Author: Rebecca Cuthbert

The skill of being rejected

Pic: This is how I keep track of submissions. Low tech but effective.

I have found, pretty recently, that being rejected as a writer is a skill. And like any skill, you can get better at it.

During lockdown, I got back to work on my own writing, spending more time and energy on it than I had in years. Instead of finding the creative well dry, as I had feared, a couple of stories seemed to write themselves. I joined four friends in a Zoom writing workshop (we still meet). I made appointments with an excellent editor-for-hire, and we’ll schedule another session soon. I wrote and I revised, and then I wrote some more. I went on a personal writers’ retreat, renting a cabin in the Catskills with my wonderful friend N. West Moss for a few days, and drafted two new stories. For a while there, I was kicking ass.

In that time period, I also got back to submitting my work to journals and magazines and writing contests. I realized that the process energizes me–everything sent out is a chance that it will find a place in the world. Submitting stories (and sometimes, essays and poems) makes the process more real for me–it makes me feel more like a “real” writer, whatever that is.

And wow, did those rejections roll in. And they keep rolling in. And honestly, yep, sometimes they stung, and sometimes they still do. But they sting less all the time. I shrug at them now, mostly. If I get two in a day, I laugh. It sucks, even now, if I get a rejection on a submission I thought was a good fit–like if my story matched the theme, or aligned with the goals of the publication.

A few came close. “Joiner,” a story, was a finalist in the New Millennium Writing Awards. A flash piece, “Rest for the Wicked,” got a lovely rejection from the Parsec Ink contest, saying it made the longlist. Fatal Flaw rejected two poems, but encouraged me to send more (I will!).

I’ve gotten acceptances, too. For the year of 2021, my record is 5 acceptances, 43 rejections, with a handful of submissions still out. Most recently, The Elpis Pages, a print collective (with profits going to Planned Parenthood), took my essay “What’s Left.” That will be out this month. Then, I got an email from Last Girls Club, saying my story wasn’t a fit for their magazine, but could they read it on their podcast, Blood & Jazz? (The answer of course was YES.)

A lot of what has gotten accepted from 2020-2021 had been in the works for a while. Like a long-ass time. A poem that Blueline Magazine took (“Bargain,”) had existed in various forms for over seven years. “Tourist,” a flash essay Anti-Heroin Chic published, was first drafted about three years ago. Every time those pieces (and others) got rejected, I would take another look at them. Tinker. Fiddle. Tighten them up. And, not surprisingly, they got better. And then they found homes.

I was inspired by the article “Why you should aim for 100 rejections a year” from LitHub by Kim Liao. I was also motivated by a Facebook thread posted by the editor of a small press, which turned into a big conversation about why women tend to submit less often than men. (Spoiler: it’s because patriarchy.) The main idea with both of those? Submit, submit, submit.

I look for opportunities on various Facebook pages, through Reedsy, Newpages, and Erica Verillo’s blog, Publishing and Other Forms of Insanity. I don’t mind submissions fees–publications are expensive to run and print, and need to pay for staff and software, etc.–but I don’t break the bank. I look for cheap and free submissions opportunities, too. I keep track of everything in a janky notebook–see photo. (I tried keeping a tidy Excel file, but that’s just not me–I’m a pen-and-paper gal at heart.)

In 2022, I hope to hit the 100 rejection mark. If I double my rejections, I might just double my acceptances, too. Who’s in?

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“Stay on the Path,” an Interview with N. West Moss, author of FLESH & BLOOD

N. West Moss is the author of the story collection, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, and the memoir, Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life. Her essays and short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, The Stockholm Review, Salon, the New York Times, Brevity, River Teeth, and Ars Medica, amongst many others

Q: What projects are you working on now? What are you excited about? 

A: I have several projects in various stages of completeness. I have a middle grade book that has been purchased, and I expect to get notes from my editor shortly. I also have ideas for two sequels to that book, and those ideas are written down in a file. I have a children’s book that I’m writing with my mother. I have a novel for adults that I’m also working on, as well as several essays, a short story, and a one-act play. That sounds like I’m writing a lot. I’m not really, but they are all there and ready for me as soon as I have time. Oh, another cool thing is that someone has purchased film rights for a few of my short stories, so I’ve gotten to spend time with him and hear the ways that he is envisioning making a very quiet story into a short film. It’s thrilling to collaborate in that way, to write, but really, I’m excited about all of my projects, every single bit of them. Creative endeavors–what joy.


Q: You write in seemingly all genres. Is it difficult or freeing to move between genres? What advice do you have for other authors who want to diversify that way? 

