Monthly Archives: May 2025

Best Rejection Letter, Ever!

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Nicolás Espinosa, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Recently I ran into an old acquaintance I knew through writing many years ago. She told me that she’d submitted a few essays to a few places and when they got rejected she gave up. It’s such a familiar story. I probably hear a similar version of it from someone nearly every month or two. But while I can’t counteract the argument that submitting work is a drain on time that might be more enjoyably spent on other things, I urge folks to expand their view of what it means to be rejected.

This week, I got the following letter from ONLY POEMS, a magazine with a 1.61% acceptance rate.

Thank you so much for trusting us with your wonderful poem. Although we‘re passing on this submission, I wanted to let you know that we received almost 600 poems for the Poem of the Month and your poem was in my Top 30.

I know “Meditating in a Heat Wave” will find a wonderful home soon, and I welcome you to share it when it does. I’d love to see it published, and also consider sharing it on our socials.

I sincerely hope you’ll try us again for our next Poem of the Month call.We will open again with a new themed call feature soon. Keep an eye out for that!

I’d also like to invite you to submit for our Poet of the Week series.  We’re also forever open for our new features: short poems, ekphrastic, and poets howl. Learn about them through our Submittable page/website/Substack.

Wow!

Out of 600 poems, mine was in the top 30! That’s pretty darn good. Problem is, for this particular call, they were going to only publish one poem. We need to stop thinking zero-sum game here, and get out of the “sports team metaphor” that if you don’t win the championship, you’ve failed. What’s even more important than my “ranking” is that my work touched these editors to the point of saying that if the poem eventually gets published in another journal, they would consider sharing it on their social media sites, extending legitimacy to my work through their good name, and enhancing its reach through their 37.8K followers on Instagram.

Of course, I’m now psyched to submit to ONLY POEMS again, but whether or not they ever publish my work, I’ll be forever grateful to their generosity in taking the time to write this letter, rebunking the insidious inner critic who lives in all of us and delights in promoting the falsehood that rejection means we are bad writers, bad people, worthless, useless, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So while the submission game may not be for everyone, I’m determined to keep playing it. The odds may be about the same, but it’s a lot cheaper than going to a casino, and the “prizes”–even when they’re rejection letters, are a lot longer lasting than whatever money might come tumbling out of a slot machine.

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Holding On to Kindness

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Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what this grief journey feels like.

The path is still so foggy, it’s easy to take an unexpected turn and find myself confronting a new thicket of wet foliage: vines to climb over, felled trees. But for days at a time I feel like myself–going about my routines, enjoying the company of family and friends, even plunging into activism and edging my way back to writing, On these days, I’m barely able to access what it feels like to be sad and worried. And then suddenly, it all comes tumbling down again. Sometimes, this is in direct reaction to a news story; other times, even more than dealing with pangs of grief from personal loss, I find myself tuned in to the suffering of so many–both here in the U.S. and abroad in war zones and elsewhere, and feel frustration and despair at being too paralyzed to be able to do anything about it. Too paralyzed, in fact, to be able to do much of anything at all.

As “weapons” (i.e. news stories) keep dropping, I imagine I’m not the only one feeling stunned as I try to claw through the rubble of what’s left and assemble some kind of structure and foundation that will hold up in the ongoing storm–a mindset to hang onto that can keep me going. However, in the past few days, a couple of things stood out that felt like beacons guiding me to a more hopeful space.

We were in New York City and I was walking with my mother to the bank through the neighborhood I grew up in, which has always felt oppressive to me despite its vibrancy. The streets are filthy with litter. Unhoused people sleep by the subway stairs and people merely step over them or walk around them. The housing is blocked from the sidewalk with iron gates, and whatever flowers are blooming are encased in tiny concrete-bordered yards. Yet, my mom, who is 91, has found intimacy and support in the neighborhood’s underpinnings. She stops at the taxi stand on the corner to greet and introduce me to one of the drivers, who knows her by name. Then she greets the mail carrier, expressing delight that he’s recovered from his illness and is back on his regular route. And the bank teller warmly smiles at her in recognition when she enters, making me feel like I’m in a smaller close-knit neighborhood, rather than a large impersonal city.

