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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
Kennedy: It must have been a great lift to you, Duff, when Doubleday offered you a two-book contract. And winning the AP Prize must have done a lot to soothe the wound of those 46 rejections The Book of Mamie weathered. Nearly every one of my own dozen books has been published by a different small press, and I never know when I finish a book whether it will be published or not. It´s almost always starting with square one in terms of the market.
Brenna: Does it bother you?
Kennedy: It´s part of the experience.
Frank: Tom, answer the question!
Kennedy: After a while you get used to it. About 10 years ago I looked into the subject of rejection to try to get a handle on it. I researched and published an article on it in Poets & Writers (www.pw.org), and I found out how many outstanding writers have weathered monumental rejections and how few writers can actually live from their sales. Gordon Weaver sent one of his stories out something like 70 times, then sold it for a few hundred dollars to a magazine that published the next two or three he sent them. Andre Dubus--who recently died and who is recognized as one of the great contemporary story writers--sent one of his stories out 38 times before he found a little magazine that would take it. And it is a splendid story, a very short one titled "Waiting." Writing that article on rejection helped me realize it´s not personal, it´s part of the experience, you have to be the water that wears away the stone.
Frank: Duff, what do you have to add on the subject of rejection? It struck me that we at Frank should be thinking more about this subject; with 950 out of 1000 manuscripts being returned each year, there are far more negative messages going out than acceptances although rejection is often unrelated to quality or merit. And often it takes us months before we even say no. It´s a lousy deal being the writer and laborious being the publisher.
Brenna: Tom said you have to be the water wearing away the stone. I´ll go with that. But I´m wondering, do you ever feel like you´re the stone, like you´re the one being worn away? Have you ever thought of quitting?
Frank: Wait, Duff, you go first...
Brenna: I could say "Survival of the fittest" again. I don´t mean by that that the best writers survive. I don´t even want to think about the great writers who have killed themselves or have just given up in despair. But it´s not enough to be good, you have to be tough as well. Survival is to a great extent what the writing life is about. I go back to what I said before about perseverance. Tom´s water wearing away the stone. And it also helps if you´ve got a strong ego and get angry at rejection, rather than go weepy with self-pity.
Frank: Okay--but don´t show that anger to us. Writers don´t realize to what degree editing a literary magazine verges on masochism.
Kennedy: That´s true. Writers should be grateful as hell to the small magazines and presses. I am. I´ve thought about quitting, but the next day I´d be back at my typewriter anyway. As Rainer Maria Rilke says in his wonderful little book Letters to a Young Poet--which I would recommend to every beginning writer--hell, to every writer--"Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create... Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside... Go into yourself. Ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: ´must I write?´"
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