I Married the Editor Who Rejected Me
His first letter said 'not for us.' His second said everything else.
The rejection arrived on a Tuesday, and it was seven sentences too long.
I know this because I owned a shoebox full of the normal kind. Thank you for thinking of us. Unfortunately this piece is not for us at this time. Two sentences, a photocopied signature, done. I could have wallpapered my bathroom with those. But the letter from Driftless Review ran nine sentences in actual blue ink, and by the third one I was pacing my kitchen, reading it out loud to a spider plant.
He had gone through my poem, a thing called Salt, line by line. He liked the second stanza more than he had liked anything all month, he said. He said the image of my mother's hands in the bread dough was doing honest work. And then he said the ending flinched. That was his word. Flinched. You walk right up to the true thing, he wrote, and then you offer us weather instead.
Signed, Daniel Rhee, Poetry Editor. The ink was smeared at the bottom, like he had folded the letter too fast.
I wrote back that night. You are not supposed to write back to rejections. Every guide for writers says so, usually in bold. I told him the ending did not flinch, the ending was restrained, and there was a difference, and the weather was a metaphor, and also, who exactly did he think he was.
His reply took six days. Restraint, he wrote, is what we call flinching when we do it on purpose. Send me the ending you were afraid of and I will show you the difference.
So I did. Not to him, because pride has a floor and I had reached it. I rewrote the ending the way it had actually happened, with my mother saying the unforgivable thing over the bread dough and me saying nothing back, and I entered the new version into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so that a stranger could disagree with him on my behalf.
It placed second.
I mailed him the results page with no note attached.
He mailed back: Second. So the ending still flinches a little. Congratulations, though. Truly.
This went on for over a year. Letters about line breaks, about his co-editor who hated semicolons the way some men hate losing, about my dog, who ate the first draft of exactly one poem and I maintain she was right to. At some point he sent me an essay about why safe poems lose, and I read it furious, because it was obviously about me, and then I read it twice more, because it was about me.
I assumed he was sixty. The letters sounded sixty. Formal, fussy about commas, prone to phrases like I would submit that. Then the journal announced a reading in Milwaukee, three hours from my apartment, and at the bottom of his next letter he added, You should come. We can argue in person, which is faster.
He was thirty one.
He was standing by the folding chairs holding a paper cup of wine like it might drip on a manuscript, and when I walked up and introduced myself, he did not say hello. He said... Salt.
"You rejected me," I said.
"Nine sentences," he said. "I counted."
"Everyone counts."
We went to a diner afterward with half the reading crowd, and then the crowd thinned the way crowds do when two people stop noticing them, and at one in the morning he took my original submission out of his bag. My actual pages, fourteen months old, soft at the corners, covered in pencil.
He had kept them... He had kept everything, it turned out. Every letter I ever sent him was in a folder in his desk, in order.
I would like to tell you I played it cool. I ordered pie I did not want and asked him to explain the pencil marks one by one, which is not cool, which is the opposite of cool, which is a person trying to make a diner breakfast last until sunrise.
We were married four years later, in a backyard in October, and that is the story I used to tell.
It is missing the best part, because I did not know the best part yet.
The best part was in the desk.
We were moving that winter, our first real apartment together, and I was the one who packed his office because he was useless in the face of his own paper. Behind the folder of my letters was a thinner folder, unlabeled except for the word DRAFTS in pencil. Inside were fourteen versions of the first rejection letter he ever sent me.
Fourteen.
In two of them, he accepted the poem. In one, he accepted it and then crossed the whole page out with a single line and wrote in the margin: If you take it, you never hear from her again. The last draft was the nine sentences he actually mailed, and reading them again on the floor of a half empty room, I could see it plainly, the engineering of it, every sentence built to make an angry woman in a kitchen three hours away pick up a pen.
He rejected my poem in nine sentences, and then he spent the next three years revising the tenth.
I sat there on the carpet with the folder in my lap until he came looking for me. He saw what I was holding and stood in the doorway with a box of mugs, waiting for the verdict, and I said, "You rejected Salt on purpose."
"The ending did flinch," he said. Then, after a moment, quieter... "But yes. I also did not want the conversation to be over."
At our wedding he read the rejection letter as part of his vows. Not for us at this time got the biggest laugh of the afternoon, his co-editor honking like a goose in the second row.
Then Daniel folded the letter, looked up, and said, "I have never been more wrong in a subordinate clause," and my grandmother, who had no idea what a subordinate clause was, cried anyway, because you did not need the grammar to hear what he meant.
The letter hangs above our kitchen table now, framed, the smear and all. People assume it was an acceptance until they lean in and read it, and then they look at me like we are both in on something strange, which we are.
I still submit poems. I still get the two sentence rejections, and they still go in the shoebox, though the shoebox has a new label now, written in his handwriting, which I will not repeat here because it is smug. I write about my mother still, and about love, which turns out to be another word for revision, for going back to the same lines year after year because you believe there is a truer version and you intend to find it.
And I think about that smear at the bottom of the first letter more than I think about almost anything. For years I read it as carelessness... It was the opposite. He folded the page too fast because if he had waited one more minute, he was going to scratch out the whole thing and say something honest, and he was not ready.
It took him fourteen drafts and three years. But he walked right up to the true thing, and this time he did not offer me weather.
The ending did not flinch.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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