On Rejection and the Beautiful Blueberry

I was not in the best of moods the other morning. It was gray and sleeting, and I'm guilty of letting weather sway my moods. The to-do list seemed overwhelming, and the calendar said there were to be no babysitting hours to be had for four days. As I leaned over the two-year-old to change his diaper, in my worn black cabled sweater, he reached up and grabbed a knit bobble. "Booberries," he said. "Iss pretty."

 Anyone who spends time with children knows the little bits of gold that come out of their mouths. They can also spew mercury and bile like Linda Blair, and show you just what they think of your stinking rules with every cubic inch of air in their lungs. But sometimes there's an utterance that makes you smile, something they say that makes you see things in a way you never have before, and for one shining moment you realize it's not true that there's nothing new under the sun, not as long as there are two-year-olds who can see blueberries in yarn.

Happiness can be brought on by the smallest, most unexpected things. I've had my entire evening turned around by a stranger in a restaurant, usually an older woman, who after suffering at the table beside us for an hour says something out of the blue like, Your children are so lovely. It doesn't matter how the kids treated me that morning or will again once we get home. She saw that I was trying, and that they were trying, and the result was something worth the tip of a hat. It's possible to be blindsided by a random bit of kindness, and it is important to be thankful for it.

 This has been on my mind since I wrote the Acknowledgements for my novel not long ago. Most people have probably never done an official Acknowledgements page, but it's a fascinating exercise, creating a neat small file of gratitude. How often do we ever sit down and make an accounting of the people who made a thing possible, who supported us and shaped us and were involved in the whole confluence of events that resulted in achieving a goal?

And yet I'm aware of one person I wanted to thank in my Acknowledgements, but didn't. To thank her would have been strange since we'd never met, never even spoken.

When I finished the first draft of my novel I was enormously pregnant with my fourth child, and filled with an urgency to progress in every way. It was my first time trying to write or publish fiction, and my point of reference for the timeline was as a magazine freelancer: a) finish, b) publish, c) paycheck. I was not accustomed to improving something slowly at no extra fee or guarantee. So in my rush to cross "Get Agent" off my to-do list before the baby came, I sent off a handful of queries immediately.

The baby came, and so did the agents' responses—some passes but also partials and fulls, all leading to rejections in the end.

It's easy to lick your wounds when you have a beautiful new infant. I put aside my manuscript and became absorbed with the unclear division of days and nights, much as I had after each of the previous three births, consumed with feedings and laundry and exhaustion and love. Months passed. What are you going to do with the novel, my husband would ask gently, because it wasn't like me to leave something unfinished. But I couldn't find a point of reentry, or a reason.

One day a letter came from the last of the agents I'd queried who'd asked for a full manuscript. I'd given up long ago, because she was a well-known agent who represented several authors I admired, and you often never heard back from important people. But when I pulled the letter from the envelope, it was three pages long. Three pages of thoughtful reflection on what she felt I had envisioned in undertaking my novel and nearly achieved, but not quite.

I read each paragraph with words like insightful and compelling, and kept waiting for the "but" that would really hurt. The turn-down came, but it came like this: "This was a near miss for me." I could feel the reluctance in her words, and it was almost as meaningful as an acceptance. I was a rookie in the business of publishing fiction, but I already knew from peers that a pass like this was not really a rejection at all. It was a blessing. Agents are too busy to take the time to write long letters of rejection just to be nice. She was not my mother, my friend, or my writing instructor. She didn't have to take the time to encourage me, or let me down gently. The only way this stranger would say it was a near miss and taken three pages to say so was if it were true.

I dove into revisions with an energy I hadn't felt since my second trimester. Someone had seen the likeness of nature in my writing, had seen hints of blueberry in the bobble, and taken the time to say so. This was a near miss for me, I would think in the downtimes. And it was enough to recharge my faith that someday, for someone, it would not be.