And now we begin an odyssey that for me took many years, but which for you, Gentle BLog Reader, will take only a few weeks. Namely, we begin the tale of my rejections from the literary journal The Missouri Review.
For reasons I can no longer remember, I became obsessed at some point with being published in the Missouri Review. I dutifully mailed off (yes — mailed!) copies of my stories, complete with carefully-crafted cover letters and meticulously-generated SASEs. (Remember SASEs?)
And then, each time, I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
In those pre-e-mail submission days, it could (and often did) take months to get a rejection letter. So from the time I submitted my first story to Missouri Review to the time I gave up (oops — spoiler alert!), literally years went by.
It started with this, the plain vanilla form letter rejection:
