"We regret to inform you..."

My literary agent terminated our contract—doesn't think my new manuscript will sell. Excerpts from the manuscript are getting rejected from magazines. Should I bother finishing my second book?

I’ve been working on my second book for almost five years now, and it’s not going so well. I still believe in it, I think, but the gatekeepers don’t seem to. “Rejection is protection,” my friend Ash Jansen says. I believe her on my good days. On my bad days, I tend to believe other things that tend to make me feel like shit.

I guess you’re supposed to receive 100 rejections per year as a writer (see this excellent series on rejection from the journal I was most recently rejected by, The Stinging Fly). I’m nowhere near that quota, so I should probably just buckle down and keep submitting, keep pitching, keep knocking on doors, but I’m impatient, and there’s that saying about how doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and I have this lovely Little Courtyard right here, and lovely You. I’ve been carrying this work long enough now that I’m ready to move on, but I can’t move on until I’ve let it go, so I’m going to let it go here to you.

It’s another memoir. Didn’t start out that way. At first, it was a long and rambling spiritual manifesto-cum-diatribe that I was quite sure would change the face of society itself. My friend, the writer Moriel Rothman-Zecher, broke it to me gently. “You’re such a good storyteller,” he said. I had written one, maybe two stories in that tome. What about the manifesto, Mori?! The manifesto!! He suggested I get back to the stories.

I basically ignored his advice for another two years. The manuscript became an even more bloated collection of theoretical essays, lotta thoughts, lotta ideas, with a few stories sprinkled into it here and there. My wife was the one to break it to me that time. The conceptual deep dives were just kind of a drag. She didn’t say it like that, but I could read between the lines.

The feedback was tough to take both times, but after nursing my ego back to health, I could see that a more personal, story-based approach would probably be better for what I was trying to create. I myself do not like reading the kind of writing that I had been doing, unless I’m the one who has written it. Getting high off your own supply, you know? I love writing down my own rabbit holes of abstract inquiry, love delivering my own sermons concerning the nature of reality and why things are the way they are at the deepest of deep levels, the bedrock levels, where, if only everyone else could get down here with me, then all our problems would spontaneously resolve themselves and we’d live in paradise on Earth. So if it’s me on the stump, I’m down to hang, but when I hit someone else’s supply of heady philosophical bud, start reading what they have to say from their own stump, I tend to either get bored or judgmental.

“Who do you think you are, to speak with such sweeping certainty about things?” I think, before putting the book down. “Shut up, man! You’re hiding behind your thoughts and ideas. Give me the meat, bro, the real shit. Tell me how it went down. How it felt. The stories you lived that taught you these things. And then let me digest the meat myself. Let me chew it and swallow it and see how it goes down. Let me have my own experience of it. Show, don’t tell, isn’t that what they say? Show me who you are. I don’t need to know what you know. I need to know who you are, what you’ve lived, how it felt, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit, a tiny bit, about what it taught you.”

I’ve recently come across two writers who do this masterfully. The late Brian Doyle and his gorgeous book, One Long River of Song, and Father Gregory Boyle’s stunning, redeeming work, Tattoos on the Heart. These men serve the stories, and offer just a dash of insight here, a sprinkle of what they’ve learned from what they’ve lived, but not so much to pickle and brine.

I had to go through this with my first book, too. Had to brine it up real salty to start. The first draft was brutal. So bad my original publisher terminated the contract to save their asses from the literary faceplant that was Chasing Wonder, as the manuscript was originally called. That laid me out flat. Never knew my ego had kidneys till I took that punch. With the help of an independent editor, (thank you, Wylie O’Sullivan) and then with the belief of my ultimate editor at Bloomsbury (thank you, Anton Mueller), Walking to Listen eventually found its way to being a decent enough book. It does do some telling, but I was 25 when I wrote it, and not all the telling’s bad I don’t think.

But God, I got into some pretty hardcore telling in the early years of this second book. I think it’s because I care so much about the topic. It’s on masculinity. I care about this topic because I am a man, and because I love men, and because I am afraid of men, and because the fate of men, whether we like it or not, is tied up with the fate of everyone else. To put it plainly: if men are unwell, the consequences of our unwellness reverberate through the ecosystem of our relationships, impacting others in ways so profound as to defy quantification. How can we possibly quantify the impact that even just a single unwell man can have on his community? And how can we possibly measure his own suffering, lived out in the isolation that is the price he has to pay to be the man he believes he’s supposed to be, never vulnerable, which is precisely what we always are as human beings: ever-vulnerable, ever exposed to the fleshy mess of living in these mortal precarious bodies, these tender susceptible minds, in the midst of ancient invisible networks of astonishing generational traumas, all while the Earth goes through one of her cataclysmic transformations. Don’t you feel those feelings, fella.

But see, there I go. Getting into my stash of heady bud. I get pumped on this. Stump up and start jumping. So, I’ve been trying to rein it in and just tell the stories. What I’ve lived. What I’ve seen. How it felt. How it feels.

About two years ago, right around the time I showed the working draft to my wife, I found enough courage to contact my literary agent about my new project, a memoir on masculinity. Oh, Man, I’m calling it. It took him almost two years to respond: “It’s a very worthy idea but I worry that it would be difficult to market.” He might be right. Since terminating my contract with him, I’ve only received more rejections. I’m nowhere near my quota of 100, so I’ll probably keep pitching it, but I want to start sharing the work now. I want to let it go.

You all, my readers here, are giving me courage in this time of rejection. I am quite literally inspired by your willingness to read my work. It’s keeping me going. And whether or not I am ever published again, it feels good to settle in here, to make this courtyard my home, the home we make together when I write something and you read it. And even more, when you write back. I love hearing from you, your thoughts, your questions, where you go with it, and I’m open to your feedback on this upcoming work. Does it find home, in you? Or does it wander around outside in the street, in the bushes, missing you entirely? Let me know.

Stay tuned.