The School Magazine Rejected Me. I Became the Editor.
Revenge is a dish best served with a masthead.
The rejection slip was four words long and I have carried it for twenty years: “Not suitable this time.” No name, no reason, no time that would apparently be suitable. Just a stamp in purple ink at the bottom, THE QUILL, EDITORIAL BOARD, as if a committee of ghosts had gathered specifically to decline my monsoon poem.
I was fourteen. The poem was called “Rain on the Tin Roof” and I had written it over two evenings, lying on my stomach on my bed with the desk lamp dragged over on its cord, believing with my whole chest that it was the best thing anyone at that school had ever produced. I had copied it out in my neatest handwriting, the handwriting I saved for exams and apologies, and posted it into the submissions box outside the staff room, a shoebox covered in blue crepe paper that smelled faintly of glue and importance.
Three weeks later, the slip. Not suitable this time.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because people love to tell rejection stories where they nodded wisely and grew as a person.
I did not grow as a person.
I stood by the notice board reading the names of the poets who had been accepted, and I felt something hot and specific that I can only describe as ambition with its fur up. Priya Nair had gotten in with a poem about the sea that rhymed “ocean” with “emotion.” A boy from the year above had gotten in with eight lines about his mother that I was forced to admit were genuinely good, which somehow made everything worse.
That evening I wrote in my diary, in letters that tore through to the next page:
I WILL RUN THAT MAGAZINE.
It took me two years and it was not a montage. It was volunteering to proofread when nobody else would touch the job. It was learning to work the temperamental photocopier in the office annex, a machine that ate every fortieth page and released a smell like hot dust and defeat.
It was staying back on Thursdays while my friends played cricket, alphabetizing submissions for an editor named Sandhya who never once said thank you but did, in my final year, write my name at the top of the handover list. When the staff advisor read it out, I arranged my face into gracious surprise. I had been rehearsing gracious surprise for two years.
Editor of The Quill. The masthead was mine. Revenge, I assumed, would now commence.
Here is where the story turns on me, as stories tend to do.
My first week in charge, I went looking through the old files, two steel cabinets in the annex with runners that shrieked when you opened them. I told myself it was archival diligence... It was not. I was looking for one thing, and I found it in a folder marked with my own intake year: “Rain on the Tin Roof,” in my neatest handwriting, with a pencilled note in the margin from whichever ghost had read it.
The note said: “Nice sounds. But it's raining on nobody. Where is the writer?”
I sat down on the annex floor and read my masterpiece with sixteen-year-old eyes, and the anonymous ghost was right. It was rain on a roof and nothing else. Sixteen lines of weather. I had described the tin, the drumming, the gutter overflowing, and had somehow left out the only interesting fact of those two evenings, which was that my parents were fighting downstairs and I was narrating the rain to myself so I would not have to hear them.
The storm was in the house and I had written about the roof.
The rejection was never the insult I thought it was. It was the first honest reading my writing ever got.
I would love to tell you I immediately became a kind and enlightened editor. Instead I became a terrified one. Because now the shoebox was mine, and every Thursday it filled up with other people's neatest handwriting, and I understood exactly how much each page weighed.
The first time I had to reject a poem, a sonnet about a grandfather by a boy in eighth standard, I wrote “Not suitable this time” on the slip, stared at it, and tore it up.
It felt like handing someone the same stone that had been thrown at me.
So I started writing notes instead. Real ones. “Your last two lines are the actual poem. Start there and send it back.” “You are hiding behind the rhyme. What are you not saying?” Where is the writer, I asked them, over and over, the ghost's question passed down like a family heirloom. It doubled my workload and made the magazine late twice, and the staff advisor called my system “inefficient sentimentality,” which I took as a masthead-worthy compliment.
The boy with the grandfather sonnet revised it four times. We printed it in the spring issue. At assembly, I watched him find his name in the contents page and hold the magazine slightly away from his body... like it might change its mind. I recognized the posture. It was mine, two years earlier, inverted.
Years later I read an essay about why safe poems lose, and it named the whole thing better than I ever had: the poems we protect from failure are the ones we have already failed. My monsoon poem was safe. It risked nothing, revealed nobody, and the ghost in the margin had simply refused to pretend otherwise. Every piece of writing luck I have had since traces back to that purple stamp. When I finally entered a monthly poetry contest as an adult, I sent the unsafe poem, the one about the fight downstairs, thirty years late but finally on the page. It did not win. It did something better: a stranger wrote to say it was the first time she had seen her own childhood kitchen in someone else's lines.
These days I spend a stupid amount of time reading profiles of writers nobody has heard yet, and I notice I am always looking for the same thing the ghost looked for. Not polish... presence. Where is the writer. It is the only editorial question that has ever mattered, and a stranger taught it to me in pencil, in a margin, in four seconds of honesty that I mistook for cruelty for two full years.
I never found out who wrote that note. Sandhya swore it wasn't her. The staff advisor claimed not to remember my poem at all, which was its own small rejection. Whoever you were: I became the editor to spite you, and stayed one because of you. I hope somebody eventually did you the same favor.
The Quill still comes out every term, I'm told. Somewhere outside a staff room there is a new shoebox in fresh crepe paper, and inside it, folded twice, is somebody's best handwriting wrapped around somebody's first risk.
Not suitable this time... Fine.
There is always a next time, and now I know who decides.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.