No one likes being rejected—but perhaps there are some surprising upsides.
Preview: Emerging Form Episode 13
“We’re sorry, your work does not suit our needs at this time.” These words are so common. Rejection is a difficult reality for most (all?) writers and artists. So how do we handle rejection? Can we use it to improve our work? What does it have to tell us and teach us? In this episode, we talk about a useful phrase in the face of rejection, Christie’s Southeast Asia Problem, and one of the poetry worlds’ best rejection letter writers. Then we’ll talk with memoirist and essayist Claire Dederer to get her take on how rejection might actually be a great teacher..
What We’re Reading:
Rosemerry:
· I love it when I find a good website with beautifully curated poems—poems that help me pay more attention to the ordinary, to the glory of the world at hand. My new favorite, The Singing Bowl edited by James Crews.
· I admit it. I love reading the Territorial Seed Company Catalog. Although planting season at 7,200 feet won’t start until mid-May, the longer days of March get me excited about planting, and looking at the Galahad tomato and the Bolero carrots and the Bright Lights chard gets me hot. You, too? Most earmarked book in the house.
Christie:
· While Rosemerry is reading seed catalogs (ok, I am too!) I am looking at poultry porn — the Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog, to be exact. I’m dreaming of the new birds I’ll be ordering soon — chickens, turkeys and guinea fowl, to be exact.
· I just devoured Rickey Gates’s gorgeous new book, Cross Country: A 3700-Mile Run to Explore Unseen America. It has as much photography as text, and it provides a thought-provoking snapshot into the many cultures and communities he experienced along his run from South Carolina to California. The people he meets are the most memorable parts.
· Just started Sierra Crane Murdoch’s new book, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, and if the rest of the book is as good as the prologue, I’m all in.
Recommended Resources:
Need a prompt? I recently found Think Written, an online resource for writers that includes this great list of 101 prompts and ideas for poems.
Need help writing dialogue? I love these 8 tips for punctuating dialogue—you’ll go way beyond “he said/she said” and learn how to make your writing more muscular, more powerful.
Need general help with how to write and edit fiction? I am loving The Editor’s Blog, which has everything from how to push plot to a list of compound words to how to write numbers in fiction.
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack)
How do you process rejection, especially when it’s a work that feels very personal?
What have you learned from rejection?