The Judge Who Told Me to Quit
I kept his exact words; they make excellent fuel.
The feedback arrived on a Tuesday, typed on cream letterhead, and it was twelve words long. I had paid fourteen pounds extra for a written critique from the head judge of a regional poetry prize, and here is what fourteen pounds bought me: "Competent. Forgettable. My honest advice is to find another use for your evenings."
I was twenty-six. I read it standing in the hallway of my flat with my coat still on, rain ticking against the window at the end of the hall, and I remember the strangest detail: I checked the envelope again, actually turned it over and looked inside, as if the rest of the feedback might have fallen out somewhere between his desk and mine. There was no rest... that was the feedback. Twelve words, one of which was "evenings."
I did not cry. I want credit for that, even now. What I did was worse and more useful. I went to the kitchen, took the fridge magnet shaped like a lemon, and stuck the card at eye level, where other people keep photos of their dogs.
My flatmate found it a week later. "What is this?" she asked, and I said, "Fuel," and she looked at me the way you look at someone who has started collecting knives.
But it was fuel. I need to be honest about that, because the internet is full of tidy stories where cruelty is dismissed with a shrug and self-love, and mine is not one of them. His twelve words worked on me like a splinter works, constantly, quietly, every single day.
I stopped skipping my writing nights. I enrolled in a proper course and did the exercises I used to think were beneath me, the boring scales, metre and compression and cutting the first stanza, which it turns out is where I had been storing all my throat-clearing. I entered a monthly contest with the discipline of a person paying off a debt, month after month, poem after poem, and I lost, and lost, and placed third, and lost, and then stopped losing quite so often.
Every rejection, I looked at the lemon magnet. Every small win, I looked at it longer.
Two years in, I had a poem commended in a national prize. Four years in, a magazine took two in one summer, and I printed the acceptance email, which is not something normal people do.
I gave readings. I got the kind of modest, real traction that would have seemed like the moon to the woman standing in that hallway in her coat. And after every single one of these things, without exception, the first face that came to mind was his. I had never met him. I had seen one photograph, a jowly man at a lectern. He lived rent-free at the exact center of my writing life, my invisible audience of one, and I mistook that arrangement for motivation.
Here is what I did not notice for six years: every poem I wrote was addressed to him.
Not literally. But I wrote to be unignorable, to be the opposite of forgettable, and the opposite of forgettable is not the same thing as good. My poems got louder, cleverer, more armored. Endings that snapped shut like briefcases. A friend from my course put her finger on it once, gently, after a reading: "Your poems win arguments," she said. "Who are you arguing with?" I laughed it off... I knew exactly who.
The turn, when it came, happened at a festival in a tent that smelled of wet grass and coffee. I was on a panel about rejection, of all things, and afterward a woman about my age came up, and we swapped war stories, and I told her about my twelve words. I have the card memorized, obviously. I recited it: competent, forgettable, my honest advice, find another use for your evenings.
She went pale in a way I did not understand, and then she took out her phone, scrolled for a moment, and showed me a photograph of a cream card with the same letterhead.
"Competent. Forgettable. My honest advice is to find another use for your evenings."
Same words. Same twelve. Word for word, comma for comma. Sent to her, in a different year, about a completely different poem, by the same judge.
We stood in that tent staring at each other, and then she started laughing, and I did not. I could not, yet. Because something enormous was collapsing in me, quietly, like a building falling into its own footprint.
For six years I had carried those words as a verdict on my particular soul. They were not a verdict... they were a rubber stamp. He had a drawer of those cards, or a template, or just a worn groove in his brain, and he dispensed his twelve words to whoever paid the fourteen pounds, the way a fortune cookie dispenses destiny.
My great wound was a form letter.
She was still laughing. "We should find the others," she said. "There must be dozens of us. A support group. Matching shirts."
I smiled and said something clever, and went back to my rented room, and sat by the window watching rain come down through the orange streetlight, and I felt the least expected feeling of that whole strange day... grief. Which makes no sense until you have lived it. The insult had been personal, and personal was the thing I had wanted most in those years, to be seen, singled out, worth aiming at. Being told to quit had at least meant someone had looked. Now even that was gone.
He had never looked. Nobody was watching me climb.
There was no one at the top of the mountain keeping score, just a tired man with a template, dead three years by then, I later learned, who had probably forgotten my name before the ink dried.
Spite is a wonderful ignition and a terrible engine.
That is the sentence I finally wrote in my notebook that night, and it is the truest thing I know about discouraging feedback. His twelve words started my engine, no question. They got me to the desk on the nights the desk felt pointless. But an engine that runs on someone else's contempt only ever drives toward them. Six years of poems, and the best of them were fists. I had become unforgettable at the cost of becoming unreadable, at least to myself.
So I did two things. First, I took the card off the fridge. It is in a shoebox now, with the ticket stubs and my grandfather's watch, filed under things that mattered once. Second, and this took far longer, I started writing poems addressed to no one. It is much harder than it sounds. The first honest one took months and was about him, in the end, or rather about letting him go, and when I finally sent it out into the world I filed it, privately, half-joking, under forgiveness. Not because he asked. Form letters never ask. Because I was tired of paying rent on a room in my own head to a man who never knew he lived there.
People ask if I would erase the card if I could, go back and never pay the fourteen pounds. They expect yes. But the card taught me the two lessons in the correct order, and I am not sure they can be learned any other way. First lesson, the one that got me started: prove him wrong. Second lesson, the one that made me a writer: there is no him.
Some evenings, when it rains against the window the way it did in that hallway, I still say the twelve words out loud to no one... Competent. Forgettable. Find another use for your evenings.
I did find one. This is it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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