A: I read in all genres, from the most high-falutin’ literary work (think Virginia Woolf) to armloads of YA, poetry, plays, etc. I love language and I don’t feel like being bound by form. So no it’s not difficult to move between genres. It’s a delight. My memoir [has launched], and [I’m doing] interviews about that book, but I’m already looking forward to spending time writing fiction again, where I can make things up, and amuse myself without being the center of the story. So I love it. That being said, I have a lot to learn. So I got the itch to write a play or two or three, and I know that there is a lot I don’t know, so I’m sitting in on a friend’s script writing class, and I’m hoping another friend (you know who you are!) will teach an online class that I can attend in January. I want to be good at it, and I want to test out the ways that these different forms both constrain and allow us certain freedoms, simultaneously. 


Q: What have you NOT tackled yet that you want to? 

A: I want to get better at long-form fiction. I love great novels and I feel right at the edge of my ability with that. I need time though, to get better at it. The novels that I want to write require great time and concentration, and I don’t have great swaths of time, sadly. I also want to write some plays. I’m all excited about Sara Ruhl’s work (I got to be on a panel with her recently and now I’m reading everything she’s written) but I’ve always been fascinated by Eugene O’Neal’s two plays, A Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh, and the ways that allowing characters to just speak for themselves reveals them so utterly. I want to be able to do that. I also love the idea of working with other people sounds great. I’d love to have a director and actors and lighting designers and costume people all add to their vision of my story. It just sounds like fun. Oh, also, I have never written poetry. I love reading poetry, but I just have never learned how to make it myself, even though I think that some of my language is poetic. I’m not a poet, I don’t get how to do it, and maybe someday someone will teach me how.


Q: What are you trying to write “around” in your life–what priorities also take up your time and energy, and how do you fit writing in, too?

A: All I want is time. All any writer wants is time. I wish I was rich and had a butler and a cook and someone to make me cocktails and do the dishes. But I don’t have any of that, and I have a full-time job, so I work around all of that. Whenever I think that it’s too hard, I think about Pearl Buck getting up very early in the morning and writing before her children awoke and before she went out to work in the rice fields, and I think, Quit being a baby and get to work. So I try to be disciplined. I have a lot of books that I want to write before my life is over, and my father, who did some writing, lost his ability to think clearly at the end of his life, so I feel like the clock is ticking. I try not to waste time, but I still do, and I’m not too hard on myself. I don’t want to ruin writing for myself by beating myself up. My career is moving along and maybe one day I’ll be able to afford to take a long residency somewhere and get substantial work completed. Until then, I do what I can. 


Q: So much about writing is really about networking and marketing, which can exhaust writers and take time away from their craft. How do you connect with readers and other writers in ways that you find beneficial or rewarding? 

A: There’s also all the time spent sending our work around and waiting for a response. I got into MacDowell a few years ago. What a lucky break that was, and I’ve since been to other residencies including the glorious Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and Cill Rialaig in Ireland. Meeting other artists at these places is enormously helpful. But really things are getting easier for me now. Getting the right agent has been enormously helpful.  He looks out for me, and helps me strategize about my career, and he protects me from a lot of the sending out process and the negotiations, that I wouldn’t be very good at. Having my current book published by Algonquin has been a stunning change for me. They arrange events for my book. They send the galleys out to reviewers and influencers. They get me interviews. They even help place some of my writing. All of this is to say that if you keep plugging away and get lucky enough to have an amazing agent and a lovely publisher, you finally get to do a bit less of these other jobs, and more of the writing. I say that to you, though, in the midst of the vortex of my first big launch, and even with people helping with that other stuff, it’s still pretty extroverted and exhausting. The thing is, I’m willing to do anything if it means I get to be a writer, and my job, as I see it, is just to stay on the path and put one little foot in front of the other for as long as I can.

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The pressure to produce

I’m writing this post even though my website isn’t ready. I’m creating a website even though I don’t really need one. I’m writing and revising and workshopping and submitting even though I don’t have a book to my name and maybe never will.

I’m doing all of this as I teach four classes per semester as an adjunct at a state university, hold a part time position as the managing editor for a small press, take one class at a time in a hairbrained bid to get a PR degree, and try to be present for my family.

But I’m not unique–I know so many writers, all of us too old to make those horrid “30 Under 30” lists. We’re not emerging writers and we’re not established writers. We’re all just swimming toward a shore that looked deceptively close when we were younger and seems to get farther away the longer we paddle.

But I am (we are) stubborn as well as struggling. The voice inside my head that tells me to keep going isn’t loud, but it’s persistent. Every time I submit to a journal or to a contest a tiny bubble of hope, no bigger than a bit of carbonation in a glass of ginger ale, floats up to the surface. I shrug and tell myself “Maybe.”

