I got my first literary rejection the other day.
Tl;dr: On the 3rd of July I came up with a poem I called “Donald Trump Sings America,” I submitted it almost on a whim to an online humor magazine, it was I think rightly rejected, the entire thing took place in the span of one afternoon, and I have some emotions to sort out about it (that’s the tl;dr part).
Here is the poem:
Donald Trump Sings America
Oh beautiful, forsake it, I’m
Bored. Anger’s how we gain!
For fakers, Haters, refugees:
Go home, you’re super Lame!
America! AMERICA!
God’s dead, your Face is me
So crown me Good
White Brotherhood
From ME to shining ME
I have mixed emotions about the poem. Unlike the stuff I’ve been putting on this blog, which I’m pretty satisfied with, I was (and am) slightly bothered by it. “Anger’s how we gain!” sounds like nothing anyone would ever say, also I’m not sure that Trump modifies with “super,” that’s more my generation’s word, and I doubt “forsake” is in his vocabulary (what is being forsaken, exactly?). “God’s dead” is maybe too dark and overloaded. The third line doesn’t come close to evoking the sounds of “purple mountains,” which was kind of the whole point.
But maybe that wasn’t the whole point. And “forsake it” and “God’s dead” could work, in their own ways, if you squinted. Maybe the piece was successful despite these problems. I wasn’t sure, until it was rejected. Overall, the concept had a certain charm to it, and the execution had its moments, I thought. Maybe it would resonate with people. I really had no idea. I guess I still don’t, which is probably a feeling I’ll have to get used to.
The poem’s inception was delightfully serendipitous, and I lived in that mood until I hit “send” and my piece was whisked away on the same creative breeze that had brought it to me. I’d been sitting in my living room, thinking about the 4th of July. I had the misinformed notion that it was the 100-year anniversary of “America the Beautiful,” because I’d seen a headline in an alert on my phone that I must have misread. As I sang the song in my mind I thought about how “for spacious” could sound like “forsaken,” and then the idea came to me. At first the poem contained more direct rhymes with each word in the original song, completely unpublishable stuff like “Unglove my putrid pain.” Then I looked at a rhyming dictionary (sue me), and I spent some time, maybe a few hours, maybe less, editing and trying to get the concept across better, though I couldn’t come up with anything relevant that rhymed with “purple mountains.”
With “White Brotherhood,” I had just left the original line until I suddenly looked at it a different way. When I came up with that, I was like, ooh, this is good.
So then I thought, maybe this is funny and I should put it…somewhere, as my comment about 4th of July. But it didn’t convey what I actually felt about the holiday, and anyway I didn’t really want to upset people. Such a Facebook post would be uncharacteristic and need explanation; it might have been good for Twitter, but I don’t tweet. And it didn’t feel right for my blog, either.
Then I remembered this humor site I occasionally read (present tense!), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which has an irreverent and politically liberal sense of humor and publishes a lot of shorter pieces. Sort of like New Yorker cartoons, some make me laugh out loud; some I find clever but not very provocative; some make me feel unhip and uneducated and annoyed about this, the way many Americans must feel about everything in The New Yorker; and some I don’t think are that funny.
Still, I would love to be published there, and at times think to myself, maybe I should try to write a humor piece. Then I wait for a funny thought to occur, and then I start writing about something else. Now, I decided I was going about it the right way — I’d had a funny thought, and then I’d remembered how to publish it. But I had to do so quickly, since this was about the 4th of July and the song anniversary. I remembered that the McSweeney submissions page had said something about Timely submissions.
The McSweeney submissions page is intimidating, in a literary and clever way that insists it isn’t trying to be intimidating, but rather to be funny, friendly, and precise. The tone is that the editors are frustrated with the massive volume of incorrect submissions they receive, but they are simultaneously above being frustrated, and poking ironic fun at the position they find themselves in of frustrated editorial staff. One rule reads, “If you submit a piece of writing intended for the magazine to the web-submissions address, you will confuse us, and if you confuse us, we will accidentally delete your work without reading it, and then we will laugh and never give it another moment’s thought, and we will sleep the carefree sleep of young children.” The subtext is that if you don’t find this funny and charming, you probably shouldn’t be submitting, because you’re the type of person who makes the submission process more difficult for everyone and, on top of it, takes everything personally.
I tried to make sure I read all the rules. First, I saw the part about Timely submissions concerning the current news, which I’d already basically read in the past and decided my poem fit into, so I didn’t quite digest the the words “news of the past 24- to 48-hours,” which might have given me some pause, since my poem was about the future.
I continued on:
SOME REASONS WE MIGHT SEND BACK OR DISLIKE YOUR SUBMISSION The following features do not necessarily disqualify any submission guilty of one or more of them, but they do not help one’s cause: Your submission was of the poetry type. Your submission was too long. Your submission included the words “these days” or “nowadays.” Your submission did not take place in a jungle. ...
