Here is one of my favorite stories about rejection.

Several years ago when A. Manette Ansay was teaching creative writing at Vanderbilt University she decided to give her students a visual demonstration about what being a writer meant.

Before class, Ansay pulled out her file of rejections. It was thick. (Nearly every writer I know keeps a similar portfolio. Surely this deliberate stockpiling of pain and failure reveals something about the writer’s psyche – why don’t we just toss them?)

With rejection letters in hand, Ansay sat in her office and constructed a dress, cobbling it together with staples. When the garment was finished, there was still a stack of correspondence on her desk, so she made a hat, complete with feather. In this costume, she greeted the class.

“I stood in front of the room in this dress made of my rejections,” she says, “and I told them, ‘This is what being a writer looks like.’” Blank faces stared back at her. Ansay recalls, “I would see by their expressions they were thinking, ‘Well, you must not be a very good writer.’”

Ansay, whose most recent novel is “Midnight Champagne,” is a terrific writer. She has received the Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award and the Friends of American Writers Award. Her collection of short stories, four novels and memoir have garnered critical praise. She is an Oprah author. And she is right. Being a writer means rejection.

After class, Ansay returned to her office and pulled off the dress, badly scratching herself with the staples in the process. “I was bleeding from my rejections,” she says.

Don’t we all?

Rejection is the beast with yellow teeth waiting in the closet. It is every denial we have ever experienced, every moment of self-doubt, magnified 10,000 fold. It’s the fifth grade teacher who humiliated us in front of the class. It’s our worst fear – You’re a fake who has been found out – in a form letter. Rejection humbles us and erodes self-confidence. And every time we sit down to write we risk it.

We deal with it differently. Depending on the moment and our temperament, we react with anger, bitterness, humor, rationalization or resignation. We remind ourselves not to take it personally. We take it very personally. Some of us assume the fetal position and consider bartending as a serious career option. Others of us dream about getting out hands on an Uzi. Any jury of our peers would acquit. Justifiable Homicide. Temporary Insanity.

A writer I know struck out the name of her publisher on copies of one of her novels and scribbled in “Scumbag Press” after the house rejected her next book.

Whatever works.

In the face of rejection, we gather stories like talismans, passing them between us like 50-dollar bills. Stories about 20 editors who pass on a manuscript that, finally published, becomes a best seller (“Ordinary People,” “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” The Firm”). Stories about an author so defeated he commits suicide, but whose work, submitted posthumously by his mother to yet another house, lands on the best seller list, wins awards (“Confederacy of Dunces”). We review the early rejections of Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck. We talk about the insanity of the publishing business and speak in awe-filled voices about the saga of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” One hundred and twenty-one publishers said no thanks before one editor saw merit in Robert M. Pirsig’s manuscript, a book which eventually sold millions of copies. We savor Pirsig’s sweet revenge as if it were our own. We try to imagine addressing the 122nd envelope, sticking the postage stamps on, shipping it. We ask ourselves sobering questions. Would I have quit after the first 20 rejections? Fifty? Seventy? One hundred? How militant is my belief in my work? Will I continue if all incoming evidence suggests I am engaged in an act of supreme self-delusion?

Faced with rejection, we recite these stories like litanies. We gain comfort – and fortitude – from them. We sho ut. Cry. Whine. Sneer at the obtuseness of editors.

Here is the totality of what I know about rejection. When I am done reacting, I must return to the work. Like all life challenges, rejection is simply a test of my mettle. It offers two options. Give up or continue. So, I continue.
Unbowed and only slightly bitter, I stumble on. Or march on defiantly. Or crawl on all fours. Or make a furious dash for the finish. I establish working relationships with other writers so I don’t have to deal with rejection in isolation. I learn to celebrate small triumphs. I develop a thicker dermis.

It serves me, too, to sheath myself in steadfast faith, to hold fast to the understanding that there is a purpose in what happens, even in rejection. I recall the words of a karate master that “every defeat holds the seeds of future victories.” I extend that faith to surround my whole life, knowing that even when the news looks bleak, it’s a building block to something else. I remind myself to follow the compass of my own true inner impulse.

And I write.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are obsessing here.

I lay it all at the feet of Martha Tod Dudman, a writer from Maine who arrived two weeks ago. Or perhaps I should say I place the blame at Martha’s hip. Where she wears a green pedometer.

Martha’s target goal is 10,000 steps a day. This, she tells us, equals five miles. Most of the time she does more.

Within days she has two of us heading off to purchase our own pedometers. $4.88 plus tax at the nearby Wal-Mart. Let the obsession begin.