It’s not clear whether everyone who lives here for a long time has a similar experience, or if these small connections are directly related to the way my mom takes on the world. She has said many times that one of the most important tips for a happy life and marriage is to always be kind. And I have witnessed the benefits of that kindness from the number of people ranging from contractors to close friends who’ve told me they love my mother and would do anything for her.

Truly, that’s a good tip–holding on to kindness and making it front and center as my mom continues to do, even as she struggles with her own grief at losing her life partner after 72 years, a grief that is even heavier and more profound than mine.

We also went to buy flowers for the yard–four generations of us: me, my mom, my daughter and son-in-law, and my 2-year-old grandchild. As we meandered through the aisles of colorful blooms, and then loaded them all into my daughter’s station wagon, I thought, this is what we need to do. Somehow, we need to keep things growing. Even if my mother’s yard is small and gated like all the other yards on the block, there’s hope in those flowers. And kindness in sharing their beauty with the people walking by, both those she knows and those she doesn’t.

 

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Befriending My Anger

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I generally reserve Wednesdays for blogging, because the end of the week is busier, but today, I find myself wondering what to write about. 

It’s likely a spread of the “writer’s block” that has permeated most of the rest of my writing life. It’s more like a silty fog than a blockade on the road. I can still delve into old poems/stories and revise them; I just haven’t been able to generate anything new that feels worth keeping.  

So instead of writing, I’ve been using the time to pour through my lists of submission opportunities, dragging out poems and stories, reading them through, working on a few and then putting things together in batches to send on Submittable. This is not terrible. I’m still spending time with my words; I’m just not birthing new ones.  But I’m missing the thrill of the generative process, saying something that feels important and urgent in the moment–something that matters.

I’m pretty sure the reason I’m feeling blocked is that I just don’t want to access the deep feelings lurking below the surface–my anger, fear and despair at all that’s happening in the world, tinted with the residue of grief from my father’s recent death. It’s not even that I’m feeling a need to write directly about these things, but to write anything of substance still requires a journey outside the carefully constructed contours of my world that I’ve struggled to hold front and center–even as I feel gratitude for having the reassurance of that world: the smiling greenery, the flowering trees, my friends and family, financial and food security.

Today, in writing group, a quote from Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James, a brilliant and poignant retelling of Huck Finn from the enslaved character Jim’s point of view:

I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it. 

And I realized that somehow I need to befriend my anger, my sadness, rather than keep it as a barely visible apparition on the other side of the fog. And then, simply brace myself, as the dam erupts, letting the rush of water and words spew forward.

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You’re Supposed to Say, Bravo!

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My two-and-a-half-year-old grandchild, Manu, loves to play songs on the piano, which he does by pressing down on random groups of notes in the song’s rhythm. Often he sings along, eradicating any question I might have about what song he’s playing, Sometimes I sing with him, but mostly, what he wants me to do is listen–and then burst into wild applause as soon as he plays the final note.

But a few weeks ago, suddenly that wasn’t enough. He turned to me and said, “You’re supposed to say, bravo!”

“Bravo!” I willingly added.

“No!” he said. “Bra…Vo” emphasizing each syllable with equal force and leaving a breath of air in between.

“Bra…Vo!”

“No, Braah…..Vo…oh..”

“Braah….Vo..oh.”

We went through this a few times. Apparently I couldn’t say bravo exactly the way his babysitter said it, but after a while he let it go and went on to something else. Thank goodness for two-year-old attention spans.

But I’ve been thinking about the message, regardless of whether I can pronounce the word bravo to Manu’s liking. We could all use more bravo in our lives.

As some readers of this blog know, four and a half years ago I started playing the piano again after pretty much abandoning it for most of my adulthood. This required way more than beefing up my music reading and finger dexterity. It involved delving into and confronting baggage that had plagued me my entire life–my debilitating perfectionism and the resulting shame at not being able to live up to the standards enshrined in our family legacy of professional musicians.

But I slogged through, one note, one phrase, one piece at a time until I eventually got the minimal piano chops I’d had up to snuff. I only played by myself in the living room. I didn’t want a teacher, or even anyone in my family to hear me play. Yet, in the back of my mind, I wondered, was I competent enough to join a chamber group? My kids had loved doing chamber music when they were teenagers and I’d been so envious. It looked like so much fun.

