It’s Monday and that means it is time for another Rejecting Rejection: Saying Yes to Yourself When the World Says No blog post. Today, we have with us the one and only Cori McCarthy. Cori’s essay will make you laugh, make you think, and make you praise the heavens that be that the the no’s she heard helped her find her voice. It would be a less brave world without it.
Welcome, Cori. Thanks for being here at The Writing Barn blog.
THE ROAD TO VOICE IS PAVED WITH REJECTION
by Cori McCarthy
In the spring of 2005, I was about to graduate from Ohio University with a BA in Creative Writing. For four years I had ignored the plethora of doubters who took pleasure in letting me know that it was a dead-end, or even crueler, a worthless degree. I was determined to make my passion into a career. The next step was grad school, where I’d continue to study poetry, and you know, eventually become Billy Collins. My chin was up. My hopes were Himalaya high.
Then I got rejected from the only grad school I applied to.
I immortalized my reaction in a terrible rant of a poem. You might want to hold your breath for this crime against lyricism.
Rejection Letter
(For the Graduate Admissions Office at Emerson College)
Oh I know now just what I’ll be
A decision without choice is oh so easy,
My title: The Serial Killer of Schools
And I will be the hero of more than just fools.
I’ll wear a holster for my scissors
Needed to cut the libraries into letters,
And I’ll paint gasoline on the chalkboards
To answer what they were meant for.
The teachers, well their lives they should keep
For who else would we follow without their lead?
But they will have to leave behind classrooms
Internet, email, projectors, and other stupid tools.
My destruction will cackle
As the waging fires crackle
That bricks, wood and concrete
Can fall to pieces (yet look so neat!)
For what are the buildings and committees
Telling us all to be?
Merely successful and well-known
So their brochure can brag how it’s grown…
No! I will be the revenge of deterred talent
And every brushed-off Person referred to as “student”,
You know, no one will even ask me why
Because we have all been there, we have all tried.
So do you blame my aspiration?
That I have not folded to intimidation,
And still believe in myself to possess great things,
That much faster than a college, I might just grow wings.
-Cori M. McCarthy, May 2005
Rejection is ugly. So is this poem. I swear I can actually write a real poem, I just never intended to share this with a living soul—or even to read it again. I can’t tell you how tempted I am to edit this, but I promise that I didn’t change a word or comma. This poem was type-stomped while steam fizzled through my hair, and I feel that sentiment should be preserved.
Clearly, I. Was. Dashed. But what was worse was that all those negative nancies seemed to be right after all. I couldn’t find a job with my degree. I started working at a liquor store where I beheld a raucous scale of humanity that put my simple rejection into context. I reread my application to grad school and found that I had been so intent on rising above the difficulties of being a writer, that my poems were unrealistic. At best, they were naïve. At worst? Blind.
The liquor store gave me more than perspective. I met my best friend there, Mario, a similarly thwarted boy with a philosophy degree. Just like that I wasn’t alone, and after awhile, I began to dream of writing again. Not poetry. No. Poetry was dead to me after all that (although, how much could I have cared for it if so little had turned me away?).
I set my sights on film school and dug in. I completed an online graduate degree in screenwriting from UCLA and volunteered to do grunt-work for my choice film school’s productions. I wanted to be sure to get my foot in the door. I wouldn’t be rejected this time around. I was going to become Charlie Kaufman.
Wrong again.
This snappish rejection letter was far worse than the first. No hilariously livid poems this time. My keyboard went silent for years.
I found AmeriCORPS next, volunteering as a reading tutor in an at-risk school district of Appalachian Ohio. Working with kids brought me back to books. I read the Harry Potter series for the first time (having told myself previously that I was far too old to enjoy it). And I began to write again. Just little stories crafted out of the weekly spelling lists and personalized for the kids I worked with.
I started writing a high fantasy piece on my lunch break. It was the kind of indulgent, wonderful, lose-yourself story that I couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying outside of myself. My secret work amassed to hundreds of pages, until I eventually described it to a well-read friend. When she told me that it sounded like it was young adult, I had no idea what she was talking about. You see, I hadn’t let myself walk around the children’s section at the bookstore since I was a child.
It wasn’t until I took a long look at my own shelves that I noticed that my favorite stories (The Lord of the Rings, The Catcher in the Rye, and Jane Eyre) were being re-categorized as young adult. Realizing that was like waking up. All my favorite stories were YA. All my sharpest memories and emotions were from high school. The idea of writing for that audience lit me up inside like a flare.
My husband (boyfriend at the time) suggested that if I was serious, I should set my sights on grad school. But I didn’t know if I wanted to be serious. Being serious about writing had been my doom all along. Every time I had tried to apply for grad school, I had unintentionally altered my writing to meet an imagined standard. But I sucked it up and googled “writing for young adults MFA” and came up with Vermont College of Fine Arts. The school looked beyond great, but the application due date was in two days. For once I didn’t overthink it. I attached that I-Want-To-Be-Tolkien manuscript and hit send.
Two weeks later, I got a phone call from Montpelier. I sent it to voicemail. I had screwed up the application, no doubt. These guys weren’t going to send me a snappish letter. They were calling to ask, “What were you thinking?” …right? But the message was nice. A woman named Kate said that she had “good news” for me. I called back immediately.
I had gotten in to VCFA.
The first day of residency, I learned that writers are everywhere. I had never met another serious writer, let alone become friends with them. Ten days later, I had a new family. By the end of the first packet, I had learned that I am not J.R.R. Tolkien. Over the next two years, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I found my voice, which—like the earlier poem hinted—needs a bit of fisticuffs to grapple with honesty.
After graduation, I tackled finding an agent, a book deal, and eventually a publisher with the new knowledge that rejection (which still stings like a host of hornets to the face, by the way) is an active part of publishing. Without rejection, I would have spent 40k learning that I am neither Billy Collins nor Charlie Kaufman. I suppose that’s the very best part—at the end of the day, I get to write as Cori McCarthy.
Cori McCarthy is the author of the YA space thriller, The Color of Rain (Running Press Teens). Her second novel, Breaking Sky, is forthcoming from Sourcebooks Fire—a story about fathers, forgiveness, and fighter jets. Cori is a contributing blogger at ThroughtheTollbooth.com and is a cohost for the goofy vlog series @NerdBaitGuide. She lives in Michigan with her family and beloved Jade trees. Find out more at www.CoriMcCarthy.com