My First Rejection Letter at Fourteen
The magazine said no thank you; my grandmother said keep writing.
The envelope I had addressed to myself came back in my grandmother's mailbox on a Thursday, and I knew before I opened it... because an acceptance would have felt heavier.
I was fourteen and I had recently committed the bravest act of my life to date: I had mailed four poems to a literary magazine in Chicago. A real one, the kind the big library kept in wooden racks. I found the address in a reference book called Writer's Market, which my grandmother kept on the shelf next to her Bible, in that order.
My grandmother lived four blocks from us in a house that smelled like starch and stewed tomatoes, and she owned a Remington typewriter with a sticking letter e. Every Saturday since I was eleven, I had typed my poems on it while she shelled peas at the kitchen table and offered criticism nobody had requested. 'Too many sunsets,' she would say without looking up. 'The sunset manages fine without you.'
She was the one who made me submit. I had a drawerful of poems and a plan to be discovered posthumously, which at fourteen felt romantic and efficient. She was unmoved. 'Poems in a drawer are just paper,' she said. 'Mail them or stop making them.' So we chose four, typed clean copies with the e's filled in by hand, and folded in a self-addressed stamped envelope, which is a strange invention when you think about it: enclosing your own return chute for bad news.
Then came the waiting, which nobody warns you about... Eleven weeks. I walked to her house every day after school to check the mail, and every day the box held coupons and church bulletins addressed to other people, and she would call 'Not today' from the porch before I even reached the gate, like a weather report.
On the Thursday it came back, she let me open it alone at her kitchen table while she pretended the stove needed her. The slip inside was a third of a page. It thanked me for my interest. It said my work 'does not suit our present needs.' It was not signed by a person.
Somewhere in Chicago, a rubber stamp had said no thank you to me.
I did not cry elegantly. Fourteen does not cry elegantly. I put my head down on the table, on top of the rejection, and heaved, while my grandmother stood at the stove stirring a pot that I am now fairly certain held only water.
She let me finish... That was the first gift, that she let me finish.
No there-theres, no it's-just-one-magazine. When I finally looked up, she was holding the slip at arm's length, reading it through the bottom of her glasses like a lab result.
'Read it again,' she said. 'Nowhere on this paper does it say stop.'
I told her it might as well have. I told her the poems were obviously garbage and that they, the great invisible they, clearly knew it. And that word, they, did something to her face that I had never seen before.
She dried her hands on her apron, went into the bedroom, and came back with a shoebox I had never seen in my life. Buster Brown, the cardboard gone soft with age, tied shut with kitchen string. She set it on the table like evidence and untied it.
Rejection slips. Dozens of them.
Some brittle and browning, some carbon-flimsy, the oldest dated 1958. My grandmother, who I had believed existed to shell peas and disapprove of sunsets, had been submitting poems and stories to magazines for thirty years. The Atlantic. Harper's. Journals so small they were mimeographed in somebody's garage. She had been rejected by all of them, methodically, decade over decade, and had never mentioned it to a living soul. And near the bottom of the box, on the same letterhead as my slip, from the same magazine in Chicago, was hers.
Dated 1961.
'I did not suit their present needs either,' she said. 'Their needs have been present a very long time.'
There were also, in that box, two acceptances. Two. A church newsletter that had printed her poem about winter cabbage, and a county newspaper that ran one in 1974 next to an ad for tractor parts. Each acceptance was paper-clipped to the string of rejections that came before it, in order, like the last bead on a necklace. 'You keep the nos with the yes,' she said, 'or the yes doesn't weigh anything.'
We sat at that table until dark while she read me sixty-year-old rejections in a voice of high ceremony, and we laughed until the neighbors' porch light came on. She showed me which of her poems she still believed in and which ones had deserved their fate. 'This one was a coward,' she said of a sonnet about spring. 'I wrote it to be liked. Poems can smell that on you.' It took me twenty more years, and one very good essay on why safe poems lose, to understand that she had handed me the entire education in one sentence.
Her other rule arrived the following week, when she caught me moping. 'Sulking gets one week,' she said. 'Then it gets a stamp.' She made me revise two of the four poems and mail them somewhere new before Saturday.
That became the system.
For the rest of high school we ran a two-person literary operation out of her kitchen: me typing on the Remington, her shelling and judging. I collected eleven more rejections before I turned eighteen, and every one went into a shoebox of my own, because she insisted rejections deserved 'decent housing.' She would hold each new slip up to the light and pronounce it 'a good no' or 'a lazy no,' depending on whether a human hand had touched it.
Somewhere in there... without either of us announcing it, I stopped being afraid of the mailbox.
That is not nothing. Most people are afraid of the mailbox their whole lives; some are so afraid they never build one. What she was teaching me had a simpler name, though neither of us would have been caught using it: hope, practiced as a discipline instead of a mood.
She died the autumn I was twenty-six, quickly, the way she preferred all things done. She left the Remington to me, the Bible to my mother, and the shoebox to no one at all, which is how I knew it was mine.
Two springs later, a magazine took one of my poems. Not the Chicago one; a smaller one, print run of eight hundred, and the acceptance came by email, which felt like being knighted over the phone. I printed it out anyway. I drove to my mother's house, took down the Buster Brown box, and paper-clipped my yes to the long chain of our nos, hers and mine, 1958 to now, and retied the string.
These days I send work out the way she taught me: on a schedule, sulk-free, one week of grief per no and then a stamp. I still enter a monthly poetry contest the way some people go to church, regular and hopeful and not always sure why. First rejection as a writer is a phrase people say with a shudder, and I understand the shudder. I just happen to know what the paper actually says.
The Remington sits on my desk with its sticking e, and some nights I type a single line just to hear the bell. And when a rejection comes in, because they still come, they never stop coming, I hold it up to the light the way she did, and I read it all the way through. Twice.
It never says stop. It has never once said stop.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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