It took a year between the time I first started thinking about it before I called the local community music center and then another six months (until last February) to find a group. I’d like to say that being in this chamber music group was a sublime experience and a dream come true, but it wasn’t. On the other hand, it wasn’t awful, either. On a scale of sweet/sour, it skewed acidic, but the tangy taste was at least somewhat pleasurable. I felt gratified that I could play the music, and even if the coach seemed to give me more direction than she gave others, she always addressed me in a kind and respectful way. The other players all seemed friendly and no one stood out as being way above or below the level of the others–or unable to do what the piece demanded. But I didn’t get much of a sense of who they were as people, which I think lessened our ability to connect musically. And I didn’t particularly feel like we got into the nuances and phrasing of the piece, which made the experience rather boring (though in all fairness, maybe it was enough that we learned how to play together).

For all these reasons, and because I still am highly judgmental when it comes to music (despite how hard I try not to be), I really did not want to play at the end of semester recital. But the other musicians did, and I certainly wasn’t going to sabotage them–even though I told my partner and my daughter very definitively that no, I did NOT want them to come.

So, last Sunday I sucked it up and drove through the foggy, drizzly rain to the performance venue, arriving half an hour early so we could get in one last run through. I noticed that without depending on the coach to tell us what to do that we were able to stop ourselves to talk about problem spots and address them, and this made me feel more connected to the other musicians. And I was pleased that our actual performance of the piece, while not perfect or wonderful or exciting, was better than we usually played it, despite the nerves of having to play in front of an audience.

No one said, bravo, or (bra… vo…) but that’s okay. I can say bravo to myself for my bravery.

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The Art of Losing…

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My intent today was to write not about the fog of grief that’s encapsulated me in so many ways over the past two months, but about the process of clawing back my life. Yet, this morning in one of my favorite Zoom writing groups, I think it was one of those spiritually serendipitous accidents that Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, The Art of Losing, was offered as a lead-in to the writing prompt.

Lose something every day, Bishop writes, evoking objects as mundane as door keys and as complex as rivers.

And in her last verse:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

We’re in that all-too-short week of spring where everything’s blooming, but nothing’s quite leafed out, and yesterday, on a walk at the Bachelor Brook conservation area, I was wowed by the beauty of the tableau–the young spring green buds draping over the marshy water, the array of skunk cabbage sprouting tall on either side of the boardwalk that seemed to be smiling at us, the way the sun shone on the young saplings, bringing out the silver hues, and overlooking it all, my friends, the beeches–those thick trunked, wise elders.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Photo by Shel Horowitz

“I love this!” I said to Shel, my partner, grateful for a moment where I could find a sliver of genuine unadulterated happiness! “I love these trees!”

Photo by Shel Horowitz

And then, as if channeling my father’s voice, I added, “Except that one over there…”

It was just the kind of thing he would say. Like, “The food’s good, except for the taste.”

Yet, Bishop insists, in her closing line of every other verse of this villanelle (as required by the form) that the art of losing is not a disaster. Objects, places, people disappear from our lives, and somehow we go on. And while we might be able to replace the set of door keys, all we have left of the places and the people are the memories.

But this is where we can each turn to our own art to process the art of losing–expressing our feelings obliquely or directly through drawing, writing, music, dancing…

And in the process, claw back our lives.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

I say this having not written very much about my father or about anything in the past two months–other than these blog entries, because my schoolgirl self is committed to satisfying the Substack Bot that demands weekly posts. But I have been playing music with a different kind of intentionality, releasing what I can’t yet find words to express.

And I’ve gone back to more of my daily self-care routines of morning exercise and breathing practice, daily woods walking, and nightly music and meditation. It’s amazing how much these ground me and actually make me more productive and focused, despite how much time they take out of my day.

Most importantly, they make me feel normal. And even if in world events, where the second part of my grief lies festering, things are anything but normal right now, I cannot do my small but necessary part in addressing them unless I feel like my settled self.

I certainly haven’t mastered the art of losing, despite Bishop’s claim that it isn’t hard, but I’m slowly finding my way through the fog, with a lot more sun predicted in the upcoming forecast.