So, just like that saying “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” I’m creating this website for what I hope one day to have and have done. And I’m creating this blog as a community space where we, all those paddling writers and I, can whisper “Maybe” together and celebrate the big and small successes and remind each other to keep trying, even though we’re fighting through jobs and chores and family obligations to grab those few precious moments when we have the time and the energy to write. To tell each other it’s okay that sometimes we can’t find those moments.

So, coming soon to this blog, look for interviews with authors and editors, guest posts from other writers, news on my projects, and musings on how I might be tired but that doesn’t mean I’m done.

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“Tides Advance, Tides Retreat,” Review of WATER LOG by Hugo Clemente

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: Serene, seductive, buoyant, and seething in turn, Hugo Clemente’s Water Log is ever shifting and always beautiful, like the ocean that features as both character and landscape in this fragmented narrative. It has been called poetry, a novel, a love story, a travel log — and while it is these things, it’s also a celebration of the nomadic surfer’s lifestyle and a keen-eyed critique of those who inhabit and visit the Canary Islands.

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“Love Lies Large,” Review of LOVE WAR STORIES by Ivelisse Rodriguez

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: In her debut collection, Ivelisse Rodriguez shows us that love and war do not exist as binary opposites—they are not even two sides of the same coin or any other cliché that points to a line, a division between the two. Love is war, an amorphous, shifting mass that stains forever what it does not consume.

Readers should mark that a Julia de Burgos quote opens the first story, and that is a clue to what follows. The famous Puerto Rican poet—champion of women and independence, disappointed so many times by love and lovers—will show up here and there throughout the pages that follow, an inspiration to the characters as well as Rodriguez herself. That several biographies trace a straight line from de Burgos’s heartache to her early death is lost on no one.

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“Hurt Like a Man,” Review of THE DOGS OF DETROIT by Brad Felver

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: One phrase comes to mind again and again while reading Brad Felver’s story collection, The Dogs of Detroit: toxic masculinity.

Colleen Clemens, in her essay “What We Mean When We Say, ‘Toxic Masculinity'” for The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project (tolerance.org), asserts that the term refers to a gender-construct theory—that it does not label all men as violent or evil, but that it is a “dangerous brand of masculinity” that can reinforce or encourage violence as the only or best answer.

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“Off Track and the Climb Back,” Review of CATCH, RELEASE by Adrianne Harun

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: What happens in the murky spaces between bright streets and crowded playgrounds? Where do the children go when no adult can bother to wonder; what do the adults get up to when grief, addiction, and sex stop up their senses and make them forget the roles they’re supposed to play?

Adrianne Harun shows us the answers in her third book, Catch, Release, a collection of short stories linked by her protagonists’ dark urges and unblinking shamelessness.

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“Groping Through the Fog,” Review of NOTES FROM THE FOG by Ben Marcus

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: Folks don’t always know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, what they’re supposed to be doing instead, and, moreover, how they’re supposed to feel about any of that. Ben Marcus’s collection Notes from the Fog seems to offer readers a variety of these existential crises—the author spreading out the brutal choices like a Vegas dealer fanning out cards—and while no one will really find clear answers to those questions or even much comfort in reading the stories, the collection’s narrators and speakers do function as grinning Pied Pipers who will dance everyone happily to hell.

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“On Giving and Forgiving,” Review of MY BEARD: MEMOIR STORIES by Sharon Doubiago

This review is published and owned by American Book Review. To read it in its entirety, please create an account with Project MUSE.

EXCERPT: Sharon Doubiago’s vibrant career as a poet, memoirist, teacher, and chronicler has most recently given readers My Beard: Memoir Stories, what her included biography calls “a memoir in the form of individual stories rather than the on-going narrative of traditional memoir.” Though the term “beard” calls to mind disguises—costume-shop props as well as pretended heterosexual relationships—Doubiago can’t be accused of hiding behind one in any of these remembered encounters. If anything, her accounts are painfully bare, raw in the sense that even with the balm of time and reflection, the reader can feel her frequent heartache and sometimes physical agony crackling outward from the pages.

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“Mon interview de Rebecca Schwab”

This interview was conducted by Cécile Matthey, and published on cecilematthey.ch. This above image is an illustration for «Thick on the Wet Cement» by Cécile Matthey.

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Dans le cadre des 10 ans du webzine anglais « The Future Fire », j’ai eu l’occasion d’interviewer Rebecca Schwab, auteure de la nouvelle « Thick on the Wet Cement », publiée dans « The Future Fire » en 2012 et que j’avais illustrée. Faisons la connaissance de cette écrivaine américaine, qui a plus d’une corde à son arc…

This year, The Future Fire, the magazine of social-political speculative fiction edited by Djibril al-Ayad, celebrates its 10th birthday. Rebecca Schwab is one of the talented authors whose works have been published in The Future Fire. Rebecca writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She serves as acquisitions editor for Leapfrog Press and Crossborder: A Journal of Fiction (Leapfrog Press and Guernica Editions), reports for The OBSERVER in Dunkirk, NY, and is a freelance writer for Buffalo Spree Magazine. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Drafthorse, Allegro Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. Rebecca has been kind enough to answer a few questions about her writing work, in particular about the short story  “Thick on the Wet Cement,” published in The Future Fire in 2012, and that I had the good luck to illustrate.

