Some Things I Found that Day
Patti Callahan Henry

Last month I went crazy cleaning out closets and drawers in a house we’ve lived in for fifteen years with three wild children. Stuff. Lots of stuff. Of course I’ve cleaned out along the way; the crib, the stroller, stuff like that. But these were things I'd labeled “storage” and were still in “storage”.

Some things I found that day: My Brownie uniform; my breakup letter to college boyfriend; journals from middle school; letter from a boy I met on a cruise; daughter’s baptism dress, Precious Moments cross-stitched wedding present; wedding veil; a dress I smocked for my daughter (YES, I sewed and smocked a Christmas dress she never wore). There were many, many other things, which all made me pause and remember the different phases and seasons of my life.

Until today I haven’t given much thought as to ‘why’ I save these things (some of which I’d forgotten I’d even saved), why every time I find them I save them again and again. I’m not preserving them for when I die and my kids must go through my boxes and decide what to keep or throw away. No, I’ve kept them for myself, but why?

The Brownie uniform is proof of a part of my life of which I have absolutely no memory of being a part of. The college boyfriend’s letter is proof of my broken heart, and then there is the memory of going on a cruise after college graduation, and then the days I had only one child and she was baptized.

The journals are the best. For some reason I thought it was important to write down what I did each day. Roller skating. I hate Algebra. Church. Washed car. I wrote these things like I was stapling myself to life, making sure my days didn’t get away from me. I needed to put something in each blank space as if proof I’d lived that day.

The one thing all this ‘stuff’ in storage has in common: I barely remember that piece of my life it represents. I will bet that if I could be that seven year old in the brownie uniform I’d feel an emotion that seems so, so important. I’d bet that at that moment I’d believed that what I felt and saw were the most important things in the world, nothing would ever be different and my problems were the only problems that mattered.

When I wrote that letter to my college boyfriend, I thought I’d never love like that again; I thought my heart was permanently and utterly broken. When I was on that cruise, I believed that nothing could ever be that fun again. When Meagan was baptized I thought I’d never again love that deeply.

I don’t know why this is the way it is, why we forget what we know, but we do. Sometimes I’ll read a paragraph in a book I wrote and I’ll have no recollection of ever having written those words in that order. I have a friend who was cleaning out files and found an entire novel she forgot she’d written – I hate her for that. That’s a much better find than a break-up letter.

So why do I save some of this memorabilia? I think I save them for many reasons.
* To remind myself that everything does pass: the good, the bad, the sad, the glorious, the awful. It all passes and another day comes and then another day. We change and grow and life’s pages turn, sometimes these days go too slowly, and sometimes too quickly.
*Time is relevant. The days after that break up letter moved much slower than the days during the cruise.
*There are parts of my life I don’t remember at all, but they still make me who I am now. I want to always be able to see all the pieces of me that make me. I don’t necessarily need to remember that part of my life for it to have influence over my thoughts and actions. I like this reminder because it makes me aware of the fact that there are hidden things at work in my life. When I wore that brownie uniform I was still Patti, still me, and yet a me I don’t know at all. This is a mystery and I like to be reminded of that mystery.

Who I am now, she too will change. These feelings will pass. This day will pass. The sad will pass. The joy will pass. People will leave my life; new ones will enter. My kids will grow; I will become older; I’ll grieve; I’ll rejoice; I’ll weep; I’ll laugh.

I do know this: I also save all these things because there is this storyteller inside me and she likes to see the narrative arc of a story. She wants to look at all that has already happened and then ask, “Wow, I wonder what will happen next?”

Maybe that is why we as novelists write stories because not only do we wonder what will happen next but also because stories are permanent. Someone can read the book ten years from now and it will be the same story we wrote today. There is something about writing a novel or a story that has an intransience that not many things in this transient life have.

Once our life is lived, the story is told. There are many parts of our story that we don’t get to write – the beginning for example, but there are other parts we do get to write. And those parts, the ones we choose to write, do tell a story that is in many ways everlasting.

