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A couple of years ago I decided to take my in-progress poetry manuscript seriously. I talked with a few poets whose opinions I trusted around finding and hiring an editor. I followed up with one of them, and she and I worked through things together. A few months later, the manuscript was better for it.
I sent it to a few places. I got mostly personal, courteous rejections: close, send this elsewhere, etc. But the one that hurt, what I tried to shrug off but couldn't, was a rejection from a press with whom I've got a personal connection. I had low expectations. I knew the odds. And it was a quick no, and it stung like hell.
Yesterday I got a boilerplate marketing email from that same press, pretty standard: they offer an annual subscription, I'd let mine lapse a year and a half ago, would I consider resubscribing? Here are the titles we're publishing this year. And I was impressed, and I was deeply sad: many of the poets weren't just peers, but friends, people I'd grown close to in the Twitter era. I could easily see my work next to theirs. But the publisher never thought so. The wound opened up. I was hurting again.
I know it's good work, and I know it'll someday find a home. But it's been languishing in the submissions queue at another publisher for well over a year, to the point where regardless of its status, I need to move on. Do some revisions, send it elsewhere. But there's a part of me that's tired. I don't know if it's February and I don't know if it's the manuscript itself, but I've found myself filled with a doubt, and something like dread. Two years ago I was so sure of the work, the order, the subject, the arc. And now I'm hurting again. Not from the rejection, but its echo.
I know part of what I'm supposed to internalize is resilience, that there will be many more rejections, and anyway, when I see my friends' work in that wonderful list, I'm only seeing the end result, not the many failures along the way. Which, fine. But at the same time, I don't know how many books I have in me. Maybe it'll be many, but maybe it'll just be one, and maybe none at all. Given that uncertainty, I think I need to make space for the feelings around this. That my dream of publishing with this press, which I've held close and quietly for decades, could very well be gone.
Part of me has always burned with a fuck-you fire: I've been underestimated in a lot of things in my life, and what I lack in natural talent, I can almost always make up for in determination and persistence. There is a side of me that wants to polish this MS further, bring it into the world, and have people tell me that they were wrong. But today that fire's flickering. I hope I'll get there eventually, but today's a day for coffee, for quiet, and for feeling lesser-than.