A Brief Portrait of Failure as a Friend

"I made up my mind that I was not going to worry anymore."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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It was Barnes and Noble in Union Square where I first rifled through all the literary publications I could find. I was 16 in New York City and I was an artist, finally. I had dropped out of high school and was just beginning to make my way through a type of life I would eventually earn the ability to call my own.

I was looking for a rag of any kind that might publish my poems. Painting had led to poetry––if I had the gall to move to New York City to become an artist, then I might as well endure some punishment as a striving poet, too. I had been writing for years; there was no difference between paint strokes and keystrokes. It was winter––more snow than I had ever seen. Keeping up with supplies turned me into a ceaseless errand boy. Typewriter ribbon, paper, paper clips, envelopes, stamps, subways to there and back. There was no online writing. Everything was done by mail. Not true––it was 2005 and I was a romantic of sorts. I had moved to New York without a computer and apparently wanted everything to be hard as possible…

Anyway, it was a year of sending off poems as frequently as I could until I finally, finally received word!––a poem of mine, after all this time, had been officially rejected. Of the dozens of poems I sent, I never heard back. But these were good poems, better than some written by professors and professionals! I would need a good speaking to the postal service––someone down there was in the habit of losing my mail!

But a letter of rejection, as canned as it was, felt like a victory. There is nothing that starts the process of being an artist better than receiving a letter of “no” with your name all over it.

One year later, back home in Georgia and at the age of 17, I was living as a high school dropout and a failed artist, failed New Yorker. As young as I was, you could have hardly convinced me otherwise.

Nonetheless, I could not put out the fire. My poems, as well as my paintings, grew larger in spirit and size over the years. I merely existed––no, lived!––furiously typing out every gripe, joy, morsel of beauty and anger I could muster! If I could only have those days back, I would write even more furiously and paint with more gusto.

Still, I submitted work to galleries and literary magazines, mostly in vain. Five years later, with nothing good happening in Georgia, I moved to San Francisco. Got into a heap of trouble by way of romance, substance, finance and lust. I had learned to play and sing on the guitar, played in the subways and the streets. I had no gripes about being broke; I needed the practice and to better cement the fortitude which was required to be a performer, a writer, an artist of any kind.

I submitted my song lyrics in the fashion that was required, but heard nothing from the recording and management companies. Of course, I felt like a fool, but by then I was used to it.

At that time, I self-published a collection of my poetry. I was 26. I took all the poems I had and dwindled them down to “62”––that is, 62 poems from Judson Vereen. I can thank e.e. cummings for that. It was years later that I realized that his collection, 100 poems from e.e. cummings, was the inspiration for the title. He, too, was also a painter. I found his influence unshakeable.

Having no exhibitions nor publications, rather sheepishly, I strolled down to the famed City Lights Books, on Jack Kerouac Avenue, and submitted 62. The clerk said they accepted local books, but my chapbook did not meet a suspiciously bureaucratic standard—they did not accept books from local authors that are perfectly bound. Apparently, they only accepted, as he said, handmade books from local authors. I knew that Kerouac himself had scribbled his words on toilet paper rolls, but surely those weren’t standards.

“Sorry, nothing I can do.”

Now, I could not help but think—if I had taken my own perfectly bound book, tore out each page and the binding and stapled it together, then, then would you accept a book from a local?

I walked out of City Lights Books disgusted. I told myself I was sick of submissions. I would never be picked from the masses. Whatever I had to do, if anything good were to happen, it would have to be done by me and me alone. I had been an artist for over a decade and a half. Never could you say it was worth it. Never could I say the victories outnumbered the defeats. Never did anything good happen unless I made it happen on my own.

Because of my disastrous nature at that time, I would go on to write many poems and songs that could not help but be informed by those perilous circumstances which, by and large, were not only of my own creation but also my own preference. I was determined to write about these very chaotic circumstances which eventually became my first novel. With no prompting or prodding from the publishing world, I set to type out my own indiscretions to the tune of a book, American Pleasure, a confessional novel of such a graphic and devastating nature, it is a shame it had to be written at all, even more so by me.

I found myself submitting once again, for the approval and representation of a literary agent with the hopes of earning American Pleasure its proper due. There was no use; I could not get a response from any literary agent, whatsoever. This time, I was living in Los Angeles and finished the novel while living in my car. Still, I found no way to beat out the noise. Again, after years of either silence or rejection, I published the book myself. At that point, I had just turned 32.

American Pleasure was a death of a kind. I say that because it was writing that book, in combination with trying to publish it, where something was snuffed out of me. It was the final gasp, the death rattle of desperation and ultimate failure that had miraculously retrieved me from the status of a beggar, a parasite of a kind. Inexplicably, I made up my mind that I was not going to worry anymore. I had been liberated from questions of failure or success.

It was American Pleasure and its final blow that confirmed in me the suspicion that I had all along; I was a good writer, but with this newfound liberation, I could write with fire. I had nothing to be afraid of anymore. I was released from my past and could now be embraced warmly by my future, whatever it holds. I had drowned out my own fears of acceptance and rejection, and silenced for good that very rejection that holds hands with the perfumic effervescence of insecurity. I had crossed the Rubicon. I could now write and make my art from the other side.

When Covid broke Los Angeles into an even more raving mad landscape of combustion, I left America for good and began publishing essays online from Brazil. Since then, I have been hired as an Opinion columnist and my essays have found a home in a wide variety of publications. I have once again self-published a second collection of poetry, Like A Bird Knows To Sing, a compendium of reflective poems written in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This collection represents a respite from modern life and the chaotic metropolis, and is dedicated to my wife, Yasmin, who is on the book’s cover, and who was the true inspiration for my move to Brazil.

Freed now from the chaos of my past and my former predicaments, my life, as well as my writing, has been cracked wide open. I am fully convinced that if my earlier efforts had been rewarded, I would have never been liberated. In fact, it would have been an incarceration of a kind. Without those days trudging along in the snow in New York, sending off those poems to be rejected, without those many years of selling zero paintings and no word about my books, I would have built myself a jail cell of success. The type of place where one meets evolution with resistance.

I would have never mounted the courage to write opinion pieces of controversy. I would have never had the gumption to move to another country. I would have never evolved from the grips of e.e. cummings’ influence had those earlier poems been published and celebrated. It is only after some years of grueling self-doubt and unanimous rejection that I have learned to write freely, uninhibited, unflinchingly and unaffected by rejection.

It is wonderful—and I have so many editors, publishers and agents who passed on my work to thank for it. I learned those lessons rather cheaply and fairly early. I am 38 years old and feel I am only just beginning. There is still much work to be done, and the knowledge that my work will forever be specked with resistance and rejection is a fact I have accepted.

When fear and anxiety about your future cease to impress you, you are self-contained, and once again, can get back to work—now, with a greater ease, and a firmer constitution. We can, after all, greet rejection as not only a friend, but as one of the greatest of all liberators.

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