Maybe we save ‘stuff’ because we need to – every once in a while – stop in the middle of our story and look back, see where we’ve been, who we’ve been. These things, like chapters in a book, remind us of the pages we forgot we lived and help us live better now.

Once upon a time there was a girl named Patti Lynn Callahan; when she was seven years old, she was in Brownie Troup #345….


Patti Callahan Henry is a NYT Bestselling novelist. She has written six novels -- Losing the Moon; Where the River Runs; When Light Breaks; Between the Tides; The Art of Keeping Secrets and Driftwood Summer.

I discovered our Guest Blogger, Molly Harper, by chance. I picked up one of her books in the store and was completely captured by her hilarious, snarky voice. When I found out she was from Kentucky I knew she needed to guest blog,

Her “Nice Girls Don’t” series is about Jane Jameson, a single librarian in her thirties working in the small Kentucky town where she grew up. This "triple whammy of worry" has made her a permanent fixture on her Mama's prayer list. And despite the fact that's pretty good at her job, she just got canned so her boss could replace her with someone who occasionally starts workplace fires. She drowns her sorrows at the local faux nostalgia-themed sports bar and during the commute home, she's mistaken for a deer and then shot by a drunk hunter. And then she wakes up as a vampire.

Rejection Bites By Molly Harper

I was a late bloomer. I tried out for EVERYTHING in school- school plays, sports, cheerleading, choir, debate team, class president. And with anything and everything I wanted to try, my mom cheerfully drove me to the audition and waited while I fell on my face ... because I'm tone-deaf, phobic about public speaking and have the physical agility of a ham-strung moose.Dad said Mom should discourage me from auditioning so often because it was hard for them to see me fail in so many public and spectacular ways. (There was an incident involving a color guard flag connecting with someone’s head.) But Mom told him, "This is a learning experience. This is what will help her find her way in life."And it did. I learned what I was really good at, and it wasn't singing, public speaking or activities that involved hand-eye coordination. In the publishing world, new writers get rejected. A LOT. In fact, I'm convinced that the words, "new author" spark a Pavlovian "no" response deep within the cortex of agents and editors everywhere. After finishing the first book in my Jane Jameson vampire series, I sent query letters to about 70 agents. I was sent polite, but firm, rejection letters by a large majority of them before anyone expressed any interest.

In fact, I was still getting rejection letters from agencies after my agent, Stephany, sold the books.
The hardest part of receiving rejection letters was that most agents try to be kind when they're letting you down. Rather than starting their letters off with “Are you serious?” they go with "This just isn't right for us at this time." Or the famous “Your voice has potential BUT…” model. These letters give you that teeny, tiny spark of hope that keeps you going. You tell yourself that the agent didn’t call you a talentless hack, so you’ll just send out ten more query letters. When I was still querying, I wondered whether agents did that because they honestly wanted to protect my feelings, or because it amused them to know I would be harassing their colleagues next.

Of course, the nice rejection letters are still preferable to the letter I received that included the words “flaccid storyline” or the one that informed me that the market was overrun by vampire books and this particular agent wasn’t inspired to add mine to the fray.Rejection sucks. It stings. It sews doubt and reaps neuroses. It helps slough off your weak areas and find your strengths. It teaches you, refines you, sends you into the fetal position under your desk with a bottle of cheap wine. But you can’t take it personally. It’s your work that being’s judged and rejection not your personality. You can’t write the rejecting agent back and ask her to reconsider or refer you to another agency. You can’t tell her that when you see her in hell, you’ll be clutching big fat royalty checks. You suck it up, push on and keep going.

Just make sure you have plenty of cheap wine handy.