(The jungle line is an example of something I don’t get.) Ok, my “song” was sort of a poem, this was maybe a problem, but I felt like I’d read poetry on their site before. (Later, as I was reading more of the site’s archives and realizing soberly how witty and well-developed the content was, I indeed found a series of limericks about philosophers, and an iambic pentameter scene called “Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and Hall and Oates.”) Further on in the rules, I read again “POETRY: We’re not considering poetry at this time.” But was my piece really poetry? It was more of a concept. It could have just as easily been written as a paragraph. Also, why did the rules contradict themselves — in one, poetry did “not necessarily disqualify,” but in the other, poetry was not wanted? There was clearly a gray area. I started drafting my email.
I appended my poem(?) with a note: “Sorry, I realize this is kind of poetry, but it’s short so hopefully not too much a waste of your time to read.” Then, I had at first written “Timely because of the 100th anniversary,” but I paused mid-sentence to verify that claim, and realized that the song was written in 1910 and there wasn’t really any Google News about it whatsoever. Shaken, I wrote, “Timely because of the 4th,” somewhat pathetically. I still thought it was Timely; I couldn’t really imagine it playing as well if it wasn’t published tomorrow. “Thanks so much for considering,” I added, which of course I meant. It’s really amazing that you can submit something and a real person reads it.
Another reason they might send back or dislike (is there a difference?) your submission: “Your submission was about being rejected by a literary magazine or website, such as the one’s [sic] whose guidelines you are currently reading.” Another section reads that if you don’t hear back from them, you should “Rail to your friends about the callous insensitivity of free, Web-based content outlets to the needs and feelings of writers. Vow the most thorough and satisfying of revenges.”
The submissions guidelines even have a way of making me feel super Lame about writing this blog post. [sic] burn though, right?
I didn’t really believe my poem would be published. I had mixed feelings about it, and it had been the work of a few hours. Yet, the reason you submit something is because you believe it could, maybe, possibly, deserve to be published. So there was, in fact, a small part of me that believed that my poem might, suddenly and very soon, go from my brain to the pages of the internet. From there, I saw it going viral, of course. I saw hate mail, since I’d included my email per the rules, and my real name per no good reason. People in red hats would be looking me up online and finding my blog and maybe where I live, since (contrary to what my fiancé insists is “just basic probability”) there is definitely only one Paige Dunn-Rankin in the world, and it’s me.
I noticed that my throat was thumping with my heartbeat. In fact my whole shoulder area, awkwardly nestled between the two back couch cushions, was throbbing. I must have had too much caffeine today, I thought, and not enough water.
A few hours later, the editor wrote back “Hi Paige — It’s a pass, but thanks for the look! Best, X.” It was amazing to hear back so quickly (I’m still waiting to hear the fate of a story at 3 different places, which I submitted about 7 weeks ago, and that’s very typical). I thought it was a great reply: simple, friendly, somehow positive. I wasn’t crushed when I read it, I wasn’t surprised, in fact my overall feeling was relief. I was also proud of myself. I think Eleanor Roosevelt said to do something that scares you every day? I’ve been doing that more and more, maybe not daily but with much greater frequency than I can ever recall in my life. Realizing that the things that scare you aren’t actually terrible, and in fact they’re worth doing, hasn’t stopped feeling revelatory. (Although I think that quote should have really clarified: “something you’ve been wanting to do, that scares you.”)
Still, “thanks for the look!” kept running through my head as I made myself some lunch and thought about what I would be writing for the rest of the day. I didn’t really feel like writing. I felt tense, and my face was hot.
Could “thanks for the look!” mean that they’d enjoyed it even slightly (but then wouldn’t they have said that)? If they’d really rejected it because it was a poem, would they have told me? Did that mean that they’d rejected it because it was bad first, poem second? Or did “thanks for the look!” mean they agreed it probably had been worth submitting, just didn’t quite meet the bar? I knew how silly it was to read into this line (An automated email following my submission had said “You can expect a short, quick, and unintentionally curt yay or nay soon”), but I was still doing it.
I read my poem again and felt the cloud of “nay.” “Anger’s how we gain!” didn’t just sound imperfect anymore, it sounded stupid. And yet — “thanks for the look!” — there were still parts of the poem I liked. Was I going to let one rejection convince me the poem was no good? But it was too on-the-nose, for sure. Too one-note. I’d suspected as much, and my suspicions were confirmed.
I was so confused and embarrassed for thinking the poem had been worth submitting that I didn’t tell a soul. I was simultaneously frustrated at myself for being so sensitive about what was, essentially, the most lite form of rejection I could ever expect as a writer. I wanted to get my thoughts right. These posts are the best help I know; there’s something about writing publicly under my name that keeps me honest and fair.
I guess now what I have toward the poem it is a kind of fondness, for something misshapen and interesting and not my best attempt. I still don’t regret submitting it. Because I did, I have a new respect, and perspective, for the emotions that come with.
I think the takeaway is — keep submitting. It’s the only way. Maybe I don’t have the makeup to be a Timely humor writer; I think I need to let things simmer a bit, make sure I have some distance to assess and decide to proudly stand behind my work, because then I won’t feel so affected by another’s opinion. Although I think that’s very hard either way. But it’ll get easier, for sure.
And there’s nothing wrong with testing the waters. I guess that’s what I was doing, without really knowing it. Dipping a toe so I could draw a quick breath at the cold. And dive in anyway.