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<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was at the podium and you were sitting in the front row when I heard you gasp.\u00a0 Some may not have heard it, others thought it was nothing more than a quick intake of breath.\u00a0 I am going to call it a gasp because it changed my life.<\/p>\n
You validated me as a writer.<\/p>\n
I was one of four performers at a story-telling event.\u00a0 You were probably there to see family or friends.\u00a0 That\u2019s the composition of the audience.\u00a0 Few people come in off the street.\u00a0\u00a0I was the last storyteller, so your job as a supportive friend was over, but you were kind enough to stay for the entire program.\u00a0 My friends and family were in the audience, but you were a complete stranger to me.\u00a0 That meant a lot.<\/p>\n
My coming-of-age story was reaching its climax.\u00a0 Abandoned in the middle of a lake, I had nothing but a frantic dog-paddle to keep me afloat.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say I felt tension building in the audience or that people were on the edge of their seat.\u00a0 I had no immediate feedback until I heard you.<\/p>\n
You see, I am pursuing story-telling as an alternative to the against-all-odds world of publishing.\u00a0 I am a writer, or at least I thought so until my MFA program told me I\u2019d be labeled \u201ca hobbyist\u201d unless I got something published.\u00a0 At the same time, I learned publishing was a grim business with no pay.\u00a0 The work-around was to embrace rejection as the noble pursuit of a writer.<\/p>\n
A classmate asked if I wanted to join a competition to see who would be the first to get 100 rejection letters.\u00a0 The record was one year.\u00a0 Only dispassionate, impersonal rejection letters counted.\u00a0 Any letter with the slightest whiff of encouragement \u2013 a closing line of \u201clooking forward to hearing from you,\u201d or the giddy (but now vanishing) experience of a handwritten rejection letter with a coffee stain on it \u2013 well, this was no rejection, but quasi-acceptance.<\/p>\n
An MFA faculty member waved his ragged sheaf of ten years of rejection letters from the New Yorker. He was a successful, self-sustaining writer with his own Wikipedia page, but he seemed prouder of these rejections than acceptances.\u00a0 He wanted us to know he was out there, aiming high and laying it on the line.<\/p>\n
I get it, I\u2019m never going to win races I don\u2019t enter, but his locker-room pep talk fell flat.\u00a0 I have experienced rejection, both social and professional, and have learned to accept it with grace and good humor.\u00a0 But it has never occurred to me to rebrand rejection as success.<\/p>\n
Yes, I can send my work off into the abyss and wait for months as some bleary-eyed editor slogs her way through a towering slush pile.\u00a0 Even if I pass this first hurdle, I want more.\u00a0 I want direct feedback, not from forgiving family and friends, but from strangers who have no vested interest in me.\u00a0 Publication only guarantees that strangers will have access to my work.\u00a0 This is not enough.<\/p>\n
I needed a work-around to the opaque layers of publication.\u00a0 Mark Twain became my mentor.\u00a0 His early platform was built on his public story-telling.\u00a0 He reveled in the audience feedback and used that to refine his literature.\u00a0 He moved between the two worlds, each leveraging the other.<\/p>\n
I joined a story-telling troupe, and with trembling hands looked into the eyes of my audience, beyond familiar faces to my target audience of strangers.\u00a0 I scanned the audience for drooping eyelids, slumping shoulders, heads in hands, and was gratified to see none.\u00a0 I happened to look down at you when I reached the climax of the story.<\/p>\n
You gasped.\u00a0 I had you.\u00a0 You thought I was about to drown, didn’t you?<\/p>\n
You made me a writer and a storyteller.<\/p>\n
With grateful thanks,<\/p>\n
Liza Blue<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: I was at the podium and you were sitting in the front row when I heard you gasp.\u00a0 Some may not have heard it, others thought it was nothing more than a quick intake of breath.\u00a0 I am going to … Continue reading <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"