Rejection Slips
ON NOT GETTING INTO THE NEW YORKER
Somehow most of my early stories had the good fortune to land on the editorial desk of a guy named Daniel Menaker. I had no idea who this person was, and it didn’t really matter because at that time in my life, editors were all-powerful demigods whose approval would allow me entry into the world I hungrily watched from afar, typing in solitude in my tiny duplex in Carrboro, North Carolina. Daniel Menaker and I became pen pals: Year after year I wrote stories, sent them to him, and he slipped them into the self-addressed stamped envelope and sent them back to me.
But not just that. He would always take a moment to write a little something, and sign it “DM.”
Looking at the first rejection letter I received from him brings back memories of the young me, the me who really knew nothing at all about what he was doing,
MY FIRST time? November 29, 1984. It was the third story I’d ever written and, like the other two, was brooding and mannered and obscure, the work of a young writer writing the way he thought writers wrote. I was confident about that story, though. At six pages, it was the longest one I’d ever written, capacious by my standards, the perfect story to send to the best magazine in the world. I had a pretty good feeling that the New Yorker was going to buy it, publish it, and I was going to be on my way. I was twenty-five years old.
Before I say what I’m about to say I need to say this: I’m a lucky writer. I’ve published six novels, most recently Extraordinary Adventures, which was released this past May. Big Fish, my first novel, was a New York Times best-seller and was adapted into a Tim Burton film and then a Broadway musical, and my other books have been published to “critical acclaim”—which means they didn’t sell as well as the first one. My books have taken me all over the world; I’ve had a wonderful time, and I hold not even the smallest grudge toward anybody.
However.
Of all the things I’ve wanted to happen in my writing life, the one I’ve wanted longer than any other is to have one of my short stories published in the New Yorker. I have been trying to do that, without success, for over thirty years.
For that first decade of my writing life, no single thing more closely corresponded to my idea of success than getting into the New Yorker. The writers who had influenced me the most—Salinger, Updike, Cheever, Nabokov, Welty—had been published there. It was more than a magazine to me: It was where the literature of the twentieth century actually happened. To be accepted by the New Yorker and edited by the great literary gatekeepers of this country—the heirs of William Shawn and William Maxwell—would be an honor and a validation that could not be equaled.
How many stories did I submit? I don’t really know. But I’d say that over the course of the last thirty-four years I’ve sent that magazine fifty stories. It may be more. I’m not sure because I kept only some of the rejection slips. The good ones, as writers call them, I kept some of those.