Acceptance is a multilayered thing that means different things to different people. It can even mean different things to the same people at different times. Case in point—

Among writers, “acceptance” has a specific meaning: work has been accepted for publication. The journals I send my work to have an acceptance rate that is quite small. Some receive thousands of stories each year or even each month and choose to print a dozen or only six or two, an acceptance rate of less than one percent or even 0.0% according to the database I can access. Bear this in mind as I reveal that my personal acceptance rate is 14.7% just now. This is considered “good” for mere mortals like myself. I have to write about it here and record this number because it has never been this high, generally 6% to 9%, still good. I’ve written about this elsewhere—one of my published essays directly addresses tracking how work is and is not published.

Writing acceptance is a good thing, but it is an accomplishment largely out of the writer’s control.

Most work is not accepted, as should be obvious from the statistics I have just revealed. And the numbers fail to reveal as much as they might. For example: my MFA is in writing fiction, but my eight most recent publications are all nonfiction. Most of my nonfiction is published right here, but occasionally I send work to journals. That’s what counts as acceptance: nonfiction sent out and accepted by a journal.

So, a lot of rejection. It’s what I mostly receive in response to my work. It’s what most writers receive most of the time.

C.C. Finley, Editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, explains rejecting a story he likes:

“Look, you’re probably a pro. This is a good story. You know it’s good. You’re probably going to sell it elsewhere. Maybe I can tell you the idiosyncratic reasons why it didn’t make me all hot and tingly so that I can’t stop thinking about it day and night, night and day. Maybe I did. But either way, you probably don’t care. It’s a no. You’ve already got your next market lined up and you’re ready to send it out again. AS YOU SHOULD.

He has far too many excellent stories to choose from. He received hundreds in a few days and he cannot use more the a handful. One, perhaps.

“There are enough good stories here to fill three magazines. At least. I can’t take all of them.

“So in the end that’s going to leave me with the stories I loved so much I have to share them.

“(Which is what I now realize editors do all the time. Dear editors, I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before. When I was submitting to you, all I ever cared about was my story.)”

In some ways my recent success in publication (yes, still trying to maintain a glow about that 14.7%) reflects the reemergence of my voice. I used to be funny, careless but cheerful. Wry. I genuinely liked people on principle. My writing reflected that approach to the world. And then a series of longterm stressors pretty much knocked some of that good humor right out of me.

How I survived my MFA program in the midst of all the chaos in my life amazes me a little even now. It might have amazed me at the time if I’d had space left over to think it through. I’m not sure I had any time. Before he stopped speaking to me, my brother called me “the most dysfunctional person” he knew, said other awful things I cannot bear to repeat and later declared that I had ruined his life. Deliberately.

I put my head down and did what needed doing. I reduced my sleep from eight to seven hours a night and completed an MFA while teaching English full time in a poor rural high school, taking care of my lovely stubborn and fading mother, and trying to be a good mother myself. I made soup on Sundays. My husband and two sons had every right to expect me to care for them. I ran fifteen to twenty miles a week.

How did that work?

teaching. Teaching full time is not a full-time job. Teaching English properly (imo) is nearly one and a half jobs, say a 1.3 job, easily 50-70 hours a week. Gary claims I was “never off the clock.” Weekdays I was up before 6:30 answering emails and fitting in my run, at school by 7:45, home again by 5:00 or so, and still planning curriculum until 7. I worked weekends designing the week and scoring papers. Students were encouraged to email anytime, but not to phone after 8:30 because “even if he has his eyes open and seems to be looking at the television, my husband is asleep by eight-thirty.”

Some of my students left a small, rural high school to attend such schools as Duke, Stanford, Berkeley, Pepperdine, Yale, Brown, Vanderbilt, University of Chicago, and my own alma mater the University of Washington. They went on to Reed and Boston College and CalTech. I wrote recommendations for three students who won the prestigious Gates Millennial Scholarships and for more who won Fords. They have become dentists and doctors and artists and surveyors and accountants and contractors and therapists of various kinds and electricians and writers and engineers and advocates for human rights and for children caught in grown-up wars. They have traveled all over the world. They have married and become parents. Sometimes they send me a note or email to let me know what they are up to.

writing. During the year before I applied to the Pacific University MFA program and while everything else was going on, I kept track of my writing and reading to ensure I could manage the additional work load—write stories and also read fifty books. I found I could do that writing and that I was reading seventy books in a year. In the program I actually trimmed the reading, but I wrote and revised hundreds of pages. I found the energy and time to do it because by then I was determined to have something for myself.

mom. I was reminded yesterday by a brilliant essay about writing memoir: everybody’s mother dies. Mine had for years been heading downhill in health and refused to admit it, refused to embrace sensible adjustments to her diet and exercise. Mom was stubborn and kind and smart and . . . did I mention stubborn? A worrier. Somewhat contrary. My dad used to complain, “Why do you ask my advice if you never take it?” She would retort that it wasn’t until she heard another’s opinion that she could clearly see her own. That was probably true, but it was also true that, all things being equal or not, Mom was inclined to do the opposite of whatever was advised. Buy or not buy, sell or not sell, go or stay—but never give in. As she passed seventy, this contrariness increased. She would not eat better, would not exercise at all, would not accept a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, would not move in with her daughter. She flirted with her doctor but would not act on his advice, would not would not would not.

