Looking for Lucia Through Years of Rejections
The importance of hope, resilience and a sense of humour to the writing life
Hello, friends —
Big welcome to everyone who’s joined since my last letter from Colorado! And greetings to all my wonderful long-time subscribers, too.
‘Maybe Once a Year, I’ll Mail Something Out’
Inspired by your responses to my latest Insta post, I’ve decided to kick off spring with a cheerful letter about literary rejection. The moral of the story is: if you’re being turned down by publishers and fellowships and grants, you’re doing it right, not wrong — and you’re definitely not alone, because I’m there with you.
And Lucia Berlin is with you, too. She received rejections throughout her writing life, including for short stories that have since become bestsellers, like ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ and ‘Angels Laundromat’. Here’s an extract from an interview she did in 1990, decades before she got the recognition she deserved.
Why are you such a secret? These days you seem to be a west coast treasure pretty much unknown on the eastern seaboard.
My books were published by small presses, with mostly west coast distribution. I hate rejection, and am very hesitant about submitting my work. I usually just wait for publishers and editors to find me, like you did.
[…]
I’m surprised that no New York publisher has picked you up.
I’m not surprised, since they keep putting me down! I’m disappointed though. Maybe once a year I’ll mail something out and it will get rejected so I won’t try again.
Although Lucia says that she ‘won’t try again’, she actually does — every year. And in 2015, a decade after her death, her writing was brought back into print by one of the most prestigious New York publishers of them all, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Lucia would have been over the moon. I just wish that she’d lived long enough to see her literary rejections give way to global acclaim.
Wait — What Is This Newsletter?
Quick interlude for everyone who has just joined us (and do feel free to skip to the next section if you’ve been here since the start)…
This newsletter began as a series of missives from the road, while I was following Lucia Berlin’s footsteps around the United States, Mexico and Chile between September and November 2023. You can still read those posts online — for instance, here are the letters from Juneau, Albuquerque and Yelapa (and the others are all there, too).
Now that I’ve finished my long trip ‘in search of’ Lucia, I’m writing up my findings in Looking for Lucia: A Biography in Motion, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It’s Lucia’s first biography, but it’s also a travel narrative, telling the story of my trans-continental search for my literary icon.
Right now, though — for once — I’m not on the road. I’m at my desk in Princeton, making the most of a rare month of stillness before I move back to the UK at the end of May, and then to Egypt in June. (Anyone with friends in Cairo: please connect us!) So these next few posts will be about the writing life in general… And in my experience, rejection is a big part of that.
My Rejection Resumé
I’m an expert at being rejected. And I’m really proud of my extensive rejection CV, since it’s proof of the extent to which I put myself and my writing out there.
I submitted my PhD in December 2023, and this was my first academic year of applying for postdoctoral fellowships. I cast my net not-very-wide, since I was trying to finish my thesis while also writing detailed fellowship applications. I applied to six in the UK and one in the US, and got rejected from all of them, although I was a finalist for one. I’ll reapply this coming academic year.
Since September, I’ve also been rejected from three grants for first-time biographers, one award for female biographers, and five subsidised writing retreats. And I’ve had my latest short story rejected by 47 literary magazines and journals over the past few years — I’m not exaggerating, and I’m continuing to revise it and send it out. The ‘Rejections’ folder in my email server contains 177 messages, and my Submittable account has received 121 ‘Decline’ responses since 2016.
Failure as the Foundation for Success
However, this academic year has brought good news, too: my short story ‘Georgia O’Keeffe and the Angel of Death’ was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize by The Idaho Review, having been rejected by 44 magazines before it found its ideal home there (The Idaho Review is such a wonderful journal — please check it out).
I’m so glad I kept redrafting and submitting that story, and that I didn’t give up!
Another recent happy ending was the publication of our special issue of The Cambridge Quarterly on biography — co-edited with the fabulous Emily Dorothea Hull, and featuring lots of great articles and an interview with Hermione Lee. The special issue finally appeared after not one, not two, but three revise-and-resubmits. Emily and I nearly abandoned hope after two-and-a-half years of rejections and delays, and I’m extremely grateful to her, and to our co-contributor Talia Kwartler, for keeping the faith.
My ‘real’ CV would simply list those successes: the Pushcart nomination, the special issue, the completed Cambridge PhD. But beneath the shiny stuff, my rejection resumé is proof that every achievement rests on a (deep) foundation of failed attempts.
So if you’re getting rejected, don’t give up. Revise your work, cast your net wide, and don’t lose hope that you’ll find the right home for your writing.
But How Can I Bear It?
Sometimes, I cry when I receive a rejection. Less so these days, since I’m pretty used to it — but if there’s a grant or a fellowship that I thought I was particularly well suited to, I might shed a tear. So what inspires me to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again (other than Fred and Ginger, obviously)?
Firstly, there’s my rejection resumé — which I hope gives you a boost, too! As you can see, I’ve learned from experience that failure is the path to success. And that makes it easier to keep going.
Secondly, there’s Lucia Berlin’s life. In 1963, her first novel was flat-out rejected by the publisher who’d paid for ‘first refusal’ and chased her for revisions for years. Half a century later, Lucia’s posthumous short story collection became a bestseller around the world and was translated into more than thirty languages. Imagine if she’d stopped writing in the 1960s, after that first disappointment!
Thirdly, there are the rejection stories of a million other celebrated writers and artists. For instance, while digging through the New York Public Library archives, I found this list of rejections of Mavis Gallant’s short story ‘Bebe’s Place’. The point is that it ends with the word ‘Sold’.
So every success story is also a rejection story. I loved Victoria Olsen’s recent Substack post about her father, the visual artist Earle Olsen, in which she quotes from one of his sketchbooks: ‘BE- / NOT PERFECT- / NO ONE IS.’
Victoria Olsen adds, ‘My father never really philosophized, so that quote is especially telling— and it circles back to the messy studios I began with. Those studios say “keep trying,” which is the only way to make art, the only way to get good at anything.’
So keep trying, everyone, and don’t be discouraged. I’m cheering you all on, as ever.
And thank you all so much for coming with me on my writing journey!
Nina
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Love this, Nina! In my first 3 days alone in London—right when this was sent—I received 2 rejections with quite a bit of sting (I had put months into vying for them). As I'm dusting myself off, this helped!
Thank you Nina—it's great to be reminded of this trio of essential qualities, and you embody them all in your writing life and in this piece. Bravo!