Molly Harper is the author of Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs, Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men and Nice Girls Don’t Live Forever (coming in December). Visit her at http://www.mollyharper.com or her blog http://www.singleundeadfemale.blogspot.com

Just Because You Build It Doesn’t Mean They Will Come

byJayne Jaudon Ferrer

This weekend, one of the country’s most acclaimed prose poets, Louis Jenkins, was in my city to do a free reading and a virtually free workshop; nine people showed up for the reading, six for the workshop. Most of those people were at least indirectly involved with setting up the events in the first place, which were made possible through a grant. The county library and I did extensive publicity over a period of several months. We contacted schools, media, area writers and writing groups, literacy and arts groups, and anyone else we thought might be interested.

My first complaint is that our local newspaper didn’t even bother to run the press release, much less do the feature article this poet’s visit deserved. One would think an author with thirteen books under his belt and thirty appearances on “The Writer’s Almanac” would merit at least a mention.

My second complaint is a question: where were all the English teachers and their students? It’s difficult to muster much sympathy for education when opportunities like this are dangled and no one grabs the bait. Every high school and college English professor within at least a fifty-mile radius should have been front and center at at least one of these events, and they should have offered extra credit to any student who attended. Not one teacher was present; not one. Only one student was, and that was my son—who got there only in time to catch the last poem, but I’ll give him credit for at least showing up.

Louis has been at this a long time; he knows—as do all of us who have done more than a few public events—that sometimes people show, sometimes they don’t. His check was assured, either way, and he showed neither disappointment nor annoyance. I, on the other hand, am ticked. And baffled. A few weeks ago, I visited James Whitcomb Riley’s home in Indianapolis. Riley made an excellent living as a poet, traveling the country speaking to sell-out crowds, drawing thousands of people to his funeral, leaving behind an estate of over three million dollars. Riley wasn’t a bad poet, but there are plenty who are better. I can’t imagine people flocking to hear his folksy verse, but flock they did—everywhere he went. So why can’t a much better poet even manage to fill a room these days?

Here’s part of the problem: John Q. Public wants to write poetry, but he doesn’t want to read it. Or hear it. Or buy the books and journals that print it. He wants his work read and validated and spread around, but he doesn’t want to invest the time and effort to study someone else’s. When I do poetry residencies in middle and high schools, I always ask how many students enjoy reading poetry, and one or two hands go up. When I ask how many write poetry, the number increases as much as tenfold. I think perhaps novelists don’t deal with this as much, simply because of the investment of time required in writing a book manuscript. Poetry’s brevity offers an easy commitment; almost anyone can sit down, scrawl a few words on a page, and claim to have a poem. But words on a page do not a poem make; the poetry comes from the connection of those words, the images and sounds they conjure, and the impact they leave behind.

All this and more was discussed at length this weekend. How sad that the teacher who this week will be called upon to offer her students tools and insights for making a poem more powerful missed a chance to learn that information LIVE from an expert. How sad that the student who dreams of publishing his sonnets or haiku someday chose to sleep in instead of having a master craftsman offer guidance on his latest effort. How sad that in a time when money is hard to come by and public arts opportunities are diminished and endangered, this FREE chance to learn and experience the power and crafting of words fluttered by like an overlooked autumn leaf, its magnificence enjoyed only by the few who took time to catch and enjoy it.

The Reading

Like Munsch’s man,

my screams are silent;

no one hears.

Indeed, there are those who would smirk

and roll their eyes at my outrage.

But, no, not outrage; outrage is

for cigarette butts flipped

nonchalantly into flowers,

for environmental activists

who drive to protests in SUVs,

for teachers forced to squelch

interest in a newfound fact

so fifty more can be covered

for the standardized test next week.

No, my scream is born of frustration,

of disappointment and despair

for, once again,

a poet proffered a key

and no one showed up

to accept it.

Copyright 2009 by Jayne Jaudon Ferrer

Jayne Jaudon Ferrer is the author of four books, the host of http://www.yourdailypoem.com/, and a frequent presenter at women’s and writers’ events. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. For more information, visit http://www.jaynejaudonferrer.com/.

REVIEWS TO MAKE YOU CRY

I once saw this commercial that showed an alligator meandering across the floor of an enormous and beautiful white room (furniture, curtains and all), and this lady was sitting on a divan with a bottle of lotion in her hand, and she was admiring her silky smooth skin. I didn’t write down what lotion she was hawking. I already had four bottles under my bathroom sink that hadn’t done any good whatsoever, so I didn’t care, plus I didn’t trust her. I figured she was getting paid so how can you count on her actions anyway. I did notice that the alligator didn’t eat her, which made it a pretty weird commercial if you ask me.

I’m thinking about this commercial because I’m reading the latest review on Amazon.com for my novel Cold Rock River, and all I can say is I will never buy that bottle of lotion even if I could find out which one it was that girl in the commercial on the white divan was using. I don’t want silky, smooth skin. I want skin like that alligator. I want skin that is incapable of any arrows penetrating the surface. I want skin that is impervious to any and all injury. I’m an author and I need skin thicker than cement. Skin like that should absolutely come with publication. You sign your contract and poof! your skin instantly turns to concrete. Done deal.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy and the reviews that eventually pile up (especially on Amazon.com) can be injurious to one’s mental health. In my own case I was sailing along quite nicely, wracking up some pretty nifty five-star reviews and getting a bit overly confident (never get overly confident), and thinking that maybe I’d written a couple of books well worth reading.

That’s when you need to watch out. Smacko! Right in the kisser! It will get you: An uglier than ugly review that says your book is not worth buying. This is what one reader wrote about mine: After reading Dorothy Allison, Fannie Flagg, Alice Walker, Connie May Fowler, Rebecca Wells (which all deserve to be read, unlike this novel), this was a very contrived and poor attempt to do what these writers have already done.

Outch!! Didn’t their mother ever tell them if they have nothing nice to say not to say anything at all? Or at least to be gentle with whatever it is they are trying to say. Couldn’t this author have simply said she did not like the novel and found it lacking in what other southern writers have managed to do. Which might have caused some readers to order the book just to find out what it was that I didn’t do. One never knows. Which got me to thinking. Maybe her one-star ugly review is not all bad. Maybe it stands out among all the five-star reviews as a sour apple. That’s it. That’s what I tell myself. Look at all those other fabulous five-star reviews on Amazon and what they have to say. I start reading through the list of the titles just to be sure: Fantastic! Another winner! Breathtaking and mesmeric! Wonderful & riveting. An engrossing novel. Simply outstanding. An amazing book. I keep going. I find the ultimate title posted: I couldn’t put it down! I’m tap-dancing on the clouds. Forget the person who gave me one star and said I wasn’t worth reading. What do they know? Exactly.

That’s when I spot it—another review. It’s there among all the others. It says: Cumbersome and ultimately predictable. Ugh!! Those ugly words head straight to my heart. But, then I remember a favorite adage my mother used to quote about fooling people. I’m thinking that adage covers pleasing people, too. You can please some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

If I’m going to keep writing I best remember that. But in case I forget, the next time I see that alligator commercial I’m going to call the station and see what kind of lotion they’re using on him. I might need some. His skin looks pretty thick.

Jackie Lee Miles is the author of Divorcing Dwayne, Cold Rock River, and Roseflower Creek. Look for her latest All That’s True in 2010. Write to the author at http://www.blogger.com/jackie@jlmiles.com. Visit the website at http://www.jlmiles.com./

Rejecting the Rejecter...

The theme these days on "A Good Blog is Hard To Find" is rejection or critiques. Or both. I’ll start with rejection and maybe I’ll find a way to get to the other. By far the most difficult rejection I ever had was from an agent, and if I’d believed her, I would never have written another word. It was a rejection of stunning cruelty, but I rejected her rejection.

It was back in 1994. She came to see a play I’d written or maybe I’d sent her a query. Anyway, she wanted to meet for coffee. She had read and loved an early draft about growing up on the gridiron of college football. It was a kind of GREAT SANTINI from the teenage daughter's point of view.

She thought it needed a good editor, though, a freelance editor. I agreed. I had no idea how to shape this story of being a coach’s daughter into a book. I had bombarded my writing group with it for three years, and a shaky first draft had emerged.

So I took this agent’s suggestion and the editor she recommended. The editor was very reasonably priced, and it helped to have a careful reader who knew nothing about my life as a football daughter, who’d moved regularly with her itinerant coaching family in search of the opportunity to win ball games.

I also quit my job as an ESL teacher in East Los Angeles. I couldn’t write my novel, teach full time, and raise a family. Our kids were four and six. I worked on my novel, OFFSIDES, while they were in school and on the weekends. I revised the book for another year. I would write three or four chapters, share them with the editor, and she would fax back notes or comments or questions. It was long before the days of email. But I felt I was on the right track. Chapter 41 became chapter one when my alter-ego character decided she was not going to move to another football town again. The idea of beginning with a conflict was something new to me as I tended hang out in voice and scene without a lot of plot.

Anyway, after a year of revising and reshaping it into a book, I sent it back to the agent. She didn’t respond and she didn’t respond. Then one summer night in August I found it on my doorstep. She had mailed it back with a letter saying something to effect of “I don’t know what you did to your story, but it’s just awful. The voice is gone. And where is the dad?” Trembling, I looked at her notes in the manuscript. They had stopped at page 80. She hadn’t even read the whole book. Though, I’d taken her advice and the editor she recommended and did everything she asked me to do for more than a year, she had stopped reading on page 80.

Let's just say it was a grief-stricken Jack Daniels night, and I think I will just leave it at that. That is another essay. But this is how I rejected her rejection. A week or so later, a thought occurred to me while I was bathing the kids. This was the thought: “She is wrong. She is wrong. She is wrong.” And this was not denial speaking. I just knew she was wrong.

So I took the book, all five hundred pages of it, and I read it again with a cold editor’s eye, and I systematically cut one hundred pages. I was ruthless and killed everything that I repeated or did twice or hit the same note too long. I honed and sharpened and got to the point a whole lot quicker. I soon realized it was way too flabby, so I cut those one hundred pages. Then I sent it to another agent. That agent took it and she sold it to William Morrow within one month.

Six months later, Diane Keaton optioned OFFSIDES for a film with Jim Henson Productions and we spent the next three years in the Hollywood mill. That, too, is another essay. The New York Public Library named, OFFSIDES, one of the best books for the Teen Age in 1997. It was before the dawn of Young Adult, and my editor at William Morrow at the time told me, “If you publish this young adult, it will be the death knell of your career,” so it was published as literary fiction.

Sadly, nothing came out of the film and even though, OFFSIDES, had great reviews it went out of print within a few years. You can find it for a buck on Amazon. But that agent who rejected me contacted my screenplay agent at the time and asked, “Can I have her next book?”

I would see this agent from time to time at parties or literary salons on the West Coast. We were always very polite. I didn’t tell her I thought of tee-peeing her house or screaming like a banshee at her front door, because I didn’t do any of those things. I just repeated to myself. “She is wrong, she is wrong, she is wrong.”

Now I absolutely believe in readers and feedback and criticism to make a book better and stronger. I would be nowhere without my group of close and trusted readers in the early stages of a manuscript, who tell me truth. But I don’t believe in cruelty when a writer is finding the story and finding her voice. I was a young novelist, and it was my very first novel, and this agent had set herself up as a kind of encouraging mentor and then said, "Never mind." But it was probably the best lesson I could have learned - to trust my own voice and not to quit no matter what an agent had decreed.

