I Wallpapered My Study With Rejection Letters
One hundred and twelve noes, arranged into something like armor.
The man from the letting agency stood in my spare room for a long time before he asked, very gently, whether everything was all right at home. I told him it was wallpaper. He wrote something on his clipboard that I suspect was not wallpaper.
To be fair to him, it is an unusual room. One hundred and twelve rejection letters, pasted edge to edge from the skirting board to just above my head, which is as far as I can reach standing on the good chair. Some are printed. Some are photocopies of printed things, which is a special kind of insult, a no that couldn't even be bothered to be an original no. Three are handwritten. One is addressed to a different poet entirely, a Ms. Hutchins, who I hope is doing well and who technically has never been rejected by that magazine, because I absorbed it for her.
The first letter arrived when I was twenty-four. I remember it precisely: a Tuesday, a thin envelope, the phrase not quite right for us at this time, and me reading it on the stairwell of my building... because I couldn't wait the extra flight. I cried a little, quietly, next to a bicycle that wasn't mine. At twenty-four you believe a rejection is information about your future. It takes years to learn it's barely information about your Tuesday.
By number fifteen I had a shoebox. By number thirty I had a second shoebox... and a personality about it. By number forty, at a party, someone asked about my writing and I heard myself say, brightly, I have enough noes to decorate a room, and everybody laughed, and I went home and stood in the spare room with a shoebox under each arm, thinking.
Wallpaper paste costs four pounds.
That's the whole startup budget for turning your failures into a design feature.
I want to be honest about why I did it, because the wall gets misunderstood. Visitors assume it's motivation, some daily rise-and-grind ritual. My sister calls it the serial killer wall and refuses to sleep in that room. A poet friend stood in front of it for ten minutes and then said, quietly, you're either the healthiest person I know or the least, and I said thank you, and we left it there.
But the real reason was simpler. Kept in shoeboxes, the letters were a secret, and secrets ferment. On the wall, in daylight, they were just paper. The magazine that rejected me in 2019 with a form letter had also, I could now see, rejected me with the same form letter in 2021, same font, same everything, and there is no way to feel tragic about a no that arrives twice like a franchise.
You can build armor out of noes, but armor is just an admission that you intend to keep standing where the arrows are.
And I did intend to. That's the part people miss when they wince at the wall. Every letter up there is a receipt for an attempt. One hundred and twelve times, somebody licked an envelope or clicked send and dared the world to say no, and the world, being the world, obliged.
The wall isn't a museum of failure. It's proof of a pulse.
Then came the afternoon that changed the whole room, and it wasn't a letter arriving. It was letter number eighty-seven, already up there, three years old, pasted at eye level beside the light switch.
I was up on the good chair, gluing number one hundred and twelve into the last gap under the ceiling, when I glanced down and saw it. I must have looked at that letter a thousand times, the way you look at your own hallway... which is to say never. It was from a small journal I'd loved. Standard printed regret, we are unable to place your work. But underneath, in pencil, in handwriting so small it seemed embarrassed of itself, someone had written: the third poem nearly stayed. Send us more like the third one.
I stood on the chair for a long time.
Three years... Three years that pencil line had hung on my wall, an open door I had wallpapered over, because I'd ripped the envelope open angry, seen the word unable, and filed it in the shoebox with my heart doing its usual defensive crouch. I never read to the bottom. Rejection had made me so efficient at protecting myself that I'd protected myself straight past an invitation.
And I knew the third poem, too. That was the sting. The third poem in that batch was the raw one, the one about my father's work overalls hanging in the shed for two winters after he retired, written fast, barely revised, sent along as a filler because the other two were the clever ones. The clever ones died without a note.
The honest one nearly stayed.
I got down off the chair and sat on the floor of my armored room and laughed, the way you laugh when the joke is you.
That week I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and it was like reading my own autopsy, cheerfully written. Then I wrote five new poems in the key of the third one, overalls poems, sink poems, poems with their hands dirty, and I sent them to a monthly contest and to the pencil journal with a cover note that said, three years late, sorry, more like the third one enclosed. I also started reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I noticed the same story in almost every one: the breakthrough was never the hundredth clever thing. It was the first honest thing that survived its author's embarrassment.
The acceptance came on a Thursday, by email, which felt anticlimactic, like winning a duel by text message. One of the five... The overalls poem, obviously.
And here is the problem nobody warns you about: there was no room left on the wall.
I stood in the study holding a printout of a yes with a glue brush in my other hand, genuinely stumped. It didn't belong up there anyway. The wall is a monument to the before, and you don't renovate a monument. So I walked to the kitchen and taped the acceptance to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a banana, between a takeaway menu and a dentist reminder, and that placement turned out to be the most accurate criticism I have ever received or produced. Rejection had been a monument in my house. Acceptance was just groceries. Just life, restocked.
The letting agent came back last month for the inspection. He stood in the study again, clipboard at the ready, and asked, gently, professionally, the same question. Everything all right at home?
I looked at the hundred and twelve noes, and the pencil line by the light switch, and thought about the banana magnet one room away.
Yes, I told him. Finally, everything is all right at home. And when I move, the wallpaper comes with me.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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