We check our tallies at breakfast. At lunch. Mid-afternoon. At dinner. Not that we’re competitive. Oh, no.

I find myself making excuses to run back to the residence from the studio. Four hundred and thirty-seven steps. On my writing breaks, instead of reading, I walk. From the rear of the studio barn up the road to the little church by the field with the baby goats and back is four thousand and twenty-seven steps. Two miles. When returning to the studio after lunch, I no longer use the shortcut across the yard. Forty more steps. No steps too few to tally.

Sara says she’s going over to the college to swim. I offer my car.

“That’s okay,” she says. “I’ll walk.” After dinner she plays - no, competes - in ping-pong. “Play,” she says is too friendly a word. It’s serious business. Intense. We’re all truly amazed at how many steps you can click off during a game.

On a warm day, taking a walk, Martha ties her sweater around her waist. When she returns she discovers that not one step has registered. The sweater has made the pedometer malfunction. For the rest of the day she is fixated on the lost steps. At breakfast the next morning she still grieves their loss, the way you’d mourn a canary that has escaped from its cage and flown through an open window.

But Martha is our cheerleader, her numbers our standard. When it turns unseasonable cold, we walk. When it rains, we walk. After dinner, we walk, usually from the residence down the drive to the highway. Two thousand, two hundred and seven steps. One mile round trip.

Soon Martha and I are sent back to Wal-Mart to get five more pedometers for other Fellows. All women. We’d walk but the store is in the next town up the highway.

There are seven men here at the moment and although we’ve offered to pick up “clickers” for them, not one is interested In fact all of them - the Irani playwright, the painters from North Carolina and Santa Fe, the San Francisco novelist, Wisconsin poet, New York film-maker and Nigerian artist - all are amused at how seriously we’re into this walking thing. They make secret man-eyes at each other as we compare tallies. And they’re the ones eating the potato chips at lunch.

Ten thousand steps - when you spend your working day at a computer - is a lot of steps to aim for. Almost a part-time job.

The artists are luckier. Cheryl notes that she racks up steps in the studio while painting. Apparently artists walk around a lot while they work.

Sadly, Martha left yesterday, returning to her real life in Maine. We picture her striding the streets of Bar Harbor. We vow not to slack off without her. We’ll see.

Stay tuned.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The LAVENDER HOUR was published a week ago. In the past I have been at home when a book came out, caught up in a flurry of launch parties, interviews, extensive book tours, store signings and celebratory dinners with family and friends.

This year on the publication date I was in Virginia.

I am in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts on a writing fellowship. At first it felt odd to be here and not out promoting the book. I received no flowers or emails from my publisher as I had in the past, no phone calls from friends. In the isolation that a place like this provides, I could almost forget it had been published.

And then it seemed that being here is the perfect and right thing.

It is true that there is satisfaction in holding a published novel in one’s hands. In seeing it on the shelves. All that work. All those hours spent riding the impermanence of emotions: doubt, fear, delight. Of course, it is thrilling. Ours is, after all, a result-oriented culture. We think that when we marry the right partner, land the job, lose ten pounds, get published, life will be ever after the magic carpet ride. We tend to think the point is publication. In the flurry of success, we can forget that eventually the book will disappear from the store shelves and that the most profound and long-lasting joy lies in the creating.

Gardeners know the immediate and sensual pleasure of a tomato perfectly ripe and still warm in the hand from the sun’s heat. But the soul satisfaction comes from tending the plant, the time spent with hands deep in the earth.

Here I am one of twenty other artists who understand that it is not the product but the process from which we derive the most intense satisfaction.

As I write this, a poet is at work in the next studio and a novelist in the one beyond that. Across the courtyard a composer is working on a song cycle. A photographer from New York is printing in the dark room. There are two children’s books authors here, a sculptor, a visual artist who paints dream-like figures, a second who draws birds nests, and a third who paints clouds against the Blue Ridge Mountains. There is a Chinese-American writer working on a memoir about her trip to Tibet. An artist from Africa is burning wood and cutting bamboo from which he is making a drum. It will “talk” he promises us. We are a mixed group. Some of us are established, even famous. Others of us are unknown. Emerging artists.

Last night after dinner an artist presented slides of her work. As she clicked through the carousel, she quoted the words of a painter who had mentored her long ago. “If there isn’t passion there, don’t do it.” Everyone in the room nodded. There was no talk of sales figures or reviews, or best-seller lists. Only the work.

My new book is out.

I am in Virginia, surrounded by my tribe and celebrating life the best way we know how.

Creating.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)