It was a year rich in rejections, making it not unlike every year since I started writing. But rejections, because they’re so often impersonal, are also unmemorable, particularly the ones that never get written (which seem to increase – if something that doesn’t exist can be said to grow in number – every year).
More indelible were my debuts in two publications: the Los Angeles Review of Books and the MLB All-Star Game Official Program. (There was another, but because of the editing it shall go unmentioned.) I spoke about travel writing in the Cheever Room at the Kenyon Review in Gambier, Ohio, and about the joys of travel at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida. On the Ohio trip I also gave talks at the University of Akron and the Polish-American Cultural Center in Cleveland, and did book readings in Mt. Vernon and Cleveland Heights (the last on a snowy night in April). I taught a course in travel writing for the Miami Book Fair, after which one of my students got her story published. (No rejections for her.) My big trip of the year was to Portugal, a two-week vacation that nevertheless produced a story – about the complicated feelings of a travel writer on returning to a beloved place now crowded with tourists – that has not yet found a home (see first paragraph). And I finished my memoir about becoming a travel writer.
What’s to be done with the present tense and its unending popularity among travel writers and editors? In 2001, in his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing, Paul Theroux was already denouncing it, calling it “precious, self-regarding, a distraction.” It had been years since Theroux had taught, so he was unaware that it is also anathema to writing teachers, who spend a good deal of their time changing verbs from past to present in stories by students who forget that they started out in present and inevitably move to the more natural, and accurate, past tense (often before subconsciously reverting to present again). Life would be so much easier for everyone – students, teachers, readers – if travel stories were told in retrospect. Travel writers, we know you survived your journey, otherwise we wouldn’t have your words about it, so don’t pretend you’re still out there. And travel editors, free your writers – and readers – from the present. Unlike the past, it has never been called ‘a foreign country.’
I got a rejection on Giving Tuesday.
Every once in a while I shoot off emails to all the editors holding my stories, inquiring about their status. Then I get up and move away from the computer, as if from a wasps’ nest I have recklessly disturbed.
A few days ago I read over for a final time a piece that an editor had requested. I had a nagging feeling that something was missing in the lead. I thought about it for a few minutes and then a light went on. I typed in a parenthetical remark consisting of three words. Two of them – they were connected by an ‘and’ – immediately became my favorite words of the piece, two of the best words I’ve written all year. Not just because of their appropriateness but their symmetry. The delight I got from coming up with them has lasted (clearly) through the week.