Sentimental lines

Here is a thank you note I wrote to my agent:

Hi ______,

I hope you're doing well and surviving the snow.

Today I got ______________, and I felt very emotional looking at them.

People say I'm "so young" with regards to my little success, but this has been a long time coming. I was seventeen when I made my first submission to the New Yorker (and promptly received a form rejection). Over the last decade, I've applied to dozens of MFA programs, tried for a Stegner three times (and Bread Loaf and Sewanee), and never stopped sending my stories and poems to the magazines and competitions. My mail was a steady stream of SASEs. I watched all my creative writing colleagues graduate alongside me and move into various careers, leaving behind their writing ambitions. I had no friends as serious as I was about "making it" as a writer. About seeing it through. They courted the idea of writing, which was my only passion, and then they labeled it a hobby and let it fall by the wayside.

When I looked around at the age of twenty-eight, I saw no one struggling with me -- or with the same intensity.

Everyone in my family knew I wanted to "be a writer," and I was beginning to feel like a fool.

Anyway. I swear. What a life.

I don't know how to thank you for taking me on, but please know that you've helped me attain the only thing I ever wanted.

Now, to this maudlin note, I want to attach my thanks to you, my readers. I've thanked you before -- but I can't thank you enough, or often enough. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that the past few weeks have been difficult for me. The crowning difficulty was my family's rejection of my writing -- their vocal "disappointment," "unhappiness," and dismissal of the Night Owl Trilogy as "porn."

I knew this was coming, and I knew when I published Night Owl that I was playing with fire.

The outpouring of support from you all has been the only thing that kept me from a feeling of devastation. You reminded me how much my story meant to you -- how much more than "porn" it is -- and told me that you were proud of me, and that I should be proud of how hard I worked to get here. Thank you for that. I needed to hear it -- so much.

As I think about the events of the past weeks, I keep coming back to two things. One -- that I published Night Owl knowing my family would despise it, and that I did it anyway, because it's a beautiful love story that doesn't shy away from intimacy. Two -- that my fiction and my faith don't stand on opposite sides of some imagined fence. My God is much larger than that.

Thank you again for reading my story, for enjoying my story, for seeing that life and love aren't wrong.

Yours,

M. Pierce