Carolyn – Even though I’ve never been a big fan of baklava, I well remember the rejection-slip contest — and the fact that not only did Shayne win the contest, but he also sold a whole lot more than the rest of us did in those days. No matter how many rejections he got, he kept writing and sending the stories out. He turned those “failures” (the rejections) into new opportunities for success!

L

When Don got his PhD in 1970, the positions for historians had gone from filling a thick booklet to a single page, yet he was one of the few, maybe the only grad student who secured a position–in West Texas. We cried on the way home from the interview, but he took the job and spent 14 years writing his way out. I wish you could see the large three-ring binder that holds the rejections he received from various institutions. But he kept working and is now a nationally recognized railroad historian with a vita so solid that his most recent Dean looked over a required list of attainments in the last few years and said to him in amazement:”You’ve been busy.”

I,too, have failed as a teacher. I was called in after my first job and told that I would be rehired but with no raise. I lost a job that was to support us through Don’s graduate years because I was pregnant. I was punished by a principal who thought I complained too much by having every class I taught in a different room during the day. But an older, and one would hope wiser me, encouraged students to give “wrong” answers if they wanted to succeed. I have kept the letters and notes sent by those students who thanked me for something I gave them that helped them to do so. They are not many but they let me know that my percieved failures weren’t always failures. And I treasure them for that.

Perhaps we should just banish the word “failure” and replace it with the awkward but more apt “learning experience.”

In the author’s group Xenobia, we used a writerly way of turning failures into success. We had a rejection slip contest. The person with the most rejection slips in three months triumphed. M. Shayne Bell won that; he had about 150 rejection slips more than anyone else. Maybe it was because the prize was baklava. You never know. (My stories got published. That sucked.)

Carolyn

Ah, memories…

And I guess it was Thomas Edison that said he didn’t fail 10,000 times (or whatever it was) trying to get the right element for a light bulb, he just found out the 9,999 things that didn’t work.

And Colonel Sanders supposedly got turned down over a thousand times on his way to being the kentucky fried chicken king.

I have a sign on my wall that I can see from my desk: Success is a journey, not a destination.

And I know that there’s always setbacks and detours on the way.

Unless you’re dead. So, again, anything short of death is temporary. What today is perceived as catastrophic is merely setback painted in shades of disappointment and hyperbole.

Thanks again for the guide.