Rejections Worth Keeping

Yesterday, I got one of the better rejections I've gotten.  I created a new manuscript to send to Two Sylvias Press for their Wilder Prize, the competition for writers who are over age 50--named after Laura Ingalls Wilder, who didn't start writing until after she was 50.

Here's the e-mail:

"Kristin-- please know, your manuscript was on our shortlist of only 20 manuscripts. This came so close for us, just a highly competitive prize this year, but we wanted you to know how strong your manuscript is and that it stood out for us. Please feel free to consider if us again if this hasn't been picked up. Your poems were some of our favorites and we are very sorry to have to pass on it. We loved your work.

Continue to submit your work to various presses with the knowledge of how subjective these decisions are. We believe in the mission of bringing more poetry and art into the world, and we encourage you to continue to do so as a poet."

I've been submitting manuscripts to Two Sylvias Press for years now, so I scrolled back through rejection letters just to make sure that this one was truly different.  In the past, I've gotten encouragement, but never anything quite like this.

I really appreciate the suggestion to submit the manuscript again--I will do that next year.  In the past, while I've gotten encouragement, I never really knew whether or not to keep submitting the same manuscript.  In fact, I created a new one because I felt a little silly submitting the same one again and again to the same presses.

I went back to my blog to see when I assembled the manuscript and why.  Here's what I wrote in this post in December:  "I also got a new poetry manuscript put together. I want something new to submit when Copper Canyon re-opens. They're pretty clear about not submitting a manuscript that has been rejected in the past. I'm not sure about whether or not to resubmit Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site to other presses where I've submitted before--those presses aren't as clear. I think that the manuscripts are significantly different from each other, but I should probably look at the two of them side by side. Are they really that different? The new manuscript has fewer of the nuclear war poems. It's composed primarily of poems written since 2014."

Based on the feedback from this submission, I'd say that the new manuscript is worth sending to other places too.  And if it hasn't been accepted by the Fall, I'll resubmit to the Wilder prize.