The Right Kind of Rejection

I consider it a privilege that, as of writing this, seventy-two Vocal writers have subscribed to me, presumably because they liked my work enough that they would want to be notified if I'd published something new.

Lately, I haven't. I'm reminded of that each morning at six o'clock, when I receive at least eight notifications that a familiar name has posted yet another poem, fairy tale, portion of a six-part series, or pontification on some intriguing topic.

During my last drought, I felt each notification personally, like a rubber band flung across a classroom, whacking me in the shoulder. Why am I not on here more? Why can't I publish more? So-and-so also has a career, a lover, a body that must be moved and fed. What's my excuse?

I started 2024 with a commitment to prioritize writing, a pledge that would award me First Place in the #200 challenge, a win for which I am forever indebted to Vocal. In that piece, I declared that I would not allow my profession as a high school English teacher to martyr me from writing.

It's now the end of May, and I haven't posted in a few months. I haven't woken any of my subscribers with an eponymous notification. I haven't added anything to my profile, which features works that are already irrelevant, lost to Vocal's stratosphere about which a reader can live in infinite entertainment.

In my most cowardly moments, I wonder how my silence is perceived. Have I been dismissed as a wanna-be, an infidel who can't keep her writing commitment, undeserving of the award that started 2024?

But then I remember that since I am not notifying anyone of my writing, it would be presumptuous to assume that anyone even notices I've been gone.

I count compulsive revising and editing as writing, and for the past eight weeks or so, I've been running back to a piece I started last November, a personal essay about my body and gypsy moths that received a prompt and vague rejection from the literary magazine for which I specifically crafted it.

Later, it received a personalized rejection from a different literary magazine, whose faculty adviser said that the piece "absolutely stood out to [her]" but whose editing team had too many questions about its ambiguous ending. She generously provided me with their questions (why doesn't the narrator recover in the end? Does she find the moths admirable, or are they her mirrors, exposing all of the things that she dislikes about herself?), which became my guides. I expanded the piece, flipped it on its head, huffed myself to its higher elevations to examine its fuller landscape, to figure out what it could be and do.

As of drafting this, no one's accepted my Moth Piece. It has, however, recently received another personalized rejection, which assured me that the essay was excellent, just not for their particular publication. A week ago, Lacy, my dear friend and one of five confidants with whom I trust my drafts, assured me that the piece was finished, that it had reached that climactic moment wherein touching it again would scratch the paint that keeps it honest.

I want this piece in a literary magazine because I want it to receive an editor's stamp of approval. I want the virtue of it having leapt the bounds of rejection at least a dozen times over so that its publication is proof that it outlasted the odds.

Reserving one's best work for submitting to literary magazines can be a gruelling test of endurance. Back in February, when the Moth Piece received its first rejection, I thought about tapping out and throwing it up here on Vocal, where perhaps, at least a handful of people would read it and like it, and where, perhaps, it could one day fit one of the broader monthly challenges.

But lately, I've come to adore being declined.

Every time I get a notification from Submittable, I expect that the message will be a polite, generic "No, thank you." I open each one, whisper every word, thank myself for donating the $20 submissions fee, a sunk cost that contributes to the web of literary diversity. I recount all that I've revised in the Moth Piece since hitting that submit button some months ago, how its structure, shape, even its center have shifted with the clarity I've found in revising. I am relieved that the older version of the story didn't make it, elated with the wisdom that comes with time.

I keep the rejections in a folder in my email like receipts of my own courage. They're confirmation that I at least dared to launch my writing into the galaxy, to admit that if a piece that is so personal to me were to get published, those who read it would be slicing me open at the breasts to peer and probe my organs.

And yet, I'm a willing victim.

I may be ashamed of my confessions; that I want them published in the first place must mean that I at least have the gall to display them.

In the May/June 2024 issue of Poets & Writers magazine, the novelist and therapist Rosalie Knecht declares that a loss is a "blank space. A nonevent...a win that happened to somebody else." A loss is "not interesting at all," she says, for "it has nothing to tell you," but acts as a "preamble to the wins."

Some would find this dismissive. I find it true, albeit incomplete: I don't want to forget the losses because they tell me that I would have welcomed the opportunity for a piece to be read in the first place.

For me, publishing on Vocal offers a similar hit of instant pleasure. In my planner, I keep a list of essay ideas or questions to explore in writing. Upon posting an essay, I cross it out and pen a small checkmark next to "The Writing Life" in my habit tracker, congratulating myself for having the hutzpah to put myself online.

This platform carries with it a facility that can't necessarily be matched elsewhere; even as I draft these words, the banner prompting me to "Submit for review" acts an affirmational prod, a signal that with the click of a button, the piece will be more than just a document in my One Drive that only I and the data-foragers will see.

Accumulating likes, comments, and Top Stories on Vocal feels good. But it also renders the inverse disparaging in a way that rejection from literary magazines does not.

Most of the time, you won't get a Top Story. Sometimes, you'll learn that only five people read your short story from the point of view of Mildred Montag. Sometimes, you'll get dozens of likes, but no Top Story.

Disappointments are always instructive: a writer can receive Vocal's rejection with the wisdom that maybe it's too long, lacks originality, appeals to no audience because it tries to appeal to too many. Maybe it's just boring.

But at the core of Vocal's brand of losing is a credit system that suspends me in a hallway of juvenile self-consciousness. They — meaning everyone (and of course, no one) — didn't like the piece, but now, anyone who comes across it will know it to be so. The piece is out there now, on the Internet where anyone can read it, and after its weak receival has worn off, if someone stumbles upon it some months later, they'll notice that it only earned four likes, one reaction, and one comment that reads with the personality of AI.

On Vocal, rejection feels public.

Of course, there's vanity in assuming that others will comb your Vocal profile for your stories of the past. There's as much vanity in assuming that anyone will look at any of the platforms on which you create your online persona, which reduces your experience to only those things that you presume will entertain others (and if it entertains no one, well, surely you'll know).

I suppose there's also vanity in thinking that anyone would want to read anything that you wrote in the first place.

I haven't been worried that I haven't been posting on here. In the interest of seeking a home for this Moth Piece, I have foregone the hit of satisfaction that comes with self-publishing on Vocal in exchange for amassing what is well over a dozen rejections from dozens more initial readers and professional editors.

But, because I started 2024 by marrying myself to writing and have chosen lately to pursue the traditional publishing path, I have been worried that the Vocal creators who know my name (and there aren't many) have declared me a colossal cliche of unkept promises.

I've in the past compared Vocal to Heaven, and I still believe that there is something ethereal about a space where writers can write without explanation, apology, context. I find Vocal especially conducive to writing about writing. An idea about process, revision, or writing-as-breathing sends me somersaulting back on here, to Vocal, where I can pamper my ego with the self-congratulating dopamine of promptly publishing a piece and gifting it a potential audience of like-minded people.

But I also relish the rejections that live in that folder in my email, the sometimes generic but sometimes personalized notes that I hoard like gold stickers on my self-assigned homework. At least they are private. They are mine; no one needs to know that the piece wasn't a win, unless I decide to tell them.

Perhaps, I'm not as brave as I believed myself to be.

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