And a word about critiques...I teach creative writing now at the University of Alabama Birmingham, and I have taught for years in freelance workshops, and I do writing workshops for kids in schools. I was lucky enough to have a professor in college who taught me everything I know about teaching because she modeled such excellent teaching. Her name was Mary Jane Harvill, and she made us believe in the possibility of ourselves as artists. It was an acting class – not even a writing class. But we had to go on stage and become these characters.

I played Blanche with a boy who would have made a knockout Blanche, and I definitely would have been a much better Stanley. But we had fun. Mary Jane made us laugh and find joy in creating characters, and even when we were awful, and we were awful, it was never about humiliation, but it was about being better – reaching down inside and finding something new to make the characters work.

I don’t allow my writing workshops to be anything but supportive and generous places to discover how to make the work better. We ask the hard questions, but I hope no writer ever leaves my workshop lacerated or doomed the way I felt that night when my first novel arrived on my doorstep like a body bag oozing failure.

It’s listening to the voice inside and keeping the critics at bay and revising and reshaping to find ways to make the stories sing.

Kerry Madden is author of the Maggie Valley Trilogy, published by Viking Children's Books. The trilogy includes Gentle's Holler (2005), Louisiana's Song (2007) and Jessie's Mountain (2008), set in the heart of Appalachia in the Smoky Mountains. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997. Her book Writing Smarts, published by American Girl, is full of story sparks for young writers. Her latest book, Harper Lee: Up Close, published by Viking, made Booklist's Ten Top Biographies of 2009 for Youth. www.kerrymadden.com

Instructive Criticism

by Mary Alice Monroe

For many of us, criticism is hard to swallow and oftentimes uncomfortable to dish out as well. Yet, it’s part of the writing process. Writers rejoice at the positive reviews and cringe at the negative ones. The phrase, “If you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen” comes to mind. A writer must develop a thick enough skin to be able to receive the criticisms, then take a deep breath and set them aside—both positive and negative ones. During the writing process, the only critic to listen to resides in your own mind.

A critique, however, is not a review. It is a sacred trust. When a writer asks a particular person or group to critique her manuscript, she is offering her unfinished work in progress up for comments that will, hopefully, make her book the best it can be. This is a risky moment. The writer is vulnerable. It is important to seek out a critique from a person or a group adept at “instructive criticism.”

The goal of the critique is to instruct, not destruct. As the one offering a critique, it’s important to remember that this is not your book. Neither is it is a book being written by committee. It is your obligation to be open minded and fair. If for any reason you feel you can’t be-- you don’t like the time period, the genre, the tone, the writing style--better to pass on it than attack it. Or worse, if you’re jealous of the talent on the pages, decline. I’ll never forget the woman who only wrote, “Did you ever think of doing something other than writing?” on my manuscript. I was young and unpublished then, but I had the confidence to quit that critique group. By the way, that woman was never published. She’s probably writing one-star-wonders on Amazon.

When I receive a manuscript, I ask the writer what it is she especially wants from me. Sometimes, she won’t know how to answer that and will stutter, “Everything!” But maybe all she wanted was a grammar or fact check. In any case, I take the responsibility seriously.
If I’m asked to do an “everything” critique of a manuscript, I don’t write madly on the pages, I rarely correct grammar or rewrite a sentence. Instead, I look at the big picture. I take notes on separate paper since I sometimes change my thoughts as the novel unfolds. When I finish, I carefully review my copious notes. It’s time now to reflect. Don’t shoot from the hip. Remember your words can hit like bullets. Below are a few suggestions on how to offer an instructive critique.

First, offer what you liked about the book. A critique doesn’t mean merely negative criticisms. Point out what really worked. Praise lavishly. Next, choose the single, main point that you feel the author should address. Give a specific example then offer suggestions how she might improve it. You may have found several problems with the manuscript but don’t bring them all up. Be choosy. Too many can be overwhelming for the fragile author. The last thing you should do is discourage the writer. She came to you for a helping hand. Your critique has the power to pull her up or knock her down. Finally, remind the writer that this is simply your opinion. To take it with a grain of salt. In the end, it is her book. Her name goes on it, not yours.

