I’m very busy figuring out ways to market and publicize Best Lesbian Erotica 2011, of which I’m the series editor. The part I like best about being editor is sending word to the people whose stories have been chosen that they are in the book…particularly if I know the person who wrote the story.

What’s not as much fun, but is also necessary, is to notify the people who didn’t get in this year.

I don’t like doing it, and I don’t like getting those notes myself (particularly if I know the person sending it).

The first time I sent out a short story, I was 14 or 15, and I think the magazine was American Girl. I typed up my cover letter, and put my story in the envelope. (I believe it was called “The President’s Papergirl.”) I debated with myself on whether to send a return envelope: I hated to waste the postage, because I was sure I’d be getting an acceptance by return mail. Surprisingly, American Girl did not publish my story! I think it was eventually published in a newspaper carriers’ newsletter. (I delivered the evening paper, The Columbia Record, which I later wrote for. Now it’s gone to newspaper heaven).

The lesson I learned early is that even if one publication has the temerity not to accept your work, surely there’s another one out there that will like it, if you keep sending it out.

Before the internet, when phones still plugged into walls and postal carriers delivered “letters,” it required a bit more effort to find submission opportunities and you had to wait a lot longer to get word of your rejection. Prose writers combed “Writer’s Market” for magazines, contests and anthologies, and playwrights picked up The Dramatists Sourcebook. When I sent out my first full-length play, every time I got a rejection letter, I put it in a folder, and vowed not to look at them until I got a production…and when the fine folks at Trustus finally produced my play, I looked: 35 rejections. These days, that’s minuscule. Now we can Google our way to instant rejection hundreds more times! This is progress?

I don’t know that you have to be a better writer than people were in decades past to get your work published or produced these days, but you certainly have to have a stronger stomach for it. (And in a weird corollary to the instant contact of the ‘net, I’ve noticed that the percentage of people who don’t reply has gone up. I used to be able to count on a letter after a certain number of months or even years; now, I’d say at least one-third of my submissions, which are mostly done by email these days, go unanswered).

I did get a response last night from a festival I was hoping to get into; my play was not selected for production this year. And for a moment, I was 15 again: what do you MEAN my perfectly lovely work didn’t get in? Well that just sucks. I’m going to sulk about it for awhile…awhile being about five minutes. At most. (And, well, maybe a little bit today.)

By admitting that, I’m actually breaking a self-imposed rule that I have never to mention rejections in public. I might grouse to a fellow writer about them (after checking to make sure the fellow-writer didn’t have anything to do with the rejection). But other than that, nada. It goes on the spreadsheet, in the “responses received” email folder, and it’s on to the next thing.

As a writer, I’m sure this has saved my sanity many times over. I think, over the years, about some writers I know who are very good, but who have essentially dropped out of it, or haven’t been able to share their great talent with the world because of rejection, or fear of it, more than anything else. Other people I know who are not geniuses, but solid, focused pros (or maybe their genius lies in stubbornness), have made careers for themselves because they can steel themselves to go on to the next submission, the next production, the next CHANCE for acceptance (though more likely rejection).

How do they do it? The hell if I know…

In my case, I stay active in writers’ workshops or peer groups. There’s nothing like a deadline to make me produce pages (a habit I picked up working in newspapers). And as for submitting…well, I started the En Avant board out of enlightened self-interest: if I could find and catalog the opportunities to submit my work, then I might actually do it myself. I’m also part of the regular Playwrights Binge Yahoo group, founded by Pat Gabridge, who has honed his submission process to a (quantifiable) science, and from whom I’ve borrowed some of his techniques to track my own submissions.

All of which leads to, the occasional production or publication…and more rejection.

From a writer’s point of view, I’m not sure which is worse: the form rejection which tells you how many submissions there were (with the occasional attached personal comment, like: “keep trying!” or “almost!”; the personal rejection from someone you know, or from an especially kind editor/screener, which says you ALMOST made it; or that special hell: getting accepted to a festival, anthology, or magazine, and having them go bust before they can publish or produce your work. 

From an editor’s point of view, I can tell you that a followup note from the writer can be a good thing, or more likely a bad thing.When I receive a note thanking me for my time and attention, I am grateful that the person understands how it went down; that’s a good note to send, building relationships with artistic directors, literary managers and editors is part of our job as writers.

On the other hand…I’ve been, and friends of mine who screen, edit and judge, have been the recipients of vicious tongue-lashings from writers who are very, very angry that their work was not selected. We are clearly stupid, idiotic, lying hacks and cheats, who do not know our jobs, are log-rolling for our friends, and deserve to be sued or publicly chastised, lose our funding, and have mean things posted about us on the Internet.

If you want to burn a bridge, go right ahead. Sometimes you have to, if a group, producer, or editor is just an idiot. But mostly they aren’t, and a poisonous screed, or even a long, public, moan of self-pity just identifies you as someone NOT to work with. And while it might feel very good (for a moment) to get all that off your chest, in the long run, it’s bad for you, because if you really begin to believe that everyone is Out to Get You, and No One Understands You & Your Genius, that’s a train of thought that can lead to all kinds of bad endings.

Rejection is personal, because it’s YOUR work that’s being rejected. Depending on how you handle it, you can keep it from ruining your vision, and let it focus that vision on how to get your work to people who just might get you.

Or, and I recommend this to all the writers who have the stamina for it, you can take your vision and make it happen yourself: produce your own work, publish your own prose, create a scene when you can’t find one that has room for you. It’s a HUGE amount of work, but it can be done.