My kind husband spent a great deal of time with her every single day. He did her laundry and made her coffee in the morning. I only visited two or three times a day for most of those five years.

soup. I made stock and a large pot of soup on Sundays that did for the next three days. I made muffins but did not have the time for bread. Sometimes we got a pizza. Sometimes we had frozen lasagna or tortellini for dinner. During the years I was still coaching cross country I would drop ten or fifteen pounds every fall, not so much from the exercise but because when I got home after practice, I was too tired to cook or eat.

self care. There wasn’t much. Running kept me sane. Not thinking too much objectively about how I used my time helped. My students helped because I genuinely loved teaching and found my students endlessly interesting and inspiring. Writing and reading were another solace. But along the way, I lost my sense of humor. I wore black so much of the time that my students complained about it. I looked through my wardrobe for color.

And then I completed my MFA and my mother died in the same week and I became the oldest member of my blood family—two intense obligations dropped away. Both our sons had graduated from college and we no longer struggled to pay our bills. We were on a five-period-a-day schedule at school which meant most days I interacted with no more than 120 students. I had quit advising yearbook and coaching, and anyway, it was July. It was the first summer I was not working or going to school and I was in bad mental shape.

I asked a retired psychiatrist friend for recommendation of a therapist and by the time she got back to me—”a while back you asked me for . . . —it was three years later and I was writing on my blog and fighting my way back to mental health with Gary’s help and my own determination and stubbornness. I would have liked professional assistance, but I managed with the help of my family and friends. One foot in front of another.

I am my mother’s daughter after all.

There is an exchange between two characters in Dorothy Sayers’s murder mystery, Strong Poison, about the impact of hardship on a woman’s worldview. Harriet Vane has betrayed her own conscience from love and then has been betrayed by that lover and is accused of his murder. She is incarcerated when she recalls better times. [piffle = silliness or facetiousness]

“I used to talk piffle rather well myself,” said Harriet, with tears in her eyes, “but it’s got knocked out of me. You know—I was really meant to be a cheerful person—all this gloom and suspicion isn’t the real me. But I’ve lost my nerve somehow.”

What did I gain from my experience of losing my nerve? At the time, I presented the face that was necessary and useful to the people I worked with and especially to my family and students. I was determinedly optimistic and as accommodating as I could manage. I seemed and insisted I was “fine.” I made a few new friends during the MFA program, but they have mostly fallen away. Privately, I was too often depressed or stressed and impatient and sometimes just plain angry. It was not a good time. But on her death bed my mother had thanked me for being so kind to her and for always doing what she asked, supporting her choices “even when I know you didn’t always agree.”

Here’s what I know that Harriet Vane does not while she talks to Lord Peter Whimsey in jail and waits to be tried for murder she did not commit: the true killer of her former lover will be revealed by a very determined amateur detective, Lord Peter will give her the space she needs to recover herself, and eventually, several novels later, Harriet and Peter will marry and have a lovely and loving life enriched by piffle and the occasional mystery. It’s worth noting that even Sayers may not have known this outcome when she wrote this version of her own life experiences—Dorothy, I am with you!

We do the best we can at the time. We try to keep ourselves whole while life picks a loose thread and unravels everything. Sometimes we feel like we’re crawling on coals. We manage.

It sounds simple when I put it like that. In reality, it is slow and there are setbacks. Things I brought upon myself and maybe I had coming to me. Recently a young man followed close behind me on the beach and shrieked obscenities into my ear. (Perhaps the cruelest aspect was not even the act, but understanding he enjoyed doing it so very much.)

Despite accepting that such bullies exist, I also learned that most people are kinder and more generous than I deserve, that people have harder lives and manage to remain themselves, that everyone has hard times some of the time, and that I can accomplish what must be accomplished far more effectively than I might have imagined I could. I can submit to the demands of life, submit and submit and submit, and I can accept myself and the values I live by. I can find acceptance. I can exercise some control. I can rediscover joy. I can accept.

I took care of my mom, I gained an MFA, my husband stuck by me, all in our close family and best friends are healthy, and here I am.

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