Offering instructive criticism should leave the writer feeling inspired to get back to work, to believe in her book. It’s simple. Offer criticism in the manner that you’d like to receive it.

My mother taught me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t’ say anything at all. In the case of criticism, nice means open minded, considerate, and instructive. I think that works for every area in our life!

Mary Alice Monroe is known for her intimate portrayals of women's lives. She has served on the faculty of numerous writer's conferences and retreats and is a frequent speaker. Her books have achieved several best seller lists, including SIBA, USA Today, and the NY Times. In 2008 Monroe was awarded the SC Center for the Book Award for Fiction.

IT'S SHOW TIME FOLKS!

I think I'm supposed to write about rejection. Or maybe that was reviews. But it's rejection that comes to mind. More specifically, it's rejection when someone puts their talent out there publicly on the line for everyone to see. And ummm, review. And ummm, reject if they feel well like it. Publicly. Basically - to be open to public humiliation to the highest degree. 

The greatest jump for me as that quiet introverted child was to put my talent out there in public in a major way in the third grade. My talent at the time was piano. I practiced and practiced over and over. If I remember correctly my piano teacher helped me choose the piece and Lord help me, while I can hear the somber tune in my mind I certainly don't remember the title. Perhaps if she had helped me choose something that was a happy diddy - but noooooo. Not only did I cause the entire class in 3rd grade to walk duck style out of the room to the only room with a piano, which caused quiet a set-up for me to fail if you ask me. You have to consider that expectations were flying sky high with all that enthusiasm for walking through the cold halls, then to a dark, dusty room where the sacred piano sat in an unused corner. I remember the darkness in the room. Remember those children standing against the wall in the dark, lined up there like it was a firing squad, and commanded to play attention while I played. The teacher hushed them and then told me to begin and within the first few unhappy, dramatic, notes - the children began to giggle. First one and then another. And no matter how much the teacher hushed them, the giggles spread like wildfire and continued. And I remember my frozen eight year old back as my fingers continued playing in spite of the unwelcome noises behind me. When my piece was completed, I closed the piano and then walking with these same turncoat cutthroats otherwise known as my precious classmates, back to our room where I was solidly beat in a landslide vote by a tap dancer in a tutu. The results of the talent show competition were read off on slips of white paper. One by painful one. The results were marked publicly on the black board in white chalk. I received two votes. One of them was mine. The rest were for the tap dancer. Walking home from school that day was no doubt a painful, learning experience. Shortly thereafter I quit piano lessons much to the dismay of my mother. I refused to go. She consented. Later I gave her a real hard time about this for relenting and allowing me to quit. Bless the heart of mother's every where trying to make the right decisions all the time for their depressed, morose, artistic writer children. I think I buried my pain somewhere between Gilligan's Island and Flipper. Thanks be to the pain relief of brainless television particular during the age prior to reality TV. Who needs reality when you are eight and have just had a public humiliation to last a lifetime. 

All that true stuff to say this. I may have quit piano lessons ultimately but those scales really paid off because boy can I type fast.  And even at eight- I kept a stiff upper lip, kept on hitting those keys when those behind my back were laughing because my particular genre wasn't their cup of tea. 

And when it came time to vote, I believed in myself to scratch my own name down on that white paper. 

Rejection? Oh yeah, I've had my share. But my fingers are on the keys, there's a music in my ears, and I'm just gonna keep playing my song. 

(River Jordan is a critically-acclaimed literary author. Her most recent novel Saints In Limbo, has been hailed as a Southern Gothic Masterpiece by Paste Magazine. She has recently completed a new work of fiction due out September 2010. River lives in Nashville with her husband Owen Hicks.  The author no longer plays the piano but folks say she types likes nobody's business. The author can be contacted through her website at http://www.riverjordan.us  )