THIS IS WHAT REJECTION LOOKS LIKE
I just logged into the Brown application website to try to view my MFA rejection letter. It’s no longer there. I am wondering where it went. My status is simply “submitted” and no longer rejected. Could my rejection have been revoked? No, probably not. There is probably a demon in their system affording me this glimmer of false hope—like dreaming of your crush putting the moves on you. The first thing I actually thought was, “What am I going to tell my parents?” They are used to me always being “the best” and are far more invested in my success than I am. I told them not to get their hopes up. I put together a typo-filled portfolio the night before it was due because I was visiting my mom who was in the hospital from a suicide attempt and applying to grad school was the last thing on my mind. But I had an application waiver, so I sent it off with a statement that basically said, “I’m sorry this is bad. My life is a wreck right now.”
Luckily, I copy and pasted the rejection letter into my long poem before it disappeared:
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Two Deadlines Loom
The &Now Festival is a biennial festival, celebration, and conference that explores intersections between creative and critical praxis, examines innovative and experimental acts of writing, and advances a serious inquiry into theories of language and consciousness. The 2011 &Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever! will be held October 13-15, 2011 at University of California, San Diego, a research institution internationally renowned for imaginative experimentation in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
ALSO
Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize
Each spring, Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, sponsors emerging writers under forty years old—with no major book publication—to spend two months in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Michael Hemmingson’s Lish Project
Gordon Lish Edited This
Forgotten and Ignored Books Edited By Gordon Lish 1978-1994
Self-Publishing Isn’t My Worst Mistake
(Ed. note: I received a lot of responses about my post about self-publishing via e-mail, on other blogs, here at HTMLGIANT. A. Lot. It has been a really interesting discussion and one that will continue. One writer, Mary Maddox, wanted to share her own story of trying to break into mainstream publishing and eventually choosing to self-publish her novel.)
Roxane’s piece on the value of self-publishing upset me. Last year I started Cantraipt Press and published my novel Talion, so I took some of her comments very personally. Yet she doesn’t denounce writers who self-publish. Her tone is thoughtful, and she understands why self-publication might be the right decision for some. Now that I’ve calmed down, I understand what happened. I read her piece entirely in the context of my own experience.
While I was at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1970’s, a visiting writer came every year to read and conduct a guest workshop. Each faculty member chose two stories by students for this event. My first year John Hawkes came. Hawkes wrote several critically acclaimed books, but he doesn’t seem to be talked about much today. The second year it was Thomas Berger, famous for Little Big Man, a best-seller now gathering dust. Both years, one of my stories was chosen for the guest workshop. My teachers considered me to be a young writer of some promise, and I desperately wanted my fiction to be published.
An introduction from Mary Lee Settle got my first novel read by an editor at Random House, who referred me to a well-known agent with an office in Greenwich Village. I was in my twenties. Imagine my excitement. But the editor had come to Random House recently from another publisher, and he lacked the support to get my novel accepted, even after I’d rewritten it to address the concerns of his colleagues. The Greenwich Village agent represented me for a few years, but she’d taken me on thinking my novel would be accepted at once and her job would be to negotiate a contract. Suddenly it became something else she had to hustle to sell. I don’t think she tried all that hard, especially after a few rejections.
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Amelia Gray}
Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2). Her first novel, THREATS, is due Winter 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
On Aging and Anxiety
Today is the very last day of my 20s. I feel like a hot wreck. Whereas I know that age doesn’t really mean anything and we age every single fucking day, it seems monumental.
I remember one of the first conversations I had with Joyelle McSweeney. I was 25. I had just graduated with my MFA. I hadn’t even submitted my first book manuscript for publication (though I was getting ready to), and she said something like: “Oh, I’m so old in comparison, it’s ghastly: I’m thirty!” In my head, I thought to myself: “Fuck, if I do even half of what Joyelle has done by the time I’m thirty, I would be grateful!”
Well, boys and girls, here it is: thirty.
Possible Paths to Freedom
Two competing suppositions:
1. The path to maximum freedom is maximum knowledge, maximum mastery, so that the largest possible range of options and possibilities is on the table, and so that improvisations and inventions and productive acts of play might rise from the foundation laid by the broadest possible exposure to everything.
2. The path to maximum freedom is a rejection of preexisting things. The way to invention, improvisation, and productive acts of play begins with a willful resistance to the idea that the making of art coincides with an engagement with the world of ideas, information, or the discourse of others. It is better not to think too much about these things. Good things rise from organic processes divorced from the analytic.
137 horses of the Elton John
Last week fucked around and got a triple double
1. Ice Cube rapped this. It is a way to make good art. “Fuck around” and you might stumble into a triple double. The lack of intent opens up the writer to odd directions. I think Perec “fucked around” into triple doubles. A triple double helps yourself and a larger idea. This is an admirable goal for words. I would like my writing to be like pick-up basketball, not a day at the office. Also I would like to dunk on Joyce Carol Oates.
2. Dude is a doctor and a writer and just won a $100,000 prize. That’s a good day.
2. The belief that the short story is a poor relation of the novel persists.
2. Nox versus Next in the quarterfinals.
2. Burnside Review chapbook contest is now open.
137. What book (s) are in the floorboards of you car right now? (I have Big World, Hitler’s Mustache, and an anthology of re-told fairy tales)
Analogous to what?
Via Adam Wilson‘s Facebook feed: a list of the “worst” analogies written by high school students, as selected by their teachers. As this blog post notes, the predicate of “worst” is an oversight, or at worst a condescending and misguided error–many of these analogies are sharp if not artful in what Adam, I think perceptively, called a “Lishian” way.
The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.