Read Your Rejection Letters
Many months ago, before October 2013, I submitted a piece to Creative Nonfiction Magazine. They were requesting submissions for their Babies Anthology co-edited by Alice Bradley. I, also at the time, had a personal essay about a solitary walk I took on the eve of my second son’s birth. It’s actually a chapter in my book. And at the suggestion of my writing mentor, I crafted it into a stand-alone piece. So the meeting between the magazine’s need for personal essays around babies and my completion of this essay happened simultaneously, and I submitted my work.
Many months ago, before October 2013, I submitted a piece to Creative Nonfiction Magazine. They were requesting submissions for their Babies Anthology co-edited by Alice Bradley. I, also at the time, had a personal essay about a solitary walk I took on the eve of my second son’s birth. It’s actually a chapter in my book. And at the suggestion of my writing mentor, I crafted it into a stand-alone piece. So the meeting between the magazine’s need for personal essays around babies and my completion of this essay happened simultaneously, and I submitted my work.
Now it’s February 2014, and I get news that out of 600 submissions, I’m a finalist! The email read like many rejection emails I get saying:
“Thank you for submitting your work for Creative Nonfiction’s upcoming Babies anthology, and for your patience during our lengthy review process. We received nearly 600 submissions and, as you might expect, narrowing down the pile has been a challenge for our tiny staff. We’ve had to make many difficult decisions, but have successfully thinned the submissions down to a relatively small number of finalists”
It’s pretty painful reading rejection letter after rejection letter, and so I almost gave up on this one. I could already tell where it was going. And yours didn’t make it. And then I read the next sentence:
“– and you’ll be happy to hear that your essay, “Alone, Whether I Like It Or Not”, is among those. Congratulations!”
Holly Sh–t! That changes things!
And then, another thought came to mind. I’ve done some major revisions to this piece since October 2013. Was this original piece good enough? Maybe even better? I read it (found two typos! yikes!), and then my eyes got a little watery at the end (again) because it’s moving. I read my current version and didn’t like it as much. Maybe because it’s the losing version; it’s not a finalist. I really hope that Creative Nonfiction publishes this piece in their anthology. It would be a great honor and I can, at last, but this baby to sleep. There’s too many lessons to be learned.