CM : Rebecca, what were your sources of inspiration to write the short story “Thick on the Wet Cement” ?

RS : For “Thick on the Wet Cement,” the object of the speaker’s curiosity (the walking woman) is based on a real woman in Morgantown, West Virginia. For all I know she is still there. She doggedly walked around town every day, rain or shine. She never smiled or greeted anyone. I always watched her, wondering what kept her so focused, and what kept her from being friendly. I was a little like the speaker of the story, but unlike that speaker, I never had the courage to say hello to her. The story came out of that speculation. I write a bit of poetry, too, which is how the haiku ended up in the story. I thought, that would be the only way someone could really communicate with “The Walker.”

CM : Could you tell a little about how you work to write a story?

RS : All of my stories come from the same basic “What if?” ideas that a lot of writers consider. I imagine a character, someone who is normal and strange all at once (like all of us), and put him/her in a situation in which he/she is uncomfortable—a situation in which the character is barely keeping his/her mask on, or can’t quite get what he/she wants. For “Thick on the Wet Cement,” I thought: what if someone became a little obsessed with that woman? Why would someone become so fixated? What would that speaker’s life be like? What would happen if there was ever a confrontation? I have a lot of unfinished stories, because I haven’t always been able to answer whatever question comes next. I hope to, someday. Those unfinished stories nag at me in unguarded moments, like when I’m washing the dishes, or can’t sleep.

CM : Do you have favourite themes?

RS : I don’t know that I have intentionally favorite themes, but looking back through my stories, I see that loneliness and desire for connection are often present. And I also see that my characters don’t usually get what they want, or at least not in the ways that they would wish for. I think, though, that with “Thick on the Wet Cement,” there is at least an opportunity for hope–maybe the walking woman will stop in to talk with the speaker. At least, the speaker doesn’t lose hope, which is kind of nice, or kind of sad, depending on how one looks at it.

CM : Have you always written?

RS: I don’t know that I’ve “always” done anything, but in high school I noticed how much I enjoyed writing–from poetry to essays. I was relatively good at it, and pursued it in college, where I met Alison Umminger, who was a wonderful influence. She gave me great advice about grad school, and I ended up getting a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from West Virginia University. There, Mark Brazaitis and Kevin Oderman became mentors, too. Now, I work several jobs that involve writing. Unfortunately, that means that « my writing » is kind of an extra thing–when I have time for it, which is not as often as I’d like it to be. Right now, I have a lot of ideas somersaulting through my head that haven’t found their way to paper (or computer file) yet.

CM: What are your favourite authors and texts?

RS: There are really too many authors and works that I admire to compose a complete list–I love the novel Waterland by Graham Swift. I love Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. I love everything from the lit/sci-fi novels of Jasper Fforde to old, “cozy” mysteries. Mary Stewart novels are fun to read. I recently finished The Shipping News, and loved that. My tastes are all over the place.

CM: How have you come to know The Future Fire?

RS: A friend initially put me onto The Future Fire. I find that my writing isn’t always easy to classify–sometimes it’s more of a hybrid instead of one specific genre, or maybe the subject matter and tone don’t “match” in a traditional way–so an inclusive publication like The Future Fire appeals to me, both as a reader and a writer. They’re into new and progressive work; they appreciate diversity, and they don’t shy away from what other magazines or journals might consider risky or weird.

CM: How does it feel to see your stories illustrated? Do you find it interesting, or disturbing, especially if the vision of the illustrator is different from yours?

RS: I’ve only had my work paired with graphics/pictures three times, and the artwork in The Future Fire is by far my favorite. Your drawing is uncannily like the woman I based the story on–down to the expression on her face. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I was absolutely thrilled. For my other stories that have been paired with photos, well, they worked. They were not as intentional as the one for TFF, though. I suppose if someone paired my work with a picture I didn’t like, or that I didn’t think fit, I’d probably keep my mouth shut. I often wear an editor’s hat, and answer to editors for all three of my jobs. So, I have respect for the position. If someone asked my opinion, I would give it honestly and respectfully.

CM: What are your writing projects?

RS: Right now, I have a very long to-do list with the press, the newspaper, and the magazine, plus some side editing projects. I mentioned that I have a few stories still in the works–I hope to return to them soon.

CM: Thank you very much, Rebecca. We wish you a lot of extra time to write!

16th August, 2015

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