What We Give Power To, What We Remember: Rejections Versus Achievements

What We Give Power To, What We Remember: Rejections Versus Achievements

First of all, thank you to Every Day Poems for featuring a poem, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [villainess]” from The Robot Scientist’s Daughter on its site.

So, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been keeping my rejection slips in photo albums, shoe boxes, or tacked onto cork boards since I started writing and submitting poems – when I was nineteen.

The other day I happened upon a photo album with about ten years worth of rejections: finalist notices for book contests I never won, kindly remarked rejections from journals I’ve never gotten into. It was really kind of a…bummer. Sure, as other famous writers have remarked, rejections are a sign that you’re doing the work of submitting. They keep us humble. In my case, they remind me of where the hell I’ve sent work and what different editors thought of it at various times. But maybe keeping them to the exclusion of the good things that happen in the writing life is doing us no favors.

So, to counter the effect of looking over ten years of kind rejections and unsigned rejections, “this came close” notes, I decided to create a scrapbook. I’m not really a scrapbooking girl, but this seemed important (plus Barnes & Nobles had a scrapbook kit on sale for half-off.)

I started to look up any signs of good things that had happened in my writing life, to see what I had kept. A newspaper clipping from a campus visit for my first book, Becoming the Villainess. A clip from the Seattle Times about my first book. A check from one of my first publications. A reminder that I’d met a lot of college-day poetry heroes like Denise Duhamel and Dorianne Laux. My husband printed out quotes from nice reviews, and found letters of acceptance and awards. I went through years of pictures I’d never printed out – my writing groups, my readings, AWP, meeting up with poets I’d admired at Poetry Festivals and Summer Writing Conferences – from the last ten years. I picked my favorites, and printed out this evidence of poetry success, fun, and friends (along with some really unfortunate hairstyles and colors). One of the lessons I learned from this? Keep more of the good stuff, let go of the bad stuff. Don’t treasure your failures more than your successes.

Maybe your thing isn’t scrapbooking. But think about the mementos you’re allowing to take up space – physical, mental, emotion – and think about replacing the mementos of discouragement with ones that encourage you, that inspire you, that remind you of the good places you’ve been and people you’ve met along the way.