best. rejection letter. ever.
Friday 25 July 2008 | someone left a cookie
I want to write Ms. Editorial Assistant back and wail, But where else do I send this darn thing?! I can’t imagine. I could only ever see it as their book, with my (flawed) inner eyes, but they’re spoken for until 2011. There are 101 of these freaky grief poems; half-Propertius, half-Trilogy, half-Peter Dale Scott and all hand-wavy. Simultaneously elated and deflated, and not a little confused. Maybe Walt Whitman or the Duende will have an idea.
It’s been a brilliant few days otherwise, as well. Persephone decided to pay us a surprise visit from Santa Fe for forty-eight hours, so we had our first official houseguest and I’ve been lolling around talking my head off with a Zen faery while the Brujo sought the solace of open spaces and cacti to get polite distance from we shrieking giggling singing gossiping girlfriends; and also, having thrown out my right shoulder on Monday, I apparently decided to complete the incapacity by throwing out my other shoulder and my neck on Tuesday, so that in fact Persephone also spent a few hours giving me bodywork (she originally moved to Santa Fe to study orthobionomy [?] with the happy result for me that now I can turn my head halfway to the left).
Alors, big ketchup post this weekend, now that Persephone has flown home, the B. is back from his desert hermitage and our lives are back to normal—or anyway whatever passes for normal in Tartarean summertime—and once I am finished reading half-a-dozen blogs and fifty emails—as well as The Subtle Knife, since I seem to have been abruptly swallowed whole by Philip Pullman this heat-dazed afternoon.
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Sorry about your rejection. Though your “glowing encomium” of the letter itself is refreshing. Usually when a gallery rejects the Artist, yours truly, I sulk for days. Rejection sucks, even if it is done nicely. I guess all those blogs on lovingly accepting suffering are paying off. Thanks once again for showing me a new way to look at life.
On another note, your rejection reminds me of an NPR story I heard last year where “Jack Kerouac, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath are just a few of the authors whose books were turned down by the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. Researchers going through the Knopf archives have come across their rejection letters, as well as a few others.”
As an interesting bit of synchronicity in my remark, I think Pullman was published by Knopf (Scholastic, 1997; USA, Knopf, 1997). So, for what it is worth, you are in good company, and let us know what you think of Pullman’s books.