Got my final rejection two days ago. I wasn’t terribly surprised. Other than a few independent publications that don’t have a hangup with publishing work already posted on a blog or in social media, I’ve more or less quit submitting.

There was a time when I took it personally. Younger me took it personally. The press that rejected me this time is one I think highly of. They’ve published great work by friends and I fully expect they will publish more. Wondering about the editorial eye is a pointless exercise. There’s any number of reasons why my chapbook was rejected. The poet whose chapbook was accepted has a slew of awards. One of the young, hungry guns. I’m happy for him. In looking him up I notice he’s taken the route a lot of them take: published in the right journals. He’s not been offering his words up to the ether. He fed it to the machine. There’s comfort in rejections in that they are absolute; there’s a high watermark missed, a community and a pedestal to aspire to. Get enough of the right accolades, get your name listed as headliners in writing conferences. Get more publications.

This writing business isn’t what it was when Jim Harrison came on the scene, when Toni Morrison came on the scene. Kurt Vonnegut said once in an interview that if he had to try and be a novelist in present day he never would have made it. It takes a certain boldness to be a writer, now more than ever.

At some point, reaching back 20 years now, I decided to cast my work out into the ether and into the machine. Rationally and spiritually, I reject the either/or construct that’s buried at the heart of all Western institutions. The ether both obfuscates and forgives because that is it’s nature. The machine is does not forgive because that is the nature built into it. Institutions, worn paths, offer no alternatives. And it’s easier to follow the grooves. That’s the difference between explorers and gold rushers.

So though I reject the either/or I once again find myself embracing and being embraced by the ether. It’s an exploratory path. It’s a wanderer’s path. And like Rilke said, “O wanderer, the path is walking too.”