"My Plate Is Full": Rejection, a Memoir

Abstract

"My Plate Is Full"Rejection, a Memoir Steve Tomasula (bio) Rejection letters. Hoo boy!—I've had my share, especially when just starting out, writing experimental prose in a social-realist literary world, though just a couple years ago I think I may have set a record for the fastest rejection ever received: while most magazines have a reporting time of three to six months, a submission I'd sent via Submittable to a science fiction magazine (whose name I can't remember; more on this below) came back in like twenty minutes. (At that rate, working forty hours a week, and without writing another story, or making any simultaneous submissions, I could get rejected 6,240 times by year's end!) At first I thought the rejection must be some version of an automated "my plate is full" rejection email (more on this below). But no, it had clearly been read by the editor: she cited specific details from the story, even intimated that she knew that another story of mine had been in a Year's Best Sci-Fi anthology a couple of years ago. And for these reasons the rejection stung more than if she hadn't read it at all. Unlike a bot, this editor knew what she was rejecting. So I put this rejection in the genre of rejections described to me by a senior editor when I became an editor on a literary magazine and inherited a slush pile the size of Mount Everest: "You don't have to drink the whole gallon to know the milk is bad." But my memories of rejection letters come mainly from the time when the business of publishing fiction was a paper affair, conducted at the pace of photocopiers, licking stamps, and stuffing envelopes in a paper economy that gave us terms like "slush pile" (for the piles of paper manuscripts that would accumulate in editorial offices all over the country); SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope, required to have your manuscript sent back to you, which everyone did because it was cheaper to have it returned to you so you could send it out to another magazine than it was to make a new copy); "over the transom" (i.e., unsolicited), and other words that have persisted into the digital age like an evolutionary hangover. And instead of a sci-fi, lightning strike of a rejection like I received last year, my memories are mainly from those paper days when, like dull, winter rain, rejections fell from agents, publishers, literary magazines, even from charitable organizations looking for organ [End Page 35] donors. Or so it seemed. Through it all, I tried to have in mind stories of other aspiring authors and how they dealt with rejection. Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979) includes as a preface the forty rejection letters the novel received before Grove Press Picked it up (yay!—a happy outcome!). You can see the list of fifty-four rejections David Markson's classic Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) received here: https://biblioklept.org/2012/01/31/list-of-rejections-of-wittgensteins-mistress-david-markson/. The stories of these authors are not exceptional. Indeed, the number of authors with similar lists is vast, part of a tradition that includes writers like Theodore Dreiser, who pinned his rejection letters and bad reviews to the wall with so much force that he broke the plaster. After a while, his room was wallpapered with them. I imagined him going to sleep each night surrounded by these ghosts of defeat, and wondered if even given his success, this contributed to his nervous breakdown years later. In any case, this method didn't seem very healthy. So I tried the opposite approach, sending work to so many places that when a rejection letter arrived I couldn't remember having sent it to the publisher (such as the above sci-fi magazine). But still, rejections came in such numbers that it seemed as if I could make a big-data project of it, using a concordance to divide them into genres: "The Polite and Formal," the "Flannel Shirt, Authenticity," the "Gallon of Milk" genre described above, and "Unnecessary Snark." Or maybe this...