here we are, two years later.
earlier this year i submitted my manuscript to two more places. two more passes. and then back in july, i started looking at the calendar. it had been two years since i sent out my MS to that west-coast press, and nearly two since they'd requested the full. in my heart, i knew what this meant: they hadn't read it, or weren't excited by it, because as another poet told me earlier this year, if a press wants your MS, they will contact you, quickly. but i held out hope. maybe it was in the last round of deliberations? i held out hope until it didn't make sense anymore. i sent a query.
my email to the editor i'd been talking with was replied to by another person — the former editor no longer there — never a good sign. apologies, we'll take a look at it, etc.
less than a week later, another bloodless form letter. two years & all that just for a form rejection.
when i was (a lot) younger and first sending my work out to literary magazines, i got no after no after no. i was just getting started out in a new city. i didn't know anyone. i didn't know if my writing was any good. i decided to put it aside and focus on things in which i could measure my own progress — music, software development, and so on. weeks became months. months became years. ultimately i went eight years without writing a word. there's a lot written about how you need thick skin to be a writer. there's less about how the experience of failure, over and over, is internalized differently by people. whose work are we missing out on when we tell people to toughen up, that there's no other way? there are people i grew up with for whom a no becomes, oh, fuck you, i'll make you want this later. i was never that person, probably never will be. i've developed some ability to harden myself to rejection, but it still hurts, still sucks. i've now collected a half a dozen rejections from canadian presses for my work. and there's a finite number of those, you know?
i believe in this ms, believe it's as good, or better, than most of what's being published. but having run through the list of presses i thought would be a best fit, and having had them all disagree (to varying degrees), i don't mind admitting that it's more than a little defeating. that this weird, small ms that works so differently from everything else i'm reading might not find its place. and that makes me sad. i've put everything into this. its glow is semi-autobiographical. and as i prepare the next round of submissions i have to think about the fact that maybe it's just never going to be.