For New Yorker writer, lesson of rejection-never accept no for an answer
by Jody Jenkins
(Editor’s note) The Collective will soon be launching a non-fiction story contest. We’ll be looking for true narratives that give readers insight into life. We’re hashing out the details now and will post the announcement soon.
As The Collective prepares to launch it’s first-ever story contest, I began thinking back on my long years of writing fiction and nonfiction and plying the publishing world, sending out story after story and book excerpts and non-fiction pieces to magazines and publishers and contests and agents, trying to land that elusive deal that would lead to a literary life.
Both my wife and I were writers and approached the trade in journeymen fashion in work ethic and by keeping a constant flow of submissions churning through the mail (in the days of paper manuscripts and stamps). Our axiom was ‘Keep it out there. Turn rejections around as quickly as possible and get them back out,” … to another literary magazine, another publisher, another agent. It was in the belief that if you’ve honed the craft and there was evidence of merit, getting published was, in part, an exercise in volume, persistence and perpetual motion.
We’ve all heard the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald pinning a hundred and twenty two rejection letters over his desk while writing This Side of Paradise. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was deemed “tedious and offensive,” Faulkner’s Sanctuary called “unpublishable,” and Gertrude Stein submitted poems for 22 years before ever getting in print. Rober M. Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was rejected 121 times before it went to press. William Golding. Jack Kerouac. J.K. Rowling. Kurt Vonnegut. The list goes on and on.
If a pre-printed “We regret that we are unable …,” evolves to “Despite its evident merit …” which then becomes something resembling “We remain interested in your work,” you know you’re on the right track.
With that volume of rejection comes a lot of soul searching, hours staring into the abyss of meaning and self-worth. Like most writers, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to decipher the tea leaves of rejection, to discern the mystery of publication at this magazine or that publisher by the subtle changes in the rejection slips over time. There is a temperature that comes with rejection that varies according to publication and with experience you begin to gauge the subtleties: If a pre-printed “We regret that we are unable …,” evolves to “Despite its evident merit …” which then becomes something resembling “We remain interested in your work,” you know you’re on the right track. A slip with a hand written note or a separate note of any sort is cause for genuine hope.
Writing is a profession of passion, a spirit quest and psychotherapy all in one where the work has to be its own reward because the returns are so often small and fleeting. As with so many other artists, few are able to ever live soley on their work. The Author’s Guild reports that the vast majority of writers in America earn less than the minimum wage and are working across genres and categories and even other jobs to piece things together. The advent of the digital age where we can YouTube anything has made print — fiction, non-fiction or otherwise —much less viable. And, on top of that, one of the constants of writing is rejection. It is so much a part of the mindset, that not so very long ago a friend sent a link to a blog devoted to literary rejection (see below). As I read through some of the funny stories people told of their experiences, an effort to commiserate with other writers about the slings and arrows of the literary life, it reminded me of my favorite story of rejection comeuppance that became a quiet rallying cry from early in my career that still echoes today.
Back in the late 80s, I went to Thanksgiving dinner at my then girlfriend’s house with her mother and some of her friends in Durham, North Carolina. A neighbor was there, a poised, graceful woman named Frances Patton, who I knew nothing about at the time but who had such a wonderful accent, I mistook it for upper crust New England when it was, in fact, Southern patrician. Born in Raleigh in 1906, she was the daughter of the editor of the Raleigh Times and her mother was the first woman ever to enroll at the University of North Carolina.
She was a lovely person, dignified and rascally all at once, a feisty soul with a twinkle in her eye. She was one of those people who had that easy joy that comes from living the thing that you love. She was in her 80s, a bit stoop shouldered and wearing her grey hair in a bun. But she was full of mental energy and clarity. Everybody called her Franny and it seemed perfectly suited to her. I later learned that my girlfriend’s mother had put us together on purpose, but at the time I was touched by the coincidence and before I knew anything of Franny’s story, I felt honored to be sitting beside her. As we forked the platters of goose and chicken going round and scooped up the cranberry in crystal and hoisted the gravy boats, she and I fell into small talk.
I had been scratching away on short stories, trying to dig myself out of a journalistic life by quitting it cold one day and hitting the road to work as an itinerant farm worker in the Upper Mid-West. I thought I had something to say and I thought, with time, I would teach myself how to say it. Whatever it was, I was certain that it required more than the ten or twelve column inches we crammed a news story into on a daily basis. Real stories needed to breathe and that meant long form. When I returned, I worked various jobs from roofing to editing while polishing my writing skills.
At one point in the midst of the general conversation Franny leaned over and said quietly “So they tell me you’re a writer.” I felt somewhat embarrassed at the suggestion but owned it. By then the word had gotten around that she was an author of some renown in her day. I told her it was slow going — “with the rejections and all.” She seemed sympathetic, nodding as if she completely understood the mindset. And as I didn’t want her feeling sorry for me, I turned the tables a bit and asked her if she had any advice as a way of allowing her to feel helpful.
“So you know what I did?” she told me, with the warm, michievous look of someone who had the pleasure of exacting a sweet literary revenge: “I sent them the very first story they had ever rejected.”
She perked up at that and said “I don’t have a clue what they want!” Everyone laughed and then by way of example, she proceeded to tell me how she got her first story published in the New Yorker.
Like so many others, she had always loved the New Yorker and thought being published there would be the epitome of literary success. She had written some stories in college that had received some attention, but then she married and had a family to raise and her writing career was long delayed by that thing called life. As her kids grew older and she began to have time, she once again turned her attention to words. And then, in 1945 at the age of 39, she published her very first story titled “A Piece of Bread.” It was the story of a young Southern girl’s encounter with a chain gang. It won the Kenyon Review Prize and was included in that year’s edition of the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories.
We barely ate as Franny spun her story, her daughter sitting beside her laughing and interjecting “Mother …” this and “Mother …” that. Franny said that when she began to write, she sent the New Yorker story after story. And story after story they rejected. But she never lost faith. Being a realist, she said she made the rounds elsewhere too. But her heart was set on being in the New Yorker.
And then finally one day news came in the mail that Harper’s had accepted one of the stories she had written. She said that almost immediately after the story came out, she received a letter from the New Yorker saying “We’d be glad to look at anything you may have to show us.”
“So you know what I did?” she told me with the warm, mischievous look of someone who had the pleasure of exacting a sweet literary revenge: “I sent them the very first story they had ever rejected. And not only did they publish it, they gave me a contract for two dozen more!”
Her daughter, smoking a cigarette by this time, burst out laughing and everyone laughed with her, enjoying the insight into a mysterious world of words from someone who had lived it intimately.
“So,” she said with the good humored smile of someone who had gotten lucky, knew it and knew how to enjoy it: “I don’t know what it is they want.” This from a woman whose stories appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Colliers, The Saturday Review of Literature and McCall’s. She published her first collection of stories in 1951 and in 1954 published the popular novel “Good Morning Miss Dove,” which 20th Century Fox made into a movie. Two more short story collections followed in 1955 and 1969.
The one thing she insisted on, however, was to never give up.
I never saw Franny again. Not long after, my girlfriend and I left for Europe. I spent many years struggling to break into fiction while working as an editor for Frank, a Paris literary magazine run by David Applefield, a graduate of Amherst College. I also worked as freelance journalist, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions and wars that broke out across Eastern Europe in its wake. I got married and we had three kids. Life happened. Franny died in 2000 at the age of 94. And though I hadn’t thought of her in years, when my friend sent along the blog devoted to literary rejection, that cozy evening sitting beside her at the Thanksgiving table came rushing back to mind, and with it the notion of what you might accomplish if you knew you couldn’t fail.
Jody Jenkins is a writer and filmmaker who lives in Northampton. He is the Director of Field Production for Amherst Media and editor of The Collective.
