There’s no such thing as a good rejection letter, although I’m pleased that writers I’ve rejected sometimes say (when they submit again) that my form letter is the nicest they’ve ever received.

It’s sad when writers say they’d be grateful for any “comments or suggestions,” because I’m not a teacher. I’m not getting paid to spend a certain amount of time with a bunch of students, no matter what they do. It’s not my job to help writers improve.

Nobody outside the classroom knows what a teacher does day by day, but my work is out there for everyone to look at, so I have to commit to a manuscript. When I buy a manuscript, I’ll do more than make comments or suggestions, I’ll do whatever I can to make that manuscript as good as it can be.

Unlike a teacher, I don’t develop a relationship with a writer over time. Even if I work with a writer for months on a given piece—and sometimes I do—it’s not in order to develop a relationship, which is what teachers do, but to develop that particular piece. In any case, after the ultimate insult of a rejection, what difference would a few off-handed—even well-considered—remarks really make, except, perhaps, to make the writer feel better. For about 20 seconds.

The real reason I can’t comment on a rejected manuscript is that anything I might say would be construed as asking for another submission, and that’s almost never my intention.

I do scribble “Onward!” on the rejection letter, by hand, although actually my scribble is Xeroxed. Some people regard this as an intimate message and are disillusioned when they find out that everybody gets the same mark on the same letter, but I mean it to be a gesture of good will and encouragement.

I like what Richard Ford did, as he explained in his introduction to Best American Short Stories a few years ago: He began by thinking there was a sort of minor-league system of litmags and that he could find his level and break in somewhere. Then he decided that if he was getting rejected, it couldn’t be because the world was fucked up, and all the editors were fools, it had to be because he wasn’t writing well enough. So he decided to stop sending stuff out and keep writing until he could write a novel that was indisputably good. Which he did, although, as he revealed in the New York Times Magazine’s ’99 obit special, when Willie Morris of Harper’s came to supper 20 years later, Ford set a complete set of his old rejection notes beside his plate. Which Morris read aloud with great solemnity.

I used to quote Flannery O’Connor whenever I talked at writers’ conferences; she said that the trouble with writing programs was not that they stifled writers, but that they didn’t stifle enough. Whenever I’d say something like that at a conference, however, everybody hated me. What they wanted me to do was to help them sustain the illusion.

The great thing about writing is that amateurs—the rawest of novices—sometimes hit it big. Someone can always come in out of the blue, even people who are not good writers.

The hardest thing for an editor, of course, is rejecting a writer you’ve published before. Dorianne Laux, whom I’ve published the most of any writer—eight or nine times over the years—wrote me a nice note after I’d rejected her recent submission:

What a great rejection letter! You sure know how to make a girl feel good about losing. I had wondered about your reaction to those poems, esp. “Teaching Poetry with Pictures.” They didn’t seem to me to be ZYZZYVA material. And yet, I remember that you had originally been drawn to “Quarter to Six” and “What My Father Told Me,” so I thought, “What the hell, take a stab at it.”

At any rate—no, I couldn’t hate you and I don’t think your unqualified acceptance of my work is part of our agreement and yes it’s O.K. to see and not buy, reject & not condemn and yes I know it’s hard and that’s what I like about you and have from the beginning. I remember you writing and asking me for work and sending it and you rejecting it and me thinking—“This is great, this guy isn’t afraid to say no!” and ever since I have thought “Well, if Howard thinks it’s good it must be and if he doesn’t like a poem that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like my work—he just doesn’t like that one poem.”

I guess it’s kind of how we can like a person but not like a particular aspect of that person, like when they say “you know” every third word or wear stupid clothes. You know? And anyway, I’ve always felt a sort of loyalty to ZYZZYVA because it picked up on my work out of nowhere and actually wrote and asked for some and ended up publishing, beautifully, two of the best poems I feel I’ve ever written.

So I have a soft spot in my heart for ZYZZYVA, and you, and besides, any editor who would send a CLMP Poet’s Award form inside a rejection letter can’t be all bad, now, can they?

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