Even if you only do it once, it’ll teach you things you might never have learned if you’d left the power to publish or produce you in others’ hands. Or, you might find that you’re actually good at it, and like doing it, and the rest of us have one more place that might accept our work.

If you do end up editing an anthology, starting a magazine, or a theater festival, please let me know, and I’ll send you something. And I promise not to yell at you if you don’t take my work.

While I meant to blog more frequently than this,  the kinds of things I could blog about are also the kind of things that keep me too damn busy to blog. (And the rent is too damn high).

By “the kind of things I do,” I mean: writing plays, producing plays, helping develop other peoples’ plays, attending plays, curating a reading series, keeping up an online bulletin board with opportunities for playwrights, editing an annual fiction anthology, and by day, editing books that make your domestic and international trips more interesting and easier. (Not to mention supporting six guinea pigs, four turtles and a dragon.)

But this weekend’s Internet storm about the Wendy Wasserstein Prize (or more specifically, the choice NOT to give a Wasserstein Prize this year) reminded me that sometimes I blog.

From Michael Lew’s eloquent letter about the lack of a winner this year, to the pollination of the post across the rest of the ‘net, the start of a petition to TDF (which administers the award), to arts bloggers and journalists checking in, I’d bet the majority of the folks who work in the American theater (particularly the playwrights) know about this issue.

“Huh…that’s dumb,” was my initial thought about the committee’s decision (because I am an eloquent writer person).

And as I am also an editor, I queried the writer as to why she thought it was dumb, and who the decision would affect, how my playwright colleagues might react and if it would make any difference at all in the way business is done with this particular award.

I knew the award was out there, but didn’t pay much attention to it. When I’m looking for productions or applying for awards, I categorize opportunities as “open” and “closed.” The Wasserstein is closed: you can’t apply for it. You have to hope someone you know nominates you (if you are a woman playwright under 32, which is long past for me, so yeah, this one disappeared in my rear view mirror ages ago). It’s like the Whiting and Kesselring awards: it’s a nice chunk o’change and some good publicity if you get it, but those who do move in circles that don’t often overlap with mine in the Venn diagram of the theater, so I try not to be bitter and move along.

(I said “try,” I didn’t say “succeed.”)

So, should I care about this, since it involves a class within the American theater of which I’m not a member (the “Usual Suspects” in my not-bitter shorthand)? Should I care about this on more than a theoretical basis, because I have plays to write and sometimes produce myself? Should I just worry about that rather than what’s going on up on Mt. Olympus? Maybe sacrifice a sheep or two? (I like lamb).

OF COURSE I should, and do, care! Can’t even try NOT to. What a fucking bullshit shoot-yourself-in-the-foot decision. And in the name of Wendy Wasserstein, no less…I grew up in the theater loving her work, reading her plays over and over. Once, a friend played me a long answering machine message to her from Wendy, who sent love, sang a song, and told a story about her mother, just like “Isn’t It Romantic!” From every account, Wendy was someone who represented the best of reaching out and encouraging others to make and love the theater. She gave of her time, money, and opened doors for people, made connections, gave a leg up.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with some people who did that for me (Tina Howe! Doric Wilson! Sabra Jones! among many others), and most importantly, they taught me it’s my obligation to do the same. In fact, when I’m yelling “CHARGE!” in the face of sexism, racism, homophobia, saying “send your work to so-and-so,” or pulling someone aside and saying “you ought to know this person…”  it’s much easier not to be bitter. (And better for the soul.)

So if I could address the committee, sitting like a dragon (not my kind of dragon…the MEAN kind of dragon) on its gold/award, I’d say something like: “Way to go, ya morons (well, maybe I wouldn’t call them morons). Way to keep the perception that WOMEN AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH PLAYWRIGHTS going! Way to reinforce the belief that if women were just GOOD ENOUGH there’d be parity in the number of plays produced by women. Way not to HELP the people you’ve been charged to support by someone who spent her life doing just that.” (Sound of playwright spinning in her grave).

This is a fight that must still be fought (and won). Damn straight I take it personally, because it is personal. I recently ended a friendship with someone who expressed the opinion that there really doesn’t NEED to be gay theater, because if the writers are good enough, their work will get produced; that gay theater was kind of a ghetto for the not-good-enough. The Wasserstein Prize decision implies the same thing about women playwrights.

I have no doubt that the Women’s Kick-Ass Committee (as I call the members of the Dramatists Guild Council who spring into action at times like these) will take up the challenge, as will the 50/50 in 2020 group, and other people who speak up for women in theater, and there will be some kind of positive change. They’ve got my back, and I’ve got theirs. I’ll show up. I’ll celebrate women playwrights. I’ll write good plays.

I have no doubt their actions will change the way the Wasserstein Award is given. In the mean time, I have plays to write and read, helpful and specific critique to give, some Drunken! Careening! Writers! to curate (Thursday, Nov. 18, 7pm, KGB Bar! This month’s readers: three women playwrights), and during the day, I must speak French to restaurants and hotels. (And there are those guinea pigs to be kept in timothy hay).

I want the women playwrights who were not recognized to keep the faith in their own work, and will encourage them any way I can.
I believe that my colleagues and I, who sweat blood onto our computer screens each day, will continue to find and make our own opportunities to keep making a difference.

And I’ll really try to blog more.