end, their hardness was the stone upon which I sharpened the blade of my words, not to maim them, but as an implement to forge a path towards a clearing, and in that clearing, the open sky of my truth , and the wide open fields of my self.