Rejected: A New Perspective

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I’ve already fulfilled the dread of turning into a walking stereotype with my fine assortment of neutral colored beanies and overwhelmingly melancholic taste in music, so my greatest fear as a writer, of course, is rejection. 

I bet you think you know where this is going. Blah blah blah, believe in yourself. Blah blah blah, Oprah quote about success. Or maybe, bleedle-heedle-hoodle deal with it, boo-hoo-hoo it’s a part of being in the writing world, you sniveling baby. But I’m going to have to pull a Robert Frost here (oh, man, I literally cringed while typing that and look, wow, I’m still not backspacing, alright, here we go) and take the road less traveled by. I’m not going to offer you either of those perspectives, because you’ve already read them. Multiple times. And if I’m being honest with you, poet, and myself, rejection is neither as harsh nor as nurturing as it so often made out to be. 

A nice scenic image of the yellow woods for our descent into discussing bitter denunciation.

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I’m writing this post bleary-eyed after staying up until 1am sorting through all the submissions that my college’s art and literary magazine received for this year’s issue. As editor-in-chief, I take all the names off of the poems, stories and art and send them to their respective board of voters to be anonymously judged. Since I know who submitted what, I have no say in what goes into the magazine. It’s all in the hands of the members of the student body that volunteered to attend the selection meetings. 

Last year, I served as poetry editor for the same magazine. With this title, I received the packet of anonymous submissions and then I ran the selection meetings that went over all of the poems submitted (there were over 100). I voted and counted the votes of those around me, I discussed many of the individual poems’ strengths and weaknesses with a group of my peers and together, we decided what would be published, and what would end up as an “unfortunately, we have decided not to publish your poem, [insert title here]…” email. While I’d submitted my work to other literary magazines and gotten many of those emails myself, this was the first look I got into the world behind those rejection letters. 

And maybe I’ve veering towards the harsh perspective on rejection here for a second, but I have to tell you that that world on the flipside is a lot larger than your one or several submissions. That’s not entirely a bad thing though. A lot of writers start out by entering their work blind. There’s no official handbook on how to firstly, gather the courage to put your work out there and then how to achieve any success or publication from finally doing it. You see a writing contest there, a quirky online lit mag there, and think, hey, maybe I should enter that. Or, hey, my English teacher/professor is pressuring me to enter it and I want them to stop asking me about it, so I’ll send some work in. Then you get rejected. And then you think, well, awesome, what was the point in that besides being able to literally hear my ego deflate, like some sort of haunting, whistling fart noise on repeat, mocking any hopes I have for future endeavors? 

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This is where I tell you not to take it personally. I know, you’ve heard that one before. But when I say that, I don’t mean it to coddle you, I don’t mean it necessarily even to reassure you. I have no idea what kind of writer you are, where you are at in your life, what skills or experiences you have. And that’s the point. When I say don’t take it personally, I mean that Dr. Seuss would not get published in the same publication as Walt Whitman. e. e. cummings would likely not be published in the same publication as Sylvia Plath. The lady who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey would not be published in the same realm as Toni Morrison. But hey, look at that, they are all published writers. 

This is her. Her name is E.L. James. Gotta have some appreciation that she has the nerve to write about whatever floats her boat I guess…oh god I’m just going to stop right there with any metaphors. 

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By participating in and running a literary magazine, I’ve learned that yes, you can submit blind and have some success, and by all means, take risks, but keep in mind each publication in existence has a feel to it. A style. Something distinct but nameless. Kind of like poems themselves. If literary magazines published everything they received, it wouldn’t be a cohesive magazine. If every style and set of themes were considered a perfect fit, it would be chaos, and not the lovely sort. There is a method to the madness behind literary magazines, trust me, even if it seems like they a pleasant hodgepodge of chaos and experimental, new-age pieces. 

That being said, going back to one of my previous examples, e. e. cummings deconstructed poems, language itself, mincing words and throwing punctuation to the ground and up to the sky and back again. His work encompasses themes such as spring, life, God, love and sex. Sylvia Plath, as you probably know, was more structured and a lot darker thematically. So a magazine, depending on what they typically look for, may reject cummings and accept Plath. Or the other way around. 

I know that even if you possess a great deal of confidence, rejection can be devastating, especially if it is received in response to work you felt represented the best of your creativity. For example, as poetry editor of my college’s magazine last year, there was one email I dreaded writing, and it was to a girl, who while extremely talented, submitted almost all of her poems in strict form. Though we’ve published a few form poems before, the campus’s magazine tends to favor shorter, free verse, more experimental type of poems, and for this reason, we rejected her poems. But she was an excellent poet. Her poems were alive and humming with bright images and unique language. But her work just didn’t go with the magazine. Being on the other side of this situation and having to make difficult, cutthroat decisions really helped me to understand why I have been told so many times not to take rejection personally before. 

So I encouraged her to do what I’ll encourage you to do today, poet with a damaged ego. If you’re having issues being published or accepted, seek out places to submit with purpose. Read old issues of the publication you want to submit to and see if you belong among their madness. I can almost guarantee there is a place for you—it just may be lurking somewhere and you have to find it, it’s not going to come to you. 

ou ain’t gonna get nowhere just by stopping by those snowy woods, potential-future Frost. Although maybe you could refrain from writing about snow altogether if that’s your last name, but hey, you do you.

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Sometimes we can enjoy the randomness of life and stumble around, tripping and falling and laughing at our own jokes, but other times, we have to be intentional. I’d say to be both when submitting your work into the world. Not everyone is going to like you—but hell, maybe they love your work but you’re a current heading in the opposite direction from which they are flowing. 

If all else fails, consider rejection letters as free decor. As a creative writing major who gets asked about twice a week if I’m planning to be a teacher, I always tell people, no, I’m going to just sit around and submit poetry and then use all of my rejection letters as a way to wallpaper the cardboard box down by the river that I’ll someday inhabit. To which most people reply, “Don’t you mean a van down by the river?” 

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Read more